Day One - The City of Baths

Day One

This is an impossibly beautiful city architecturally. Because they've been conquered by so many major empires, they have the advantage of centuries of styles and artistic movements from everywhere. So, it's like someone mixed up LEGOs from Renaissance, Moorish, and Art Deco playsets and dumped the pail all over the city.

Everywhere you look it's crazy domes and leering gargoyles and soaring towers. Some are renovated, and some are giant, blistered, faded heaps. The eye is constantly drawn to detail. There's the urban decay I love, smoke-blasted caryatids, neon signs with letters hanging free, but also rewarding, preserved glory -- sudden glittering mosaics high up on a bright pink building in the middle of nowhere.

I took a quick shower (no shampoo provided!) and went out in search of coffee. I hit an ATM first. It looks like $100 is 22,000 forints. I've told all my friends my "forint currency" joke, but I'll tell you too. Can't get enough of it. So funny to me. I'm in a forint country. Hee haw, there I go again, up to the ceiling.

The symbol for the forint is HUF for "Hungarian Forint," so I've been calling them "hufflebucks."

Once before, in Iceland, I used an ATM, and I had no idea what the Krona was in relation to the dollar, so I just hit a button, and found out later I'd taken out $300 bucks. This time I knew to look for whatever was close to 22K. One of the options was 20, so I struck! Not a moment to lose! A single 20,000 bill came out. Was it going to be hard to cash? Probably!

I figured paying for coffee with the equivalent of a $100 bill would piss off even the happiest Magyar, so I looked for something to crack it on, which, here in the Beverly Hill of Budapest, was no problem. Place was swarming with touts hawking Hop On/Hop Off bus tours. I bought one, and my day was set. He was happy to make the sale.

I love "tout" as a noun.

The city is doing well. This is clearly the result of being "the new Prague" (see issue #1!). So, there are lots of construction projects. Cranes be swivelin' and tattoed giants be huckin' pavestones. One curly wolf pushing a wheelbarrow of bricks looked exactly like a "torturer" from central casting.

I love "torturer" as a noun

As a result, some of the streets are all tore up, so I had to take a little tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a little coffee place. I had small bills and a headache. It was time to get rid of both of them.

In my mind, I wanted a hot cup of coffee to walk around with, but they don't do that here. You get a thimble full of espresso or you get a thumb full of "get lost." I took the espresso, and I ordered a random roll listed as "dios brios." That had to mean "today's bread" or "bread of the day" but I kept saying it to myself like an upset Spanish maid. Ay yi yi, dios brios, senior. The men on the horses, they are coming back!

It was some shitty raisin thing, but it looked good, and that's what was important. Thus fortified, I made my way past an elegant McDonalds and a beautiful statue of Hermes to a parky area called Erzabet ter. I liked thinking Hermes had run from Grand Central Station to here.

Erzabet means "Elizabeth" by the way. Common name around here! It's pronounced Urzh-uh-bet, but I've been saying it like, 'ere's a bit. Erzabet o' fun! I guess what's her blood, the one that bathed in all them virgins was Erzabet Bathory. 

There was a little park fair with ladies selling gingerbread shaped like witches, and men selling beautiful leather purses and bags. No man bags. Some of the gingerbread was shaped like leather purses as well. A bathroom was locked and had a sign on it that read "WC Okok" 

Okok must mean "out of order," but it's funny that it looked like ok, ok. I guess two ok's cancel each other out and mean "not ok"

Found the area where the Hop On Bus lived, and I hopped on, and the city laid itself bare to me. Endless, heartbreaking avenues of European glory. The decadence of Paris, the practicality of Berlin, the colors of St. Petersburg, the KFCs of Kentucky. 

It ain't total chaos, but it ain't the orderly layout of Manhattan. The bus route looks like someone dropped some tangled ear buds on a map, traced it and turned the ignition. This is the way we're going. But this is crazy. It's my bus and we'll go in whatever crazy way I want, so go sell tickets, ya tout.

