So… the anticipated
content warning. Be aware this blog
contains more discussions of sex than it probably really needs (especially day
5) though a lot of it is just insinuated rather than expressly detailed (that
almost makes it sound exciting – don’t worry, it isn’t). Also, lots of talk of drinking and unhealthy
drinking culture, which some parents of younger readers may wish to shield
their children from.
I hadn’t been in a city with much in the way of attractions since
Athens, so Budapest was a good dose of touristy fun. It’s a busy place, there’s plenty to do and,
what with it being a popular party destination, plenty of like-minded young
people to meet. It was a place that
could be whatever you wanted – relaxing, intense, exciting, cultural, tacky, it
has it all. So there was really no way I
couldn’t enjoy Budapest, and I’d like to think that, although I came nowhere
near seeing it all, I got a good dose of the range it offers.
As is often the case, it all started in a train station…
DAY ONE
I had been dropped off at the Keleti Station, which is the east station
(though, when you look at them on a map, the stations only vaguely represent
their indicative locations). We’d been
given a bottle of water and a bag of pizza-flavoured biscuits that I was
happily munching on, though when I read that the bag contained four servings
and one serving was about a third of your daily salt intake recommendations, I
stopped eating them (after a couple more… they were stale and gross, but
addictive).
The plan was metro it over to the hotel Dad had been in the night before
and ideally be there in time to have some breakfast. I like metros because they’re easy to use and
you don’t have to deal with people since you can get a ticket at the automated
machines and validate it in the machines as well. Machines don’t roll their eyes at your
pronunciation of place names.
Well, my plan didn’t quite work out because the ticket machines didn’t
accept 10000HUF notes (all I had was two of these, which comes to around 80
euro – it’s like Monopoly money, it doesn’t feel real). I had to go to the ticket booth and buy a
ticket (350HUF – by the way, the ‘F’ stands for ‘forint’). Buying tickets in eastern Europe feels
awfully serious – you are met by someone behind a thick glass shield who can
only communicate with you through a small microphone and speaker (making their
accents even harder to understand). In
front of them is a small circular tray with two sections. Put the money in one section, they put the
ticket and change in the other, then they spin the tray around and you take the
bits and they take the bits and everyone is happy.
One other idiosyncrasy of the Budapest public transport system is the
fact that you have to buy a separate ticket for each leg of your journey – no
transfers. Not even on the metro (which
is a huge oversight in my opinion). You
can buy a separate transfer ticket that gives you the option to make one
change. No unlimited use within 1-2
hours, once you are off the vehicle that’s it.
Budapest is also the first place I have seen people checking tickets at
the entrance to the metro. They’re
unlikely to catch anyone trying to cheat the system, though, since they’re
really obvious. I guess it does work as
a deterrent.
What of the metro itself? The
trains are the original soviet models (hell, if it ain’t broke…) so they are
basically big metal boxes that clang and clatter their way through the
tunnels. I had a brief scare when the
metro stopped moving for a moment (it was the kind of metro where I wasn’t
certain that the stop was intentional) but luckily it got going again pretty
quickly. The locals seemed fairly
unconcerned about it – I guess it happens with some regularity.
I ended up on the opposite side of the Danube from the hotel, and just
needed a quick trip across the Chain Bridge in order to reach it. It was on this short walk that I began to
recognize just how big everything was in Budapest. I could see Buda Castle just on the other
side of the river, the Houses of Parliament nearby, the Chain Bridge
(obviously) and a variety of other random buildings.
(Small aside – I just crossed the border into Slovenia and it’s raining,
which is seriously the first rain I’ve seen for ages. Damn.)
All of these structures were immense.
Hell, the Danube was pretty big too (I mean it’s no Nile or Amazon, but
if it was Buda and Pest would probably still be two separate cities). Somehow they still managed to be pretty,
though, unlike with the blocky structures in Bucharest.
Anyway, enough admiring the architecture. I had a hotel to reach (and hopefully still a
breakfast to eat – though after the pizza biscuits I probably didn’t need any
more food). From the Pest side (one side
of the Danube is Pest, where most of the attractions are, and the other side is
Buda, with the castle and the hotel) I had seen the hotel poking over the top
of some of the other buildings on the river, so I knew pretty much exactly
where to go.
So – into the hotel, got sorted with a key and room number and started
to make my way upstairs before I heard Dad calling my name. He was sitting down in the foyer skyping with
Mum and Katrina. I needed to drop my
bags off and suchlike, so went up to the room and came back down for breakfast.
It was a buffet breakfast so of course I ate way too much (they had a
liver paste spread for the bread that I had to try).
(I’ve been in Slovenia like three minutes and the train has already gone
past a bunch of deer. I think I like it
already).
When we finished up with breakfast (read: when I stopped stuffing my
face) we went back up to the room so I could get cleaned up (I still smelled
like cigarette smoke from my time in the bar in Brasov) and maybe do a bit of
washing. I didn’t do all my clothes
since I wasn’t certain it would dry in just a day, and anyway, the sink was too
small to fit everything. By evening that
day, the whole room had the fuggy, thick feeling to it due to both the moisture
from my clothes and the way-too-high heaters.
Both Dad and I were keen to get out and, seeing as we were already on
the Buda side we thought we’d go check out Buda Castle. So we did.
Just down the street from the hotel was the path leading up to the
castle. At the start of the path was a
brick hut with a long queue out the front.
We couldn’t quite work out what the queue was for, but assumed it must
be for the castle, so Dad got in line while I went to have a look and see if I
could work out what was being sold there.
Turned out it was just the ticket office for the funicular leading up
the hill, so it was just selling public transport tickets. Whoops.
We thought it more interesting to walk up the hill than ride up, so
started along the path. We hadn’t gotten
far before coming across an inconspicuous gate leading to a staircase cut into
the wall. We decided that was a more
exciting route than the wide road we had been following previously, so through
we went, coming up the hill until we reached the main castle.
