Day 8 (continued)
Well, initially I didn’t seem all that blessed at all. I had just got in from Györ, and already I was on the wrong bus to the hostel. I quickly righted myself, although I didn’t have a valid ticket on the correct way there (shhhhh), and dropped my stuff off at the hostel, which was a bit more residential than I had hoped for. First of all, it didn’t really have a communal area, where you’d normally meet other people at bigger hostels. This hostel was also in an apartment building, so from my experience at Györ I was a bit hesitant. But, the one person on staff was nice, and I trusted her with doing my laundry for me. Maybe they think that people would break their washing machine. Maybe they just want another way to collect money. In any case, I had a bunch of stuff I needed to be cleaned and I didn’t want to hand wash all of it. As my laundry was being done, I took off to find the tourist info office.
Now, I think that Hungarian streets are purposely designed to get tourists lost. First of all, it was very hard to find street signs without walking a couple blocks. Businesses rarely gave away what number they were, let alone what street it was they were on. So, it took me a while to find what was supposed to be fairly obvious. Well, once I did, it was already dinnertime, so all the places I would have wanted to go to were closed. I decided instead on dinner, so I went out to Liszt Ferenc ter (Franz Liszt square), which is the hip spot of town for the 20-30 year olds. They must make a pretty good living because the prices there were very comparable to Western Europe. But, I was already there, and my hunger beat out my frugality, so I sat with a glass of Hungarian wine eating veal paprikash (a creamy paprika-based stew) with potato dumplings. It was really good food, and I had leftovers. The wine was OK, but not spectacular. It did take some hand waving, I mean
gesturing, to get across to the wait staff that I wanted a box to take the leftovers to go though. I guess they don’t do that kind of thing often.
Day 9
My first full day in Budapest also happened to be the hottest day that I spent there. In the mid-afternoon, it was 37 degrees... and quite humid as well. But, in the morning, when I had planned to tackle Buda that day, I had no idea what temperature it would end up. I started off my morning heading to the metro station that was supposed to be closest to Buda Hill, one of the two prominent hills on the Buda side of the river. From there, I managed to find the street I was supposed to be on and began the climb up the hill towards the walls of Buda Hill. After a nice warm climb, I was already beginning to feel my clothes sticking to me a bit more than usual.
My first destination was Matthias Church. As I walked through old Buda, I noticed that there were a lot more tourist groups here than down where I was staying in Pest. So, I followed not-too-close behind one of them to catch a phrase or two about the old city and the church. When I got there though, I wasn’t greated by the façade of the most photographed church in Budapest. No, instead, I got scaffolding covering the spire and most of the beautiful (it would have been, had I been able to see it) tiling on the roofs. Apparently, it’s undergoing some kind of remodel or reconstruction. Luckily, the inside was still intact and I paid the student’s fee to enter for a look. The stained glass inside was very well preserved, or maybe more likely well restored. The columns and almost all the other interior surfaces of the church were painted in geometric decorations. If there had been more light, I would probably have been able to admire the intense colors of these patterns, but it was not to be. I returned to the brightness of the world outside and, following one of the many tours’ lead, I walked around the Fisherman’s Bastion, an area of the wall that is astonishingly clean and not smelly, though the name may suggest otherwise. It was built on the area that used to be a fish market in the days of the castle’s operation, and now is one of the prominent portions of the wall in Buda and a favorite lookout spot over to Pest.
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| A view of Buda and of Pest across the Danube |
After that, I hiked on further to the Buda Castle itself. In the days since it’s use as an actual castle and residence, it has been parceled out into a couple museums. I didn’t really have the time for any of these museums, so I decided to pass. I also decided to forgo the trip up to the dome, which is included in the museum admission to the National History Museum. This was mostly because the sun was intensely bright, but the air was still amazingly hazy. After the castle, I walked along the walls until I found a nice portion of stairs on which to sit for a picnic. I think I must have downed half a liter of orange juice in less than a minute; it was so hot.
Afterwards, I continued down the hill, until I got back to near the banks of the Danube, called the Duna in Magyar. I realized that I was on the other side of the castle, but that just meant that I was closer to Gellert Hill, the other prominence in Buda. I caught a bus that took me to Szt. Gellert ter (ter = plaza or square, I think) and proceeded to find my way up to the Citadel, which was atop that hill. I wound up residential streets and up unmarked paths on the hill in the midday sun, realizing that I was quickly running out of fluids and still had no idea where I was. I was being pointed in the right direction by a couple of spray painted arrows in red, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else at all headed where I was headed. After I was almost to the top of the hill, I finally saw other people, people who looked like they hadn’t just walked up a really tall hill exposed to bright sunlight and humidity. They were congregated around the Liberation Monument, which was built to honor the Soviet soldiers that died in the fight to expel the Nazis from Hungary. Despite the collapse of the communist puppet states and the subsequent removal of the propagandist statues, this monument, a trio of statues with a woman holding I think a chafe of wheat in the center and elevated above the other two, had become a prominent feature of the landscape and was preserved in its place. I bought a liter of cold water at tourist concession prices and downed a good portion of it before drawing up the strength to move on to the Citadel.