First stop was an opera house dedicated to Franz Liszt. He apparently made people crazy. Like, he would come to town, and women would lose their minds. Before Elvis, before the Beatles, there was Lisztomania. I pictured his name in giant red letters.

I didn't get off. There sure was plenty to see, and you weren't allowed to stand up on the bus, so pictures were hard, but I figured the glamour of this bus plan would be to use it to scout out neighborhoods, hop off, then walk back, explore on foot, then hop right back on. Genius!  

So, we passed the House of Terror, which was a sad, haunted blue and gray building where the Nazi party used to party and where the Commie police had their headquarters when the city was red. So, it was a prison and a torture house, and an all around shitty place to be. It's a museum now, and you can see all the terrible things people do to people. Not interested. 

Like, the United States has a horrible history. The whole country is built on a cursed Indian burial ground, and the map is full of cigarette burns marking civil rights massacres, but we do our citizens the favor of pretending it never happened. I just can't imagine what it would be like to be an old European and know what your neighbors did in the war and the terrible times after and what they needed to do to survive. Like, it would be weird to see the kids of the guy who reported on you to the secret police.

Then we rolled up on Heroes Square

Cool place commemorating when the pope dreamed that Archangel Gabriel told him to give Stephen of Hungary the crown. Stephen had sold the most subscriptions to Christian Magazine, and that was the reward. Cool, open plaza with some beautiful statues. The first thing they told us about it was that Michael Jackson had filmed a video here. It's the one where he's a giant statue.

Earlier in the day, I had seen a shrine to MJ. It was a tree in a corner of Erzabet ter (ter means "square" ya dig?) He was cool, I guess, but he was no Franz Liszt. He sure inspired folks to put his face in a daisy and nail it to a tree, though.

  I hopped off in the Square and walked back to the opera house. It was... a long walk. It seemed so short on the bus. I'm very glad I did it, because when you dip down small streets, you see weird shit like tiny doors in the sides of buildings and strange signs beckoning you to join basement poker games, and real people. Real Hungarians walking their dogs and carrying bags of groceries. Old women in house dresses. And everywhere, everywhere, fascinating architectural detail. Chipped statues, overdone Byzantine facades, everything, everything. Got some great snaps.

Snap!

Also got exhausted. Hot day, terrible sleep the night before. So the whole hop off and trudge back plan worked on paper, but the execution was... nope, not going to complain about it. It was awesome. I filled myself with images and feeling. I saw a boy in a shirt that read "I cannot live without shocking colors," I saw a boy in red pants smoking at a cafe. I saw a statue of a skeleton holding a man's skull, I saw an enormous crew of Germans drinking on the sidewalk and smiling with foam in their mustaches.

Kept seeing shit. Couldn't see enough. Got a little beauty fatigued. Like, if everything is amazing, then nothing is, but... turned a corner to see an amazing Art Deco theatre. They have everything.

Hopped back on the bus and kind of hit the wall. I wanted to max out my ticket, but it was maxing me out, so I just let the city flow around me and took in parks and mansions and tree-lined avenues. People laughing, people talking, a man selling ice cream. Singing Italian songs.

Palaces and castles and the least advertising I have ever seen in a city. Is there an ordinance against it? I've never been less hit with demands that I buy a phone or the internet or an insurance. Why so little? 

Oh, that's been something. My phone doesn't work here, so I'm going six or seven hours without... looking at my social media or my email. It's a kind of detox. I went through withdrawal at first, but got over it pretty quickly.

Though, the length of this entry belies the need for something. Some connection.

Got some fried rice at The Citadel. We crossed the bridge into Buda. Turns out I'd been in Pest the entire time. The rule, the driver said, was if you can see a hill, you're in Buda, if it's flat, you're in Pest. This appeared to be true. Nice panoramic view of everything from up there.

 They have their own Statue of Liberty here. It's a chick running with a shield over her head. She doesn't look like she's protecting herself with it, though. It looks like she's bringing it to cover you. I liked that idea very much. Like, our Statue of Liberty is kind of a sedentary lighthouse in comparison.