Buda Castle is only about 150-200 years old as it exists now (though to
be honest I couldn’t quite figure out what was original and what wasn’t for
reasons that will become clearer soon).
It’s really more of a palace than a castle, though a very impressive one
that looks over the rest of Budapest from a dramatic perch. The courtyards, which stretch across the
entire hill, are filled with tall, proud, triumphant statues. Well, except for one statue that just seemed
to depict three boys catching a fish.
Maybe I somehow missed some of the triumph in that one.
Buda Castle houses two key museums – the National Art Gallery and the
National History Museum. The Hungarian
for ‘history’ looks a little like ‘torte’, so we were kind of hoping for the
National Cake Museum, but you take what you can. We decided we could give the art gallery a
miss and headed in to get a feel for Budapest’s history. We only really looked at one exhibit,
something about 1000 years of Budapest or something, which gave us a really
thorough understanding of Budapest’s history.
Basically it would experience a period of prosperity and rapid growth
before someone decided to invade and razed it to the ground, after which there
would be prosperity and rapid growth, repeat ad nauseum. It was invaded by the Byzantines, the
Ottomans, the Nazis and the Soviets, just to name… four.
Apparently the occupation by the Nazis and the battle with the Soviets
was extremely vicious and brought the entire city to the ground, including Buda
Castle, which was a bit confusing as the exhibit was housed in Buda
Castle. As a result, I suspect that some
parts of the castle were reconstructed to repair damage done in the various
battles, but I’m not sure which bits, or if there even are any. There was definitely some reconstruction work
going on, though it seemed to be more about getting rid of the ruins than
rebuilding them.
We were about ready for something to eat, and by something to eat we
obviously meant goulash. Because goulash
is Hungarian. And we were in Hungary.
The idea was that we shouldn’t really be spending more than maybe five
or six euro (1500Ft) on a goulash, and this turned out to be far more difficult
to manage than we expected. The reason
for this was, of course, that we were exploring one of the tourist hubs of
Budapest, the castle, and all the restaurants had marked up their prices accordingly. We were heading back to the hotel, having
almost resigned ourselves to having to research some goulash for dinner, when
we came across a small place filled with locals just down the road from our
hotel. We knew it must be good when we
walked in and were told that there were no seats, though the guy was very
friendly and said there would be a table free soon if we waited. We waited.
After a lunch of goulash and Hungarian beer (I never used to like beer,
but the local European beers are delicious) we went to the hotel to plan our
afternoon/evening. The plan ended up
being: find an awesome restaurant for dinner, book it, walk around a bit, go to
restaurant, eat, be happy, sleep. This
worked out pretty well, with us finding a place called the Bohemian Bistro (or
something like that), going for a walk down the Danube to the Green Bridge and
then looping around back to the hotel to get ready for dinner.
On the way down the river we noticed that the hills were peppered with
random gates, holes and cave-like things.
There was even a little cave church inside the rocky walls (we had a
look from the outside but didn’t go in).
I later found out that pretty much the entirety of Buda is on top of a
massive cave system, created the same way the thermal baths were.
Our route also took us along the main pedestrian street, the name of
which eludes me, though there wasn’t anything particularly of note along there
– just shops and cafes and things.
Back at the hotel, while we were waiting for it to be worth heading out
for dinner, I looked up some of the common scams in Budapest. One in particular caught my attention in
which two women, not necessarily particularly attractive, approach a traveller
asking to use their map. They say they
are looking for a great bar they went to before and can’t find it. Of course they invite you to go with them,
taking you to a planned place where they immediately order drinks without
getting a menu. When the bill comes,
it’s much much much more expensive than you expect (try over 100 euros for
three drinks) and you are frog-marched to an ATM to get cash out to pay them.
I didn’t think I was particularly likely to get scammed like that, but
it was quite entertaining reading all the stories of people who had got
themselves into that situation.
Dinner was rather fantastic. We
started with a soup each – Dad went for goulash soup while I decided to have a
Chicken Tripe Broth. The goulash came in
a hanging pot that was heated by a small candle, while I received a bowl
containing a single, fat dumpling and another containing a huge amount of
chicken broth, tripe and vegetables floating in it. Dad had crispy duck as a main while I went
for wild boar (it’s not every place where you can order wild boar). The duck was a lot better than the boar, but
both were good.
Feeling well satisfied we walked back to the hotel to get a good night’s
sleep before Dad’s last day in Budapest.
DAY TWO
After breakfast (during which I discovered to my delight that they
offered strudel) we checked out, put our bags in the hotel’s storage room and
made our way out towards the House of Terror.
The House of Terror is a museum dedicated to the horrors of the two
regimes Budapest was occupied by between the forties and the eighties – first
the fascist Arrowcross party, a figurehead of the Nazi party, followed by the
Soviet occupation. It’s a somewhat
harrowing experience, housed in the former headquarters of the secret police of
both regimes. Each room has a different
theme, with information provided in sheets of paper that you can keep. The exhibits are more about creating a
feeling than providing particular information, using audiovisuals, interviews
with surviving victims of the gulags, posters, models and a mock-up prison cell
exhibit in the basement that is a very difficult place to walk through.
For the most part I was able to keep a little removed from the content
of the museum, though in the basement my emotional guard was let down a
little. After seeing photos of all the
people kept in the prison cells I rounded a corner into one last cell and was
surprised to come across a gallows sitting in a bare stone room, empty and
foreboding. That was a bit full on
(mainly because I wasn’t expecting it), and I needed a second to regain my
composure.
Perhaps one day we will have a similar museum about the way the
Australian government has treated refugees.
It may not be the same in terms of scale, but the use of people’s fear
of difference to excuse atrocities continues.