On the way to the main entrance (I apparently had gotten to the hill the “back” way, opposite the parking lot where tons of tour buses were parked), I passed restaurants, drink and ice cream stands, and more than a fair share of booths selling traditional Hungarian hand-made goods and postcards. When I finally found the museum, I paid my admission and walked up more graveled paths to the bunker, where the exhibit was. Before I describe the contents of the museum, a bit of history is an order. The Citadella, although built well before the rise of Nazism in Germany, had become an important stronghold for the occupying Nazis. From here, they had control of the skies over Budapest and, in the last hours of the war, it was the headquarters of the Luftwaffe in Hungary. Inside the bunker, it was actually part history museum, part wax museum. Wax sculptures depicted the Nazis as they had worked in the Citadella in the later parts of WWII. Each room was recreated to its original task, except that now there was no one real to maintain it. The floors were all gravel, and water dripped from unknown places in the ceiling to dark pools on the floors. There was an air-control room, a strategy room, and an interrogation room - all things you would expect to find in a bunker during a war. Some rooms, however, weren’t recreated and were used instead for photographs of the horrors that fell upon Budapest during the Nazi-supported government of the Arrow Cross party. It was stark, graphic, and all very real, despite the grainy black and white photos. I have to say that the atmosphere of the dark, damp, and dripping bunker added to the knot that was growing in my stomach. By the time I reached the end of the exhibit, I was ready to leave and re-encounter the post-Nazi, post-Soviet Hungary.
I walked towards the parking lot of tour buses and started winding my way down the hill this time. I caught a bus that looked like it was headed downhill and rode that until it started to turn towards the outskirts of Buda. Then I continued to find my way down Gellert Hill, back towards the familiarity of the Danube. It was all very residential there, with houses and garages and fences keeping good neighbors good neighbors. I could tell it was a fairly affluent part of time, from both its existence on a hill and the size and apparent expense of the estates. Finally, I saw the Duna and caught one of the trams back north. After the tram too started to veer towards inner Buda, I hopped off and continued my way back to Pest. I crossed the Duna over the Chain Bridge, one of the first bridges built in Budapest, one of the last to be rebuilt after WWII, and another of those recognizable landmarks of the metropolitan. After that, I headed to Vaci utca (utca = street), Budapest’s pedestrian-only shopping street, which starts in Vorosmarty ter and ends at another square, which I don’t remember the name of right now. This was definitely one of the tourist-centers of Pest. Shops ranged from clothing stores to wine shops to those good ol’ Hungarian folkart places. I walked along, people watching and wondering about how capitalism has won out in a former Nazi, former Communist state. I continued on quickly, not only because I wasn’t really interested in clothes shopping and trinkets, but also because I wanted to make it to the Great Market Hall before it closed.
Luckily, I had an hour to spare, and I spent about half of that wandering through the aisles of the market, which is indoors, watching people buying and selling cured meats, fresh butchers’ cuts, fruits, vegetables, strudel, sauces, Hungarian foie gras in a can, and paprika, lots and lots of paprika. That must have been half the stores! Anyway, I headed over to a stand where the grapes looked enticing and ordered up a kilo of them. I think with the heat, I forgot how much a kilo is, or I was too lazy to look up the word “half” in the phrasebook. So, more than a pound of green grapes later (damned sellers at produce markets are all like this!), I’m munching on grapes while on the lookout for a small sample of paprika as a souvenir. Almost every stand has the same stuff though - little satchels of hot, sweet, or smoked paprika at various weights and all with one or more little wooden scoops to dig it out of the bags. Often, there would be hand-painted ceramic jars of paprika instead, all having paprika and “hot” or “sweet” written on them in Magyar, Deutch, and English. At a few places, they had paprika oil, so I decided that I would get that instead of the dried, powdered spice, just to be different. I found one place that had a particularly unique looking mini-jug of it and bought my sole souvenir so far there. The woman working this booth, though, eyed me with suspicion the entire time I was there - it’s almost as if they think that as tourists, we will just up and leave with stuff we like, thinking it’s free. Odd, really. I would encounter that again when I went to buy a sandwich to go from a café the next day.
