Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Budapest, Hungary
This morning a nagging decision was made; we are pressing on to Bucharest and then to Istanbul. Yikes, I get goosebumps as I write this. Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie, 'Murder on the Orient Express', Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, all the usual suspects. Maybe I better hold off on the romance of it all until we see the reality. This was choice one all along, but our backup was to double back from Budapest to Krakow, then to Berlin, Brussels, and the Eurostar home to London. But the journey is as long by train, and it is in the daytime so not as restful, and it is retracing our steps, 'turning back' so to speak. Now we move forward, see new sights. Better.
So after our breakfast decision to move on the Bucharest, we were out after breakfast and back to the train station to buy our tickets. That done quite easily, a fifteen hour train ride but it is overnight and we have a sleeper compartment, wooo hooo. We leave at 7:10pm tomorrow evening and get in before noon to Bucharest. Before we left our hotel we reserved two nights in a Bucharest Ibis, so we are now ticketed, reserved, paid, and have a place to stay. Committed now, we can go about the rest of our day.
We wandered a while, then went to a bookstore we saw yesterday that sells English books and a fine selection too. The ride is fifteen hours, even if we sleep a lot of it, so it will be good to have reading material to pass the time as the country we passed through on the way to Budapest is featureless and flat farm land. Then back to the hotel for a brief rest, as the remains of the day will be active. We plan the 24hour 'hop on hop off' tour, followed by a river cruise on the Danube, then dinner, home late. Then tomorrow we can use the tour bus ticket to see more of the sights before we train out of here. That's the plan, anyway.
A word about Budapest, just for our memories and to keep them fresh. First, we love Budapest - the look and feel of the place and the ways of the people. We have nothing but good memories so far. But (and isn't there always a 'but') this place has suffered a lot in the past couple of generations. Settled by the Romans and developed as a significant site with its medicinal hot springs and pleasant cliamate, it was overrun by the Huns and other tribes from the steppes to the east, and sacked. Then a successful monarchy evolved from the resident tribes and villiages. This monarchy, over generations, built many monuments and developed the Hungarian Magyar culture and is still well loved and respected by today's citizens. That civilization was overrun by the Ottoman Turks, again plunging the region into chaos. The turks were finally driven out, but the area was taken over by the Hapsburgs, the same crowd we saw in Vienna. That era ended with the conclusion of the First World War, and the area of 'the Austro-Hungarian Empire' was carved up into automous regions, with a net loss to Hungary. Then the chaos of WWII, with Hungary falling in line (along with Austria and Romania) with the Nazi regime. During the battles that followed, over 80% of the region of Budapest was leveled by bombs and artillery and all the bridges over the Danube were destroyed. Worse, the area was 'liberated' by the Russians and they didn't leave until the 1980's. The Hungarian revolution happened in 1956, with Hungarian students standing up against Russian tanks. The students, and Hungarian society, lost that one although the regime did lighten up a bit and society was a bit more progressive as time passed. Finally, with the evolution into a market economy in the '90s, Hungary had its freedom but little else as goods became more expensive here while there was little in the way of export goods from Hungary to the rest of the world. At last, with the great credit boom of the new millenium, a lot of money flowed into Hungary and Budapest and new developments sprang up and a lot of renovation of the Soviet-era buildings was undertaken. Now, in the present of April, 2011, and since the collapse of the credit boom in 2008, things have taken an apparent giant step backwards once again.
Now, all along the main street that leads from the train station to the Elizabeth Bridge, shops are closed, glass broken, buildings dirty and empty, marble tiles fallen from the facades of building and pillars. Sidewalks filthy, uncleaned, and clearly commerce as fallen badly on its face as the in-flow of money dried up. Goods that are for sale along these once-busy corridors of commerce are certainly not the high-fashion goods that we are used to seeing in the other cities and towns of Europe that we have visited, and that is so sad to see and certainly no reflection on the energy of the Hungarian people. The one exception to this trend is along Arkady street, and along the tourist roads that border the Danube (Dunna to the locals) river. There, in tourist central, a prosperous facade is maintained supported no doubt by the tourist Euro or Dollar. As elsewhere in the world, as so many countries take the valid approach that if you don't have products or services to sell the world then sell a look at your history and culture, and the opportunity to experience it. Hungary, and Budapest, does this very well and we tourists get a very fair measure in return for our Euros.