Dad’s transfer to the airport (organized by the hotel) was to be at
3:30pm, and combined with the fact that the House of Terror took a lot more
time to get through than we expected, we found that there was not much time
remaining before Dad would have to leave.
There was some kind of winter market going on (as it turned out just for
the weekend) so we decided to go there for some traditional Hungarian junk food
(hey, junk food can be a cultural experience too!)
I actually thought the market was really cool, though admittedly
small. We went for langos (you know –
the doughy pizza thing that’s deep fried and served with sour cream and cheese
– at least ours was) followed up by those cylindrical doughnut things that
aren’t really doughnuts but I can’t remember what they’re called so doughnuts
will have to do.
We actually got to see them preparing the latter sweet food in front of
us, which they did in a very cool manner.
First they take the dough and roll it out into a thin sausage. They butter up a wooden cylinder (duh) and
wrap the sausage around it before rolling it vigorously so that the dough
flattens. They coat the outside of the
dough with sugar and grill it over coals, turning constantly to get an even
browning across the entire chunk of deliciousness. And delicious it was. Trust me on that. It’s finished off with a dusting of cinnamon
sugar (or other kinds of sugary goodness, but let’s be honest – if you’re
getting anything other than cinnamon sugar you’re doing it wrong).
They serve it immediately (yes they make them to order, which in a way
explained the massive queue) in a plastic bag, which steams up
immediately. As soon as you open the bag
you get a wafting of cinnamon, sweetness and awesome.
At that it was time for Dad to leave, so we went back to the hotel,
grabbed our bags and saw each other off.
From here I was to make my way to a place called Hi-5 Hostel, which was
somewhere in the seventh district on the Pest side. Across the river I went in search of this
wondrous place.
The hostel was, as is often the case, in a probably-due-to-be-condemned
apartment block with a large, dirty courtyard in the centre and a series of
broken doors taking you up a two-storey staircase to yet another broken door
that led straight to hostel nirvana (yes I know I said that about the Brasov
one when I first arrived, but that was in a facebook update before I knew THE
TRUTH!)
I went to join the guys hanging around in the common room, watching one
of their mates play Civilisation on the Xbox 360. They’d all just gotten up (did I mention it
was around 4pm?) Hi-5 has an extremely
friendly, comfortable atmosphere because… well… everyone there is friendly and
comfortable. It seems to be almost
entirely inhabited by people who were on a world/European trip and ended up staying
there forever. This was actually how a
lot of the staff members (in fact, possibly all of the staff members) ended up
there.
I got the full story from Kate, who was working there with her sister
Sarah. They had been doing a world trip,
starting in Africa (where apparently getting kidnapped is more comfortable than
the actual tour they were on), before heading to Europe and getting stuck in
Budapest (Kate stated her intent to stay at least until Summer).
It was pretty easy to slot into the gang, and I soon found myself
getting thrashed in a game of Halo 4
(the newest test of masculinity).
That night was a dinner night, which meant a big plate of Fettuccine
Carbonara for 500 forints (about 1,50 euro).
It was also the night of drinking games (who am I kidding, every night
was drinking game night) followed by going out (which, admittedly, was also
every night).
The game of choice was King’s Cup, probably because most of the staff
were Australian (as in all of the staff were Australian except for one guy who
was British). Rocking the table were a
French Canadian pair (male), Kate, a staff member called Jacob (who for some
reason ended up drinking the King’s Cup even when someone else got it – mainly
for the girls), Trent, an Australian who didn’t work there, and many others
whose names I will never remember (those I do remember I only remember because
of later episodes). Oh yeah! There was a Belgian couple as well.
OK, so the drinking ended (I had three 500mL beers in all – 750 forints)
and the announcement was made that it was time to go out. There was a brief discussion amongst the
staff about where we would be going (though I think the “where” was really for
the benefit of the staff that were going out, since they almost, but not quite,
outnumbered us).
While we were getting ready to go out, I noticed that the toilets in the
hostel were the same as they had been at the hotel. Some explanation is needed here. See, toilets in Budapest (the ones that I saw
anyway) have a bizarre quirk – they have a little dry platform right where you
would generally aim your business, which is rather disconcerting when your drop
a great dirty deuce and end up having it stare you in the face when you stand
up. It also causes two other significant
problems:
1)
When you flush stains remain (they have an extra
jet for the platform, but it doesn’t 100% work)
2)
The whole point of s***ting into the water at the
bottom of the toilet bowl is that it prevents the smell getting up and out
As a result, every single toilet cubicle in Budapest smells like s***.
I got an opportunity to mention this to Kate. She responded that apparently it was a German
design to allow you to look at your poo.
To, you know, see if they’re the right colour (brown in case you’re
wondering). My feeling is that if you
were really that concerned you could use something else.
It was a Sunday night, so there was nothing particularly special on, so
they decided to take us to a place called Szimpla, which was Jacob’s third
favourite bar in the world (his favourite, also in Budapest, was closed for the
winter or something). Szimpla is what is
known as a ruin bar, otherwise known as my kind of bar. The ruin bars (there are a lot of them in
Budapest) used to be old apartments that went unclaimed at the fall of the
Soviet regime. Some enterprising fellows
bought them up and turned them into some of the most eclectic bars I’ve
seen. I was about to say underground,
and they do have an underground feel to them, but they are also some of the
most popular places in the city, and I feel like being well known kind of stops
you being underground.
We sat in the exterior courtyard area, near an old Beatle car (old as in
rusted over and falling apart). I found
out that the French Canadians were planning to leave the next day for Zagreb,
which was my next destination. I made a
drunken promise to buy them beers each day they stayed if they came with me on
Thursday to Zagreb. I managed to
negotiate down to just beers on the Tuesday and Wednesday, since Kate was also
trying to get them to stay longer (I later found out the reason for this when
Kate accompanied one of them back to the hostel so that he could ‘skype with
his sister’. From now on I will use
‘skype with my sister’ as innuendo for having sex, because I never do either
(sorry Katrina)).
