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.