Still in Budapest

BKV. Önnek Jar. *

When I was in Amsterdam, I opted against public transportation in favor of hoofing it all around, but in Budapest I decided to invest in a 72-hour public transport ticket. Not that you can’t get around central Budapest on foot—in fact, it’s the best way to see the city, and I certainly did my fair share of walking. But I wanted the security of knowing that, in case of emergencies, I could hop on a tram or a metro that would bring me back to Deak Ferenc ter (a central metro station close to my hostel) safe and sound. I was definitely glad of the decision on the afternoon I trekked out to the “green lungs” of Budapest, City Park; and also on my last night in the city, when I got stranded on the north end of Margaret Island, a good two-hour walk from my hostel, as the sun was going down. There are some occasions when you really just don’t want to walk anymore; several times in Budapest I reached my limit, and being able to jump on a streetcar and watch the scenery along the Buda side of the river hurtle by (the trams in Budapest travel at what feels like breakneck speed compared with those in Frankfurt) felt like a miracle.

It’s actually not as difficult to decipher metro and tram schedules in a foreign language as I thought it was going to be: as long as you know which station you want—and maybe write it down in advance—it’s just a matter of matching. That being said, it was a much slower process getting from point A to point B in Budapest than it was in Vienna—which is a much larger city with a much more confusing layout but where I had the advantage of speaking the language. And you definitely don’t want to rely on the intercom voice on public transport in Budapest because the intercom is often A.) drowned out by the noise of the train or B.) broken, and anyway C.) spoken Magyar doesn’t always sound like what it looks like, and it’s entirely possible you won’t be able to tell which station the lady is talking about.

One other thing about Hungarian public transport: Budapest is super intense about blackriding— it costs the equivalent of about 60 Euro if you’re caught. BKV posts three or four super-intimidating-looking security officers at every metro station (Sarah the Tour Guide warned us at the useful post-tour information session that metro guards “are not nice people,” but the ones I interacted with seemed all right—once I showed them my ticket, at least. One even smiled at me.). They asked to see my ticket no less than four times in three days. Meaning, if I hadn’t had the ticket, I would have been 180 Euro in the red.

*I copied these words from the receipt I got along with my ticket. I have no idea what they mean.

And Speaking of Money

While Hungary is a member of the European Union, it is one of the countries whose economy is not yet strong enough to support the Euro, so the first thing I had to do upon getting off the train from Vienna was swap out some Euros for Hungarian florints—at an exchange rate of about 300 florints to one Euro. While intellectually I understood that being in possession of 30,000 florints did not mean that by crossing the Hungarian border I had suddenly made my fortune, it still felt incredibly extravagant to hand over 250 florints for a glass of wine, 4000 florints for a novel, etc. And it’s also sobering to realize, as Sarah the tour guide pointed out, that while the exchange rate makes Budapest a heaven for tourists—food and booze and entertainment are all incredibly cheap— it also makes it a less than excellent place to actually have to make a living.

House of Terror

As I mentioned in my last post, I didn’t spend as much time visiting museums in Budapest as I did in Amsterdam. While that certainly did wonders for my wallet, though, I also feel like I gained less of a sense for the city and its history as a result. In my defense, there is a lot more history to be grasped in Budapest than in Amsterdam, where the first human settlers don’t even appear until the double-digit centuries—it’s one of Europe’s youngest cities. Budapest’s history is much more extensive and, I think you could argue, much more complex, with the endless series of occupations, the ever-changing borders of the country, and the city’s status as a meeting-point of east and west.

One museum that I did visit was the House of Terror on Andrassy Avenue, a swanky up-scale neighborhood that includes the “Broadway of Budapest.” When I first heard the name House of Terror, I couldn’t help but think of the ride at Disney World, Tower of Terror. The Hungarian House of Terror is is nowhere near as much adrenaline-pumping fun as the Disney ride, though: it’s the former headquarters of both the Hungarian branch of the Nazi Party, the “Arrow Cross Party,” and the Communist State Security Authority. Today it houses a museum which details the atrocities committed by both groups—concentration camp and gulag transportations, illegal surveillance, specious arrests, interrogations and murders—as well as the experiences of the victims. (As in Amsterdam and Vienna as well, there’s special attention paid to the rebels and resistors, as if to say These were the real Hungarians. We want nothing to do with those other people.)

Recreation of a communist interrogation room
in the House of Terror.