I was chatting with the Belgian girl as we left Szimpla to make our way
towards Insztant (noticing a trend with these names?) She had come with her boyfriend, as I
mentioned before, but the boyfriend had not come out, choosing to go to bed
instead.
I couldn’t really figure out their relationship (well, ok, they’re
relationship was obviously boyfriend and girlfriend – I’m talking about the
subtleties) because she kept saying how she’d wanted to come to Budapest alone
but he had pulled the ‘don’t you love me?’ card (which I had always assumed was
the sole prerogative of the female in a relationship) and so she’d felt she had
to let him come along. And yet they were
going on a month long holiday together to somewhere later in the year, which
sounded romantic enough. Sounded to me
like a solid case of relationship-itis, the point where the relationship is in
its death throes so both parties do their damnedest to act like it isn’t. Or else they had a very strong relationship
that I couldn’t possibly understand from just chatting with one of them for a
few hours. There’s that possibility too.
Nothing else happened that night – I basically just went back to my dorm
after a short time at Insztant and (to the possible sound of French
Canadian/Australian bonding, though if that was indeed the noise I heard that
night they were surprisingly subtle about the whole thing) went to sleep.
DAY THREE
I woke up around 7am, got up around 8am (breakfast didn’t start until
then). For some reason being drunk when
I go to sleep makes me wake up early.
I was feeling fresh but lazy, so I spent most of the morning flopping
around the hostel chatting with people and blogging. I did have big plans for that evening though:
caving. See, the Buda side is an ant
hive of caves created by the combination of the area being below sea level a
few million years ago and on or near a tectonic plate. And they offered an adventure caving tour,
which is pretty much my favourite thing ever (I’ve done one other in Jenolan
Caves) for 20 euro.
That wasn’t until 3:45pm, though by the time I had booked myself in (or,
more accurately, but the time I had gotten James, the British staff member, to
book me in… hehehe…) there wasn’t really enough time to do anything else. I was bumming around, thinking I should
probably eat some lunch before the cave when Trent emerged and said he wanted
to go try a buffet place that all the staff members swore by. When he said this, all the staff kind of
looked at him, stunned, and said, “What, you’ve been here _____ months and you
STILL haven’t been there?” A buffet was
right up my alley (especially one that cost a little over four euro) so I
agreed to go with him.
We were told that the restaurant was on one of the corners of Oktagon,
which is a big roundabout that is… well, an octagon. It wasn’t, by the way. We walked the full loop, going, “Well, there
are only eight corners in an octagon, and I’m damn sure we’ve gone past all of
them,” before asking a local who sent us down one of the streets about fifty
metres. Which, admittedly, isn’t far,
but is far enough that it definitely isn’t on the octagon.
I had a good feed. I mean, it was
what you’d expect – pasta, great big meatballs, goulash, fried foods, burgers,
salad (hahahahahaha who’d eat that?) potatoes and soup. And little cheesecake things. After I’d filled myself up (did I mention
four euros?) we discovered that there was a section of the restaurant where you
could choose different meats and they’d be grilled in front of you. If only I had found that before eating all
the crap. Sigh.
It was about time to do some caving by this point, so I said my goodbyes
to Trent and headed for the nearby train station, which was the meeting point. I’d been informed that I’d need some bus
tickets (two transfer tickets, as two buses were required each direction) so
bought these before heading for the meeting point.
The only instructions I had received were that the meeting point was at
the train station, which I assumed to mean the entrance of the station. So that’s where I waited. Every now and then I would see people who
looked like they were going to do the caving, but would then see the person
they were waiting for and walk off. I
knew that it would be a pretty full tour since I’d almost not been able to get
in (luckily it’s pretty easy to add one extra person into a group) so I was
getting really concerned when 3:40pm arrived and there was no-one. So I went for a walk to the side of the
station and spotted a big group waiting at a bus terminal. I approached them and asked if they were the
caving group. They were, but the guide
hadn’t arrived yet. It was 3:49pm. Thank God he was late.
So… the buses are a bit irritating.
To validate your ticket you stick it in a slot and then pull a little
handle, which punches a bunch of holes into your ticket into a set of squares
(a three by three square, in fact) providing a number that must somehow be
linked to the bus you catch. It’s stupid
because half the punchers don’t work and if you put the ticket in wrong you end
up punching different numbers, which isn’t as difficult to do as it should
be. Fortunately no-one actually checks
your ticket…
There were sixteen in the tour altogether, and we were divided up into
two groups of six and one of four (why not one of six and two of five? Don’t ask me.) The guide made the first group, selecting an
American woman and her young (11 year old) son Thomas, a Norwegian man and his
young (around 10 – and she spoke fluent English) daughter, and an American guy
a little older than me who had been chatting with the mother and son.
The tour guide looked around for one extra person to join that group.
Sucks to be the person who ends up with them, I thought. They’ll be stuck doing the easy route! No sooner had I thought this, of course, when
the guide pointed at me, saying, “You, can you join them?”
And because I’m such a nice guy I said yes.
We got into our overalls, slapped on our helmet (with lamp) and shoved
our belongings into the lockers. Thomas
was a bit hesitant to leave his jumper, but was assured that he wouldn’t need
it (I was stuck in my thermals, though – bad idea).
Then we met our tour guide, a bubbly Hungarian man named Lockje (at
least that’s what I’m going to call him, though it’s probably wrong). He spoke English very quickly, explaining
things a bit like this: “Sowe’regoingtostartbygoingdownthistunnelheremakesureyougofeetfirstunlessyouwanttohaveabitmorefunofcoursethoughthatwouldbeverydangerous,”
before leaping head first into the tiny gap in the rock, leaving us going:
“…hello?” and wondering if we’d lost him before, moments later, his head would
pop up out of another gap elsewhere and say, “Hello!”