UPDATE: have since learned the "shield" is a palm frond. Sure doesn't look like it to me! But, that's what it is. Guess I'll make my own statue!

 Learned about a dude who climbed the hills to try and get the pagans to hunt Easter eggs, but the pagans preferred to stuff him in a barrel and roll him down to the Danube. He drowned and died, so the church thought he was awesome. That's how you do it, evangelists. You go up there, ask those witches and pine cone sniffers to be Christian, and you let them kill you in some weirdo way. That is exactly how it's done.

Then we got back to something I recognized, and I hopped off, grabbed some crocodile-shaped crackers and went back to my sleeping silks. I thought about Gloria coming back to check on me, knew darkness, and got the first healthy, natural sleep of the trip. Dozed through a golden afternoon.

Woke up at 8:30. Had a coupon for an 8:45 boat ride. Grabbed my jeans and made it to the docks with thirty seconds to spare.

Beautiful night. Perfect breeze. Happy English ladies having a hen party. Boat was infested with enormous spiders. It was terrifying.

Got some good shots of the Parliament all lit up, though,

Fled the spiders. Got ripped off at a late-night dinnery. The menu said gnocci, but it sure looked like spaetzel to me!!, came back here, imagined Gloria coming back to see if I'd brought any escorts up here, knew darkness, and woke up ready for Day Two. The time difference is such, that I was able to listen to a live baseball game back in the States while I wrote to you.

Too,
Long

Boots on the Ground

Day Zero

Got some sleep on the connecting flight, but made sure not to miss the free sandwich. It was on something called Volkorenbrood, which was amazaaing. So fresh! So wheaty. I was almost ashamed how much I loved it, siphoning up every crumb. KLM Dutch Airlines has some style, boy. Their water cups have little relief tulips, wooden shoes, and bicycles on them. The holy trinity of the Hollandverse.

The food on the big flight was good too. The next time I hear a comedian hassle plane food, he's getting heckled.

We busted through some clouds, I busted through five chapters of You Can't Win (Jack Black) and Budapest appeared. Airport isn't quite near the city, so my first view was rural villages and fields. Every roof was orange or red. Very pretty, and probably looks exactly as you imagine, reader.

Stuck on the plane for a bit, so I messed around with the guidebook. Hungary was all cavemen, and then the Roman fucking Empire was like, "I'll have me some of you, me lad." So, then it got all the benefits of that -- Christianity, pizza, literacy, hygiene. Then no lesser entity than Attila the fucking Hun came roaring in, and the Romans were like, "We do not have time for this mess. Just take it."

So, it was Hun Headquarters was a while (the guidebook was like, "do NOT think this is why it's called Hungary, there is NO connection." Seemed really sensitive about it), but Atilla died on top of a pile of slave girls, and then no more diminished mortal than Suleimon the Magnificent gave the place a good old Turkish snatching, and it was all his.

I loved all this, because it's not like it was: "a bunch of tribes got their shit together and made a country." It was massive names from history personally coming in to regulate. It was like Circus of the Conquering Stars.

Then the Turks were like, "this place is pretty awesome, let's take all of Europe," and Vienna was like, "how about you take none of Europe instead?", and beat the shit out of them. Slapped the whole Turkish army between two slices of Volkorenbrood, and shipped 'em back to the automat.

The Turks gobbled off all the way back to Turkey, and Hungary was its own place again. Don't know what happened next, because the hairy Magyars next to me finally got up, and I was able to exit the plane.

I was looking forward to taking a picture of my visa stamp, but there was no customs agent. No form to fill out either. It's tougher to get into Canada. Just grabbed my stuff and zipped over to the exit. I was met by an old woman holding a clipboard with my name on it. Her own name was Erzebet.

She and her husband drove me to my room in a mini-van. Awesome drive. Swirling images of domes and towers and columns and factories. Men practicing archery in a field, a man with his face in his hands leaning on a collapsed wall, a weird collection of ancient airplanes on display.