We hopped on the bus in mid-afternoon, and journeyed over the Danube via the Elizabeth bridge from Pest (pronounced Pesshht) to Buda, then along the river to the Funicular and then up the hill to the Palace of the former Hungarian monarchs at the top of the hill. There we got off the bus and walked around, taking thousands of pictures. One particular building on the hill was absolutely covered in shell damage, the facade and stone blocks shattered and pock-marked by bullet and shell damage. We have only seen the like of this in Caen, France, last year on the road trip, and they preserved the damage as part of the Normandy landings tourist experience to reflect the fierce fighting there. There, only a few building were preserved in the damaged state, the vast majority were fine and modern. Here, in Budapest, many buildings through the city have the damage still evident as the fighting must have gone house-to-house here and the results never repaired. My photos don't tell the whole story of the fire-storm that must have taken place here, where I stood, in the warm spring sunshine today. Jan and I shook off the experience and retrospective terror here, and did what tourists always do, we went for a late lunch and had some wine and beer. An absolutely lovely courtyard restaurant, in the warm sun and blue sky, deserted except for Jan and I and our waiter. He was a friendly sort, and told us about the building outside when I asked him. It had been the 'Ministry of War' building, and had been pounded in WWII. We talked a lot of Hungarian cooking, and Paprika. It is the traditional Hungarian culinary ingredient, means 'Pepper' in Hungarian, and is used in various strengths of 'heat' in many, many dishes. The peppers are harvested, dried, and ground up before use, and the heat comes by including, or not, the seeds - which are the hot part of the pepper.
Back to the bus, hopped on again after meeting a charming girl at the stop, a student studying business in Clermont-Ferrand in France, here on Easter Break. She and Jan chatted at length as we rode up to the top of the Citadel, still on the Buda side of the Danube. There, many photos later of the panoramic view of the divided city, on the bus again and down, over the Danube via the Elizabeth Bridge to the old section of Pest where we exited at a tourist market. I bought some Mig 21 fighter pilot goggles (oh sure, as if, but that's what the vendor said) for the motorcycle, and Jan got a book. Then a walk down to the river to Pier #11 to get the boat for our Danube River Cruise.
The ride was about and hour and a half, up the river to the Margaret Bridge, then back down to the Modern Bridge, then back to the pier. I took about 20 minutes, maybe more, of video and hundreds of pictures. Jan took, conservatively, thousands of pictures. This whole city with its marvelous sights is just one huge Kodak moment, and our pictures preserve our memories. Words fail, the sights just overwhelmed us. The people in front of me had a medium sized dog, a very nice 'mutt' who crawled under their seat and sat at my feet the whole trip, a curiously happy experience for me and I took his picture. Jan sat on the other side of the boat, so our images are duplicated a bit through the changing light as the twilight faded will make them different. One note of reality, the Danube is NOT blue now, it is a muddy greenish brown.
Finally, off the boat and walking along the river as the light faded completely and the lighting of the castles and churches and monuments took over completely. It was very impressive, again many night images on our cameras as we are getting good at that. At last up the same street we took last night, cameras away now, just walking in the warm evening air. We found the lovely street of last night, lined with lights and sidewalk bistros and the finely dressed of Budapest, and this time, having saved our appetites tonight, we stopped. Had a lovely dinner, with wine, Chicken Paprika for Jan and Goulash for me, then home to the Ibis. One faux pas for me, I was carrying our bag of stuff (sweaters, souveniers, etc), and not used to dealing with this kind of baggage, it flopped around was we got up to leave and I smashed a wine glass. Oops. The staff was very nice, concerned only that we were not hurt and refusing my offer to pay for the glass. They were very gracious.