We got to an early part of the cave and Lockje turned to us.
“We have to make a very important decision here,” he said. “We have two choices. We can take an easier route, or a very hard
route.”
“The hard one!” Thomas immediately shouted.
“Yes, I hate to tell you, but that question was not really for you,
Thomas, since you will be able to fit either way.”
Neither of the adults could bear to disappoint Thomas after his
enthusiastic outburst, so we went the hard route. How hard was it? Well, I went through one (admittedly
optional) gap that was about thirty centimetres long and took two minutes to
get through. The kids had gone on their
stomach, the adults had declined to give it a go, and Lockje turned to me and
said, “For you, I think it is better if you go on your back.”
What an asshole.
Go on my back I did, and it wasn’t long before I realized that, despite
it being quite a squeeze, the shoulders and abdomen were the easy part. Unfortunately I reached the hips at a point
where my knees had found their way to a slight rise in the tunnel, and it was
here I noticed that knees aren’t designed to bend backwards (“on my back” my
arse, I thought). I must have looked
pretty stuck (admittedly I was, though more in the sense that I couldn’t get
back) because everyone started shouting encouragement (though there isn’t
really much else you can do when you’re watching some guy trying to fit through
a gap that’s only slightly bigger than his head).
So I’m writing this blog entry from my position stuck in the cave. Lockje promises me he’ll take it up to
somewhere with wifi to post it once I’m done…
Kidding, I made it through. Of
course.
One of the interesting things about this cave compared to the one I did
at Jenolan was that it had a very muddy floor.
The reason for this was that many of the tunnels had once been filled
with clay from the time when it was underwater.
Early explorers had to dig their way through the narrow tunnels that I
have been describing, only candles to light their way. Lockje told us about one tunnel that he took
over five hours to dig through (it was about two metres long or something…
can’t remember the details entirely).
So who were the brave pioneers of these tunnels? Why, a class at the local high school, of
course.
Far out, Hungarians are hardcore.
As we were leaving I managed to sell the American mother & son team
on Jenolan Caves adventure tours (goddamn it, Tourism Australia should be
paying me a commission). It was another
couple of bus rides back to the hostel, which I reached a little after
8pm. So the drinking was in full swing.
At some point that day a group of Brits had checked in (three girls, one
boy). Another addition was James’ Polish
friend, Magdalena, who was quite quiet and was kind of just sitting there,
watching everyone else playing the game.
One of the British girls had gotten stupidly, blindly, completely drunk
(8:15pm by the way). This was actually
the first time I had seen her: completely off her face. She kind of sat at the table, went to grab
something, knocked something over, apologized to everyone and everything and
then stumbled into the staff room, from which she had to be gingerly coaxed out
of.
Kate was pretty pissed off that some drunken lout was in the staff room
(“She can’t go in there, it’s off limits to guests”) but all the male staff
members were just like – don’t worry, she’s drunk, it’s not a problem. It all ended with my first game of Flip Cup
(why did they only ever play games with cups? Oh yeah, they’re drinking games –
duh) which I did ok at until we actually started playing. My direct competition was an American guy who
had checked in that day and was living in France, though I wasn’t entirely
certain if he was studying, working or just living there. We were about as terrible as each other.
Monday night was an extra special night that all of the staff looked
forward to – Monday at Morrison’s!
Morrison’s was a bar just down the road where, on Mondays, you could pay
a 500ft entrance fee and receive three free pints of beer. Oh, and they had karaoke. The karaoke was pretty good too – it wasn’t
taken over by the professionals but was kind of creating a mosh pit of happy
singers. I was forced to sing something,
so went for Boulevard of Broken Dreams,
though I’m pretty sure my microphone can’t have been connected since no-one’s
ears bled.
After a while Kate arrived and introduced me to two people who had just
checked in – a British girl and a Norwegian guy (I squandered my opportunity to
say my sister had spent the last year in Norway, though I’m not entirely sure
where that would have got me). I’m
pretty sure she was just trying to get rid of them so she could go make out in
a corner with her French Canadian, and had decided that I could offer them some
quality conversation (though whether she chose me because I’m pretty good at
conversation or whether she just left them with the first person she found and
was just lucky is anyone’s guess).
They were studying in Austria, so spoke German to each other, though
both spoke fluent English so most of our conversation was in English. I mentioned that I wanted to go to the
baths. They mentioned they wanted to go
to the baths. We decided, together, that
we would go to the baths the next day.
This was to be the start of one of the most excruciating sagas of my
trip so far, all of which would end in bitter disappointment (oh God I’ve made
it sound exciting. It wasn’t. Though it was disappointing.)
They left soon after finishing their free beers, but I needed to stick
around because I’d promised the Belgian girl I would show her the way back to
the hostel (she was drunk, not good with directions, and wasn’t sticking with
anyone in particular, so I thought it would be better if she had someone to
walk with, especially as I wasn’t feeling too drunk. As a further aside, I think my alcohol
tolerance is shooting up.)
She’d started dancing with a guy called Peter (another Australian,
though I’m not certain his name was actually Peter but I need to give him a
name as he plays a role on a later night as well). Peter was really drunk (he was at the stage
where he was slurring, “Man, I’m soooo drunk,” and trying to push people
together and make them dance). Somehow I
was totally sober by this point and the whole dancing in a drunken mosh pit was
not appealing, but I had made a promise so stuck it out. Luckily Peter and Belgian Girl were over it
pretty quickly too, and I led the way out.
Until they brought up pizza, so I took them to the pizza place (there
was one we had been to the night before) before taking them back to the
hostel. So that was that night.