The museum concludes with an agonizingly slow elevator ride into the basement of the building, during which a former Communist operative describes in bone-chilling detail (backed by the same excessively ominous, emotionally manipulative soundtrack that has followed you through the museum up to this point) the conditions in which prisoners were kept there, and the methods by which they were executed. The elevator then releases you into the basement, which has been restored to look exactly as it did when the Communists were in power: bare-walled stone cells with bare light bulbs overhead, which were often kept on day and night to keep the prisoners from sleeping; interrogation rooms dominated by sinisterly bureaucratic-looking desks; one chamber containing a gallows which you can only hope is a recreation and not an actual artifact from the period. The walls of the cells are lined with photographs of people who were kept there, along with their names and their dates of birth and death.

The very last room of the museum is also lined with photographs, names and dates. But in this case the names and faces belong not to the victims but to the perpetrators, members of the Communist party who were responsible, whether directly or indirectly, for the imprisonments, tortures, and murders that took place in the building over the decades. As I made my way through this last room, I found myself in the midst of a cluster of older Hungarian women, who nudged me out of the way in order to crowd close to the photographs. I couldn’t help but wonder what these women were searching for—they were of an age where they could very well have been looking for an ex-boyfriend, a neighbor, a childhood friend—or the person responsible for the death of any of those people. Then again, they could very well have been looking for themselves.

In our collective cultural memory, if it’s fair to speak of such a thing existing, we tend to assume that mass murder ended when the noble Allies rousted the big, bad Nazis from power in Germany, but the truth is people have continued to be cruel to one another long after the last concentration camp was liberated.

Budapest is for Lovers

I’ve seen a fair amount of PDA in all of the European cities I’ve been in thus far, including Frankfurt, but Budapest wins the prize by far, both for ubiquity and for intensity. I saw couples making out on the top of Castle Hill, on the banks of the Danube, on the subway and on the tram, in museums, in churches, everywhere. There was even a couple going at it in the HOUSE OF TERROR, for pity’s sake. And most of these weren’t even teenagers—they were couples in their upper twenties and older.

It got to the point , after three days of this nonstop barrage of hormones, where I had to actively repress the urge to shout at random strangers, “STOP walking around with your hands in each other’s back pockets. It’s tacky.” Or, “I hate to interrupt your spit-swapping session, but could you please get out of the way so I can get off this tram now?” Is PDA this bad in the States, and I just haven’t noticed?  Is what I saw actually completely within reason, and I’m just hyper-sensitive and over-reacting to it due to my own breakup woes? Questions to ponder.  

Goin’ on Walkabout

No one does world travel quite like the Australians, and I don’t think anyone does it nearly as well. By far my favorite random-stranger interaction from the whole two weeks I spent traveling was with David, an Aussie backpacker in his late thirties/early forties that I met on the free tour. David, as he explained to me while we waited for the guides to show up (tourists who showed up after us asked whether we were the guides, I guess because we were both perched on a fountain the square, which could be interpreted as an official kind of stance) was in Europe for three months “on walkabout.” “I saw my chance and I just took it,” he told me, “’Cause you never know if it’ll come along again.” He had no concrete plans for his trip, as far as how long he was staying in each location, or even where exactly he was going. He was mind-blowingly friendly: as the tour group shuffled between sights, he flitted up and down the procession, chatting with anybody and everybody who would speak to him, hustling up to the front every once in a while to ask Sarah a question or three that had popped into his head.

View of Budapest from atop Gellert Hill 

By the end of the tour, David was unquestionably my new travel hero. In an instance of small-world kismet, I ran into him again: as I was climbing up Gellert Hill the next day to get a look at the Liberty Monument (and, of course, the stunning view of the city), he was on the way down from doing the same thing. He seemed genuinely thrilled to see me again, asked what I’d been up to around the city and what I thought about what I’d seen. He told me was thinking about “shipping off” the next day, maybe heading farther east, or maybe south, towards the Balkans (a locale a fellow ETA near Frankfurt came back from Herbstferien raving about and which I therefore now feel morally bound to visit.) After a few minutes of pleasant chit-chat, David and I parted ways again—although, as we did, he jokingly told me, "See you in the next city!" 

What I love about Australian backpackers is how they seem to want to genuinely experience the places they visit. So often tourists have a sort of zombie-like affect: they go for the sake of having gone, they see for the sake of having seen. Australians, by contrast, see to see and do to do— it sounds cheesy to say, but they live, or at least travel, completely in the moment. In the original aboriginal context, the term “walkabout” has a spiritual connotation: it’s a coming-of-age journey a young man undertakes on the way to becoming a man. It really seems that Australians have taken this spiritual component of travel, this idea of travel as a transformative experience, to heart. One even hesitates to call them tourists. 

A Few Quick Words on Food

There is one ingredient that you absolutely have to have a taste for if you are going to experience Hungarian cuisine—an element of their culture of which the locals are extremely proud—properly: paprika, Hungarian red gold. Paprika appears in practically every traditional dish, which is why so many of them take on a brownish-red color. In addition to going into the preparation of the dishes, paprika very frequently appears on the table next to the pepper and salt as a condiment. Hungarians love paprika. (Disclaimer: this may be an unfair and reductive cultural stereotype, but whatever. I ate a lot of paprika in Budapest, okay?)