As we got closer, it was A CITY, streams of colorfully dressed people descending into subways and buying flowers and tripping on cobblestones. This place is NOT on a grid, so it was constant wending and warping around enormous, stone buildings, then shooting down narrow streets lined with cafes and shops.

The radio was on, and Erzebet wanted to sing, you could tell, but she thought it would bother me, so she was whispering the lyrics to all the songs.

There were roughly ten thousand things I wanted to photograph, and I tried to mark down some street names to come back, but the language is impenetrable. And, like, something I thought was the name of a street would just mean, "Laundromat" or something, so I'll never find it again.

The room I booked on airbnb flooded, so they upgraded me to a palace. Mr.and Mrs. Erzebet were paid and received a Five Euro tip for their pains. They dumped me off with the famous Gloria (which is the alias that she's been living under), and I was taken to Vaci utca.

Utca means "street", it's usually just abbreviated with a u. This particular street is apparently the Bourbon or Duval or 5th Avenue of Budapest. I think they were surprised when I hadn't heard of it. It's very pretty but also tourist central but also right on the shores of the Danube.

Here's the view from my window

That clock tower makes with the bing bong every hour.

Gloria was all legs and pink cellphone and registration book. She told me the wifi code, warned me not to bring escorts back to the room, said, "I hope you are to be happy with your choose," and was gone.

I am happy with my choice, Gloria. Thank you.

Journey over! Trip can officially start.

I had about an hour of light left, so I grabbed the camera and ran out. No plan, just figured I'd wander until it got dark. Zipped over to the Danube which is just... amazing bridges! Castles hewn into the cliffside shore!

Ran around like a bag of cashew nuts, and realized I was overdoing it. Exhausted, so I let one of the tourist places take me by the arm and feed me goulash (thin!) and a pork cutlet (breaded!) and went back up to my chambers.

Woke up with a caffeine headache that's crossing my eyes, so first thing today - Operation Find Where They Keep the Coffee in This Crazy 'Burg!

Interlude - The Journey

Nine hour flight from Seattle. Connecting now in Amsterdam. Their airport is called Schiphol, which looks too much like "Ship hole" to mean anything else. With all the extra vowels, Dutch always looks like it's meant to be yawned rather than spoken.

They kept us pretty busy on the flight with free movies and a planewide sudoku contest. Constant free sandwiches. Folks watched Iron Man 3, cheeks bulging with cheese. Folks entered numbers into squares with one hand and squeezed packets of mayonnaise onto pickles with the other. I murdered a stack of New Yorkers and started Utz (Bruce Chatwin).

On my last extended trip, I didn't want to be weighed down with books, but I dearly needed something to read. Back then, I would never have thrown a book away, so anything I had with me would have been lugged around as dead weight for three months. So... my girlfriend photocopied a million short stories for me, and had them delivered one of the hostels.

I read them on trains and ships and threw them away. It was a wonderfully random collection of famous stories, contemporary stories, and chapters from books. She illustrated some of the pages. Those I kept.

When they ran out, I would go to used bookstores in whichever country I was in and ask if they had any books in English. They almost always had a shoe box with two or three busted paperbacks. Almost always "sleaze" or children's classics. That's when I first read Call of the Wild.

I didn't buy the porn, but I regret it now. I'm sure they were hilarious, rare collectibles.

For this trip, I brought an entire backpack full of books, but I'll be giving them to used bookstores when I'm done, so someone like Young Simon will have something when they run out of photocopied stories

Sat next to a friendly Aussie on the plane. He slept healthily most of the time. I may have slept, but as usual, I dreamed I was on a plane, so it's hard to know. Here in the Ship Hole, I can't tell if I'm exhausted or excited.