DAY FOUR
I got up at about the same time as I had the previous day (maybe the
room got bright too early? I wasn’t using the curtains around my bed since I
was hanging washing, so maybe that was it).
After breakfast I sat around the common room for a bit, waiting for the
Brit and the Norwegian so that we could do the baths.
The Norwegian turned up first. He
greeted me and asked me what I was doing that day.
“Uh… Well I was going to do the baths.”
“We’ll be doing those too, eventually.
I think today we’re going to start by just having a walk around.”
Uh… what?
I didn’t want to press the point, though I probably should have, and I concluded
that they might do it with me the next day, so I made alternative plans. Budapest has a large central market similar
to the one in Barcelona, so I thought I might use up the morning by heading
there, grabbing a bit of lunch, and see what happened in the afternoon.
The market was cool, plenty of meats and breads and langos (which is
what I had for lunch of course). I also
had a strudel to follow. Good stuff.
That afternoon I wanted to go and organize a reservation for my train to
Zagreb, mainly in order to avoid falling into the trap of staying in Budapest
forever and missing all the potential gems along my route. It was quite a long walk – my train was to
leave from Deli station, which was on the other side of the river and then
some. When I got there I was told I
didn’t need a reservation, so in order to not feel like I had wasted an entire
afternoon I made my way toward the Holocaust Memorial Centre, because seeing
more persecution was exactly what the doctor ordered.
On the way I found a part of Buda Castle I hadn’t seen before on my
visit with Dad. It wasn’t a building –
rather, it was part of the walls. They
seemed a lot older than the palaces, and I did a quick walk along the cobbled
pavement around a few defensive towers before making my way along the Danube
toward the Memorial.
I had to go through a security check, assumedly because there is a
threat of some kind of attack (seriously, why would you blow up a Holocaust
Memorial?) I think the security guard
thought his job was a bit silly – he was very nice and didn’t do a particularly
thorough check, since I was able to smuggle the bomb through in my backpack.
The memorial is a series of rooms detailing various things Jews and the
Roma were denied during the Holocaust – ranging from property to dignity to
life. The walls were all black and the
way was lit by a series of lines that wrapped around the room, disappearing one
by one to symbolize the deaths.
There were a number of audiovisual displays that detailed the lives of
actual families at the time through each of the room themes, as well as a
fifteen minute video called The Origins
of Anti-Semitism, which seemed to conclude that it was all the Christians’
faults really.
The museum closed at 6pm, and I had arrived there fairly late as it was,
so I had to rush through the final couple of rooms detailing the horrors of
Auschwitz and listing the people who had helped Jews escape the horror.
I followed the signs to the exit and suddenly found myself in a
synagogue. It was empty, and I really
needed to leave before they locked me in, but in all honesty I had no idea
where I was or where I was going. I
found a corridor and followed it. Coming
the opposite way was an employee turning off the lights as he went.
“Exit?” he asked me.
“Yes please,” I said.
“Follow, I’ll show you faster way.”
He showed me out a side entrance and I was soon out, past the
bored-looking security guard and back in the direction of the hostel.
Back in the common room, the Norwegian came over to me.
“Looks like we missed our opportunity for the baths. Monday and Tuesday are the only days they let
women in.” (He was referring to his
British companion, not to me – Norwegians are too polite to make those kinds of
calls.)
Well… that sucked. You’re probably
wondering why I didn’t just go to the baths anyway. Well… because anywhere requiring me to be in
a situation where I was surrounded by strangers wearing only bathing suits was
a place I needed to visit with others.
You need someone with whom to joke about all the skin and how silly you
feel etc etc. Suffice it to say I was
not going to the baths without an entourage.
That night was Peter’s last night, and he had been persuaded by the
American staying in France to get 50000ft out from an ATM (“50000 is hardly
anything, right? This s*** is Monopoly
money.”) So Peter had a lot of money
left over, and he totally intended on spending it on getting drunk.
After the drinking games we went across to Insztant. I had been chatting with Magdalena, discovering
she live in Krakow (“Hey, I’m going to be in Krakow soon!”) and suchlike. Jacob didn’t come with us that night as he
had taken two kings cups and was not doing so well (actually, if memory serves,
I think he joined us later, but these nights tended to be a bit of a blur).
We got our first round at an upstairs bar before heading downstairs to
find a table. Somehow we lost Peter and
Magdalena (Peter had been in the drunken process of buying her a drink). I ended up chatting with an Australian girl
who I’m pretty sure must have only stayed one night since I can’t remember
seeing her at any other point in my stay, though she worked at a Hoyts cinema
so we had a decent conversation (well, it was about films at least. It was let down by the fact that she
unironically claimed that Hoyts was a non-mainstream cinema because they had
the occasional Spanish film festival or something.)
It was around this point that I discovered the most irritating thing I
have come across in all my travels. I
went to use the bathroom and found a small woman behind a desk in front of
it. I went to go use one of the urinals
and she spoke up in Hungarian. I looked
over and saw a small saucer with 100ft coins on it.
So… 100ft to use the urinal? I
really, really wanted to just unzip there and then and piss all over her little
desk… but I didn’t. Because that would
have been gross.
I paid up and used the toilet, fuming a bit. Public toilets… yeah, it’s irritating, but I
can understand. But in a bar? Where you’re paying for drinks? That’s quite simply ridiculous.
When I returned Peter and Magdalena had found us. Both were looking a
little worse for wear (Peter more so) as they had gatecrashed a birthday party
and been bought drinks. Peter had made
friends with the toilet guard upstairs, so he dragged me up there when I next
needed the loo.
It didn’t help much, though this lady was much nicer and kind of
apologetically asked for 100ft. I just
said I didn’t have any change, she went, “Really? Oh,” and that was that. But still… wtf? Are they trying to turn their bar into a
giant sewer?