Another piece of Hungarian trivia closely related to food: apparently Hungary is the world leader in heart attacks and high cholesterol. When you learn that they traditionally cook their food not in vegetable oil, not in butter, but in PIG FAT, you can easily see how that might be a case. It’s actually somewhat difficult/dangerous to travel in Hungary if you’re a vegetarian, because even the “vegetable” dishes are cooked up in pig fat. Apparently, Hungarians even fry pig fat up on its own at eat that. Yum.

In Amsterdam it was the cheese; now, for Budapest, I’d like to take a few moments to rhapsodize about the wine. Because the wine I had in Hungary is without question the most delicious wine I have ever tasted. Granted, that might not mean much coming from me, seeing as how my experience with wine is largely limited to the now two years that I have been over twenty one (ah, how weird, being twenty one!). But I genuinely cannot imagine wine getting much tastier than this. I bought a small bottle of tokay at the Great Market Hall—honestly mostly because I remember “A Decanter of Tokay” as the title of The Golden Compass—and took it back to the hostel with me (fortunately the communal kitchen was equipped with a bottle opener). The stuff is liquid gold, I tell you. Sweet nectar of the heavens. Helplessly under the spell of this astonishing concoction, I desperately wished to buy a full-size bottle or two to take back to Frankfurt with me, but I worried, since there were five days in Vienna between me and home, that packing glass bottles might not be the best life choice in the world. 

So, regretfully, I left Hungarian wine in Hungary, as I left Dutch cheese in the Netherlands. Of course, the Hungarians couldn’t be so greedy as to horde all their wines to themselves. I need to get my butt to a wine store here in Frankfurt and see what I can turn up… 

And now I give you: sunset over the Buda hills. 

Herbstferien, Episode 2: Budapest

Royal Palace

“When you are in Budapest, you don’t walk around like this,” says my Hungarian tour guide Sarah, tucking her chin under and staring at her feet. “Or like this,” she adds, this time looking at us, the thirty-odd tourists she was shepherding through the city, head on. “When you are in Budapest, you walk like this.” Sarah lifts her chin and raises her arms, gesturing at the buildings that surround us on Vöröszmarty Ter as if to say, Look at this! And this! We are in Budapest, isn’t it amazing?

If you ignore the fact that anyone who actually walked around the city like that would probably A.) draw some very strange looks and B.) walk headfirst into a building, a statue, or an oncoming streetcar, you can see Sarah’s point. Budapest isn’t a city where you can hurry from landmark to landmark and museum to museum, and during the in-between time put up your blinkers and focus on what’s directly in front of you. Or, more accurately, you can take this turbo-tourist approach, but if you do, you do so at your own peril, and if you miss something, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Geographically and architecturally, Budapest is an absolutely stunning city, built on the banks of the aquamarine Danube, which splits the city neatly into a western part, Buda (or the fireplace side) and an eastern part, Pest (or the water side); holding court atop Castle Hill in Buda, the Habsburgs’ Royal Palace and the Matthias Church dominate the skyline, facing off with St. Stephen’s Basilica and the Parliament building on the Pest side. The two halves of the city are connected by a series of five bridges, which light up at night. And everywhere you look in the city, there’s something interesting to look at—a statue commemorating some Hungarian hero or a stunning piece of nineteenth-century architecture (Pest, it turns out, was largely designed by the same architect who designed nineteenth-century Vienna).

St. Stephen's Basilica. St. Stephen was the first king
of Hungary. His mummified hand is on display in this
church (I decided against seeing that one). 

I logged much less time in museums and churches in Budapest than I did in Amsterdam, in part because walking or tramming around the city gave me plenty to do during daylight hours, and also because the weather was absolutely spectacular—a balmy sixty-five to seventy degrees and not a cloud in the sky. During the tour, I asked Sarah if there is an equivalent to “Indian summer” in Magyar, and she said they call it “old spinster summer” (which, incidentally, is also what it’s called in German—Altweibersommer). But, since high tourist season in Budapest lasts through the middle of October—I was there on the tail end of it—I have the distinct feeling that the weather I saw in Budapest wasn’t even unusual for that time of year.

\Of the three cities I visited over the last two weeks, Budapest was by far the biggest “risk.” Geographically, historically, and culturally, it was the farthest removed from my sphere of familiarity. Yes, Budapest is still a major metropolitan city and, yes, Hungary is still (technically) in Western Europe. Nevertheless, in Budapest I had a “you’re not in Kansas anymore” feeling that I hadn’t before, for all of the culture shock I went through during my first couple of weeks in Frankfurt. 