Boarding another plane now for Budapest.  Two hours. I'm staying in a room I booked on airbnb, and I sprangsprung for a car to pick me up. The note I got from my landlord says:

"The driver will be waiting for you at the airport and showing a paper with your name on it. Then my friend Glória will greet you at the apartment around 17:50"

I've been singing Glória like it's pronounced Glue-rea and saying "I think she's got your room key, Glue-rea" and cracking myself up. I'm a dime store Laura Branigan.

Loved seeing all the European faces and clothes as I transferred to the new gate for this connecting flight. Fierce brows and proud expressions. Boys with perms. All the women look like German film stars.

There's a little bodega called V!ZZ!T, and that is making me laugh too. The ! is what they use in writing to represent the "click" sound they use in those clicking languages. It's a supply store for cicadas.
One more flight, and I'll be there.

Eastern Europe - Prelude

Why Budapest?

In 2000, I graduated from college after a semester in London. Since I was there, had a little graduation present money, and didn't have a job waiting for me back in the States, it seemed like the thing to do to travel around Europe.

Because I was precocious, I'd read when I was a boy that the children of aristocrats would be sent on "The Tour" when they finished their studies, and because I was pretentious, I decided I wanted to do the same thing.

The idea was to get a formal education, and then a "real world" education. They went to Italy and drew the stones of Venice. I went to Berlin, ate gyros and oranges, and looked for cool record albums to ship home. They walked around their uncle's vineyards in Florence, I slept in train stations waiting for the internet café to open.

I traveled a corridor from Berlin to Athens, poking around in Prague and Vienna, but everywhere I went, every hostel I stayed in, the cool kids were coming from or about to go to Budapest. Thirteen years ago it was "the new Prague."

What that meant was, a place newly freed from under Stalin's stubby thumb, dirt-cheap places to stay and eat, and fawning locals mad for Snickers bars, Gin Blossoms cassingles, and other trappings of The West. It sounded cool.

I liked Prague (of course!) but there was this idea I had then, and I think it's common, that you've just missed out on something cool. That you've moved to Williamsburg after it was gentrified, that the day you found a pair of Diesel jeans at Goodwill, they started selling them at Target.

So, though, Prague was a million red-brick shades of bridge-covered glory, it seemed (in my snooty mind)  like the Starbucks version of Eastern Europe whereas Budapest seemed like the cool indie coffee place where drunk girls played the harp until everyone got up to sing Bowie songs together on the way to a party in an abandoned machine shop.

I don't really feel that way anymore. Like, I don't think I need to be ahead of any travel trends. I just want to see other places and get a flake of what life is like there. It's essential to see new places to get a broader sense of what it means to be a person, and you need to have a bunch of trips where you fuck up, so you know how to do it next time.

Did I "waste" my first trip to Europe when I was 15? If you measure it by not meeting a girl on the Bridge of Sighs and coming back a painter, then yes. If you measure it by building a foundation so I could take better advantage when I came back at 18, then no. When you travel, you learn about yourself, what you're capable of, what bores you, what you're afraid of, what you like.

You usually have the opportunity to do something very unlike what you usually do, and you can untether yourself completely if you dare, or you can keep one foot in both worlds and just use the sampler spoon. You might also discover you're only comfortable with what you already know and spend the whole time in the hotel watching Dallas. It's all cool. It's all your experience and it all helps with the next time you travel or helps you decide you don't want to.

For this trip, I don't want to check places off on a list of cool places or discover a secret goulash recipe to shock folks with. I just want to surround myself with new stories and new flavors and absorb them to enhance my experience. I'm cool enough with being alone that I don't need to force anything or any connections.

So, it didn't need to be Budapest, but going there felt like a promise kept to my 26-year-old self.

I'll flesh out Young Simon's Tour with castles and a dip in the Danube, and Now Simon will read in café's and make new promises for Old Simon to keep later on.

I also want to take a bunch of pictures, because Young Simon thought taking pictures was sooo Left Bank. That leather-vested tool deserved everything that happened to him. But, I love him anyway, so I'm taking him to Hungary. 

I hope Old Simon will love me the same way some day.