Back at the hostel (which was just across the street), we caught up with
some South Americans in the common room.
Peter was kind of dragging Magdalena around at this point, and they went
out with one of the South Americans for a cigarette (may not have been a
cigarette – I’m not 100% certain). As I
was heading out to go to bed, I saw Peter leading Magdalena downstairs toward
the dorms.
The South American turned and winked at me.
“He’s going to have a very good night tonight,” he said.
DAY FIVE
My last full day in Budapest started off in an extremely… unmotivated
manner. I just couldn’t be bothered to
do anything. I had had a vague hope that
the baths may still happen, but didn’t see the Norwegian or Brit all
morning. Instead I sat around with the
staff watching Cam (one of the staff) play Fallout
3 and, later, episodes of Archer. Which is an admittedly funny show, but…
yeah. In a foreign city and all.
At around 3pm (yes I bummed around for six hours – go ahead, judge away)
I went, “S***, I’ve got to do something today, otherwise everyone’ll read my
blog and be like, what a lazy bastard,” so I went out to do the free communist
walking tour. Unfortunately the tour was
about twenty minutes away, and by the time I actually decided I was going it
was 3:15pm, so I didn’t have time to put on proper shoes. Instead I wore my thin cloth slipper-like
shoes, the ones I only wear indoors and in Australian weather. Budapest hadn’t been terribly cold, so I
theorized that I would be alright.
Well, it snowed.
Considerably. My feet got wet and
cold. And I had to trudge around the
city for two hours. Most of the tour was
stuff I already knew from the House of Terror, though there was the occasional
extra tidbit (in Hungary medical staff aren’t paid very well so in order to get
decent service you have to tip them a lot in advance, bananas used to be
strictly controlled and the guide’s friends once had to eat 10kg of bananas at
the border of Austria and Hungary because they didn’t know they couldn’t import
them etc etc) that made it worth getting out of the hostel.
Luckily we finished at Insztant (seriously, how did I keep managing to
end up there?) so the hostel was very close once the tour was over. I rushed in to warm my feet.
It was another cheap dinner night, followed of course by drinking games
and a ruin bar pub crawl. This time we
were joined by a new face, Bryony (she told us to remember it as Brian-y,
though I never thought of Bryony as an uncommon name…) We played a new game this time,
Bulls***. To play you all get cards,
turn the rest up one by one and then give people drinks if you have those
cards, or if you don’t. If you think
someone is giving you drinks but doesn’t have the right card, call bulls***, at
which point they either have to drink twice as much or show you the card in
which case you drink twice as much.
Anyway, then we went on the bar crawl.
I like the ruin bars, so a crawl through them was not unappealing. We started at Szimpla, which I think was
definitely my favourite of the lot. We
were being led that night by Jacob.
I bought the French Canadians the drink I had promised them – they were
kind of surprised, partly because they thought I was drunk when I made the
promise (I was, but not enough to not be aware of what I was doing) and partly
because it was fairly obvious they had been staying due to the hookup between
one of them and Kate. Still, they
appreciated it, and I thought it was money well spent if it meant I had
companions on the trip to Zagreb – and possibly within Zagreb itself!
We took up the whole table, so I had to grab a seat from another table and
ended up seated next to Bryony, who was sitting on a stool. She said that sitting on a stool made her
legs uncomfortable and that she needed to rest them on something. That something was my lap. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that
the obvious question I should have asked was: WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST ASK IF WE
COULD SWAP SEATS?
So we had a nice conversation with her legs on my lap about her
travels. She had been to Istanbul and
had some seedy stories to tell about taxi drivers who assumed that all Western
women were up for it, and basically tried to molest her in the cabs. She was later informed that, in Turkey, a
woman getting into the front of a taxi is basically asking for it. So ladies – if you ever go to Turkey, don’t
take a cab alone! (I should mention here
that I suspect she was not being 100% truthful, or at least exaggerating a
bit. You’ll probably figure out why I
suspect this as I continue my explanation of the night. By the way – this is the last bit of
retrospective commentary I’m giving about the night. From now on I will only be describing the
events and what I thought at the time, and leaving you to come to the
conclusions.)
Jacob joined our conversation at this point with a story about a drunken
night in Russia during which he was held at knife point by a biker who had, for
some reason, been begging for rubles in a fast food outlet. It was a pretty impressive story.
At some point I brought up the fact that I hadn’t been to the baths, and
I had really wanted to but was leaving the next day and didn’t want to go
alone. Bryony frowned.
“What time do the baths open?” she asked.
“Dunno. Jacob, what time do the
baths open?”
“Six.”
“Six.”
“Six?”
“Six.”
“We could do six.”
I grinned, seeing an opportunity.
“You want to get up and go to the baths at six?”
“Yeah, why not? I’ll set an alarm
now.”
Awesome. Things were looking up –
I wouldn’t have to miss out because of my lame phobia of going to baths without
a friend.
She set her alarm in her phone.
“Or we could just stay up all night.”
“I’d be up for that.”
I was feeling pretty comfortable here, in a hazy beer-induced fuzz with
a lady’s legs on my lap (oh come on, you didn’t think I wasn’t being a tipsy,
lusty bastard when I let her put her legs on me, did you?) so it didn’t come as
much surprise when Jacob announced it was time to move on. We lost a few people on the way, and it ended
up being just Bryony, Jacob, myself, the American and two of the Brits from the
group of four that had arrived a couple of days ago – one, the male, the other
one of the females.
On the walk to the next bar, Bryony detailed her experience with
boys. She was over, she told me, having
boys tell her that, yes, it was just about sex, when actually, a few months
later, they would say they were in love with her. All she wanted was sex, she said.
Um… ok.