View of Parliament from one of the five bridges. Sarah
said that the building is a lot prettier than the mess
that goes on inside it. By which she means the government.
She was a very outspoken and opinionated tour guide.

As if to underscore this point, that Budapest is a different kind of city from those you find in Western Western Europe, while we were waiting in Vörösmarty Ter for the other two tour groups to get a head start on us and Sarah was attempting to give us a ten-minute overview of the incredibly lengthy and complex history of Hungary and Budapest in particular, a Hungarian man sauntered over to a tree next to the statue where we were perched, dropped trou, and promptly started to relieve himself in full view of a group of about thirty tourists. Sarah, clearly annoyed and a little bit embarrassed—whether it was on behalf of the man or herself or her country, I’m not sure— interrupted her oration, turned and exchanged a few words with the man in Hungarian, then turned back to us and announced, “He’s completely pissed.” She then went on to explain how this kind of behavior was representative of a certain post-Communist attitude one encounters in Budapest, and in Hungary in general.

Contributing a great deal to my discombobulation, of course, was the language barrier. Hungarian, which in Hungarian is called Magyar. is a curious anomaly of a European language with absolutely no ties to the Romantic, Germanic or Slavic languages families, despite the fact that over the centuries nations with languages of all these persuasions have had influence in the area. The only language even remotely related to Magyar is Finnish, and the similarities there are slim. According to Sarah the Tour Guide, when Hollywood moviemakers want an alien language in their movie, but they’re too lazy or cheap to actually invent a new language, they use Magyar. This means that when space movies are dubbed into Magyar, the alien dialog has to be dubbed out, otherwise the audience will know exactly what the aliens are saying, and the effect will be ruined. Additionally, the unusual syntactical patterns of that most beloved of little green aliens, Yoda, is modeled on Magyar: all of his lines were written in English, translated into Magyar, and then mirror-translated back into English, with the Magyar syntax left in place.

In the end, I managed to master about five words of Magyar: igen (yes); nem (no—particularly useful when I first got off the train and was accosted by sketchy men wanting to know if I needed a taxi); kerem (please); köszönöm (thank you); and egészségedre (Cheers. Also bless you). Of all of these, köszönöm was probably the most useful, and the one I used most frequently: good manners are appreciated in any language.

Of course, my failure to master Magyar in four days would have been no problem if Budapest were one of those cities, like Frankfurt or Amsterdam, where everyone understands English at least well enough for a tourist to get what she wants from them. And in truth, everyone under the age of 35 (which comprises most of the people in the tourist business, like hostel employees and waiters, anyway) does speak English pretty well. Over the age of 35, meaning those people who were in school before 1989, and thus when Hungary was under Communist control, your chances get considerably slimmer, and with the over-60 set, you might as well forget about it.

However, my complete inability to communicate with them did not prevent me from having a few delightful interactions with members of Hungary’s most distinguished generation. While I was waiting for the number 2 tram on the Pest side of the river, a tiny, stooped Hungarian woman came up to me and started asking for directions. At least I assume that’s what she was saying, though for all I know she could have been cheerfully hurling the worst kinds of profanities my way. I found this immensely funny, of course, because just by merit of being Hungarian, she was automatically more qualified to decipher the Budapest public transit system than I was. When I made clear that I had no idea what she was saying, she laughed, patted me on the shoulder, and continued to chatter away happily at me for a further two minutes, while I did my best to smile and nod politely.

Great Market Hall, with stands selling everything from
vegetables to wine to cute touristy "Hungarica."

Langos. Also known as a heart-attack waiting to happen.

Later that same day, I went to the Great Market Hall in search of what Sarah assured our tour group was “the best Langos in town” (a Langos is essentially a Frisbee-sized piece of fried dough, to which can be added a wide variety of toppings). I found the place, which I counted as an immense victory in itself, and ordered my Langos—traditional style, topped with sour cream and cheese—then turned around and realized to my dismay that there were absolutely no free seats to be found at the tables lining the walkway opposite the Langos stand and its neighbors. Until, that is, an older Hungarian man noticed me standing there, and immediately stood up and started gesturing insistently at his seat. Because I was starving, and because this Langos was clearly a sit-down kind of culinary adventure, I took it. The elderly gentleman promptly disappeared, and returned a few seconds later with a pile of napkins, which he proceeded to place on the table in front of me, all the while talking to me in rapid, to me utterly unintelligible Magyar. From his manner and his gestures, I got the distinct feeling that he was lecturing me—whether on the history of Langos or the importance of neat eating habits, or some other random topic, I guess I’ll never know.