My typical response when a girl is complaining about not getting boys is
to rationalize the boys’ behavior in terms that don’t contradict what they are
saying, but in a way that doesn’t make boys seem complex or, God forbid,
different from one another (except for me, of course, as the external overseer
who is somehow able to explain the relationship approach of three billion
individuals in a single sweeping generalization). Because men are simple.
I’ve had the exact opposite conversation with someone before, and my
approach was the same – agree and explain.
Somehow, though, I don’t think my conclusions were contradictory,
despite rationalizing contradictory behavior.
Interesting.
Anyway, my explanation for her was that boys are at heart hopeless
romantics that tend to try and pretend for as long as possible that they’re
just in it for the sex so that they don’t get hurt. To which her response was, yes, but if the
girl (her) is just in it for the sex, then it can get terribly confusing. To which I replied that most guys assume that
everything a girl says is doublespeak since we have persuaded ourselves we
don’t understand them, so when a girl says she’s just in it for the sex, we
don’t really take that as gospel (in fact, I suspect a lot of men don’t really
think women enjoy sex).
Anyway, I hadn’t quite worked out how we’d ended up talking so deeply
about sex and relationships (haha, deeply – we were drunk, so it was only
superficial surface stuff we were saying to impress each other with our
analytical ability). We arrived at the
next bar and went as a troupe to the toilet.
They had a lady there collecting money, but we kind of just walked
straight past – it seemed she was just selling toilet paper and paper
towels. I asked Jacob about the paying
for toilets thing later, and he said it was optional as long as you bought a
drink. So, basically it was a tourist
trap for people who didn’t speak Hungarian, with the door person not explaining
the optional part.
We had a shot of Hungarian rakia here (they had some different flavours
– I did plum. Tasted like brandy.) I was still chatting with Bryony as we made our
way off to Insztant (again). Before
going in, we went to drop our coats off inside the hostel to avoid the 200ft
coatroom fee. Bryony and I were in the
same dorm, so we showed each other our beds so that when one of us woke up we
could wake the other one.
We went to Insztant, had a beer, had a chat, and I ended up needing the
toilet. The same lady was there, but
this time I just walked straight past her.
She yelled at me but I was like, hell, I know the drill now lady. While I was using the urinal, I noticed a mop
being thrust aggressively at the floor beside me. She was MOPPING right next to me. What a **** (sorry, I can’t even give you a
letter to help you with that word – it’s a real bad one). As I left she thrust a finger into my chest,
but I just pushed straight past. I
assumed if she didn’t go get a security guard, or at least explain what she was
saying in English (she could have found someone to translate) then she didn’t
have a leg to stand on. And it seems
like she didn’t, because she didn’t bother with me after that. I guess 100ft isn’t really a very big deal IF
YOU’RE A BAR AND HAVE SOLD ALL THESE PEOPLE DRINKS.
When I got back I was dragged downstairs by Bryony (when I’m drunk I’m
aggressive in conversation – as in I talk a lot – but passive in all other
regards) where there was a dance floor with kinda-sorta techno music (I say
techno – it probably wasn’t, but I can’t even remember what it sounded like,
let alone know what genre it was). We
danced with everyone in a group for a bit (a local had found and joined us as
well) before heading back upstairs.
I lost the group for a bit upon getting back up, so had a quick scan of
the place. I eventually found them all
at the bar. Jacob and Bryony were
sucking each others’ faces off. I
thought I should probably leave them to it – I had been enjoying talking with
Bryony, but the night had clearly gone beyond the conversation segment. I went back and joined the American, who was
thinking about leaving, and the two Brits.
The guy was shaking his head, and the girl asked him what was up.
“He’s going to get three for three with that girl,” he said referring to
Bryony.
“What’s that mean?”
“Well, we’ve both got with a bird the last two nights. He’s going to make it three for three.”
I had to leave at that point. I
was not going to stick around for a discussion that treated such things so
flippantly.
I set my alarm for 6am the next morning – I wanted to make sure I was up
in case Bryony slept through her alarm.
The more the better, right?
DAY SIX
I awoke to my alarm at 6am. I
rose and looked at Bryony’s bed. It was empty. It had remained empty all night.
I went back to sleep.
When I woke up for real I waited around a bit for the French
Canadians. I don’t know why, but I
didn’t see them at all the entire day.
So I was let down again (that’s probably a bit of a harsh way of putting
it, but I had bought them a beer, and it was how it felt at the time) and was
looking at a six hour train ride alone.
The rest of the day was uneventful – I checked out, went to the train
station, had a panic attack when I saw the seats were numbered, tried to ask
the conductor if I needed a reservation, found out he spoke no English, found
out “no English,” just meant, “Not very good English,” found out I would be
fine and that I didn’t need a reservation, got on the train and headed for
Zagreb. A group of students played some
kind of drinking game in a cabin further down from me. They were very noisy.
Oh, there was one interesting thing on the train. The passport control came in, checked my
passport, all was good for the Schengen one.
Then came the Croatian passport control.
Now, I had done no real research, just looking to see that a British
passport could get me into every country I was going to. I had assumed that the deal was ‘freedom of
movement’ anywhere in Europe.
The Croatian border control looked at my passport, then at me. Then at my passport.
“Do you have some other ID?”
“Uh…” I thought about giving her
my Australian passport, but decided that might confuse things.
“Like a driver’s licence, or student card…”
“Oh, I have a driver’s licence.”
Derp derp, it was my Australian licence.
Ah well, she didn’t notice.
Then she took out a stamp and put the first stamp I have received so far
into my UK passport. Then she handed it
back and went on her way. I stared at
the stamp for a bit, not entirely sure what it was doing there. I later looked it up and discovered that the
deal is 90 days, not freedom of movement as I had originally believed. Whoops.
So that got me to Zagreb.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go skype with my sister, so this
story is
TO
BE CONTINUED