After my single souvenir and my overabundance of grapes, I walked back towards the hostel. There, I met a new one-night tenant, who had been traveling Europe for a month and had two more left. Lucky man. After a shower, leftovers from the night before, and some thunderstorms, I decided to be social, and I went with my new friend, Donnacadh (the “dh” is silent), to Central Café, a place recommended in his guidebook. When we got there, I ordered a chocolate dessert and a cabernet sauvignon, which was much better than the wine from the night before. We talked about where we were from (Ireland, living in London mostly), what we both did (he’s a theater director, but will be looking for something other than the RSC after his vacation), and what places we’d been and where we were going to next. It was pretty cool to be social and have someone to talk to, and I realized that one of the few gems of traveling alone is the chance to throw yourself out on a limb and meet up with people you otherwise wouldn’t have spent time with if you were in a group of your own friends.
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| Traffic, busy as ever, across the Danube |
We left the place, and, since I wanted to take some night shots of Buda, we walked along the river first before heading back to the hostel. By the end of the day, I realized that there was no way I could see everything I wanted to in just 2 days. Luckily, there was room for another night, even though I was out of cash by then and would have to pay later, and I canceled my stay in the hostel in Pecs. I had plans for an early morning, so I went to bed fairly early.
Day 10
Well, the waking up early plans didn’t work out so well, so I decided to dive straight into the rest of my day. I headed over to Parliament, where there was a really long line just to buy tickets and another one for people who already had tickets. With the security measures, you had to be let in, a few at a time, to buy tickets for your tour, the only way you were allowed into the building as a member of the public.
Well, I decided I’d wait later and instead headed to St. Stephen’s Basilica, home of the most famous relic in Hungary, the Holy Right. The Holy Right is actually a right hand, one that used to (and I suppose still does) belong to St. Stephen himself, first of the kings of the Arpad dynasty. It was Stephen who brought Christianity to Hungary, and, when he thought that he would have no heir, it was him who gave his kingdom, spiritually, to Mary. Even today, Mary is depicted wearing the Hungarian royal crown, and she is the country’s patron saint. By some works of fortune, his right hand, still intact after centuries, made it home to Budapest, where it is now on display in a chapel, in a box that lights up if you deposit a 100 Forint piece. That’s not to say that the relic is the only draw to the church. The basilica itself is amazingly gorgeous. Almost every surface that could be gilded is. There are more than a dozen types of stone used in the building and decoration of the church, with the prominent columns a deep red marble with a grey marble base. The paintings were huge, statues were around every corner, and the entire basilica reflected the opulence of the rule of the Hapsburgs in Hungary.
After this, I got tickets for an English tour of the Parliament, and, when the tour finally started, it did not disappoint. The third largest Parliament in the world (after the British Parliament and the Reichschtag), it was also very elaborate on the outside and inside. It consisted of various architectural styles but was all designed and even partly (a very small part) built by one architect. Up the grand staircase, inside the main gallery were the four royal devices - the crown, orb, scepter, and sword. Along the staircases and around the main gallery were various statues, depicting various saints and leaders of Hungary. And, above the main gallery was the stained glass decorated dome. The stained glass windows, for the most part, were not damaged in the bombings of WWII because they were removed early on and stored in sand in the basement for protection.
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| The Holy Right (lit by the unholily and wrongly priced light) |
After this tour was over, I headed over to the Hungarian State Opera House, for another fascinating and informative tour. The opera house was built with state support and, as a corollary agreement, mostly Hungarian materials and labor were used. There is room for just under 2000 people because another of the conditions was that it not exceed the capacity of the Viennese opera house. We started off in the uncomfortable wooden seats, which aid the acoustics of the performance hall - acoustics that are reputed to be the third best of all the opera halls in the world (after L’opera Garnier and La Scala). The royal lounge, where royalty and nobility entertained their guests, was decorated in paintings of the great divas of the time, in costume reflecting their praise-worthy roles. In fact, the royal family gets its own box, the Royal box, which is now reserved for the leaders of the country and their guests. (The rule was apparently broken only once, during the filming of Evita, when Madonna and Antonio Banderas were allowed attendance). Side boxes were for other VIPs, special guests of the performers, and the press. Since the summer is the off-season, the stage, which is twice the size and much taller than the audience section, was being renovated and readied for a new season - September to June. I will have to come back for sure!
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The back entrance to the Opera House (it was for the Royal guests only) |
The frills of aristocracy were overshadowed by the House of Terror, on 60 Andrassy, an address now synonymous with both the Nazi secret police and the enforcers of the Soviet regime, the AVO and AVH. The exhibits here started with the operations of the Nazis and the puppet government, the Arrow Cross. Videos and photographs of interned and massacred Jews were incredibly moving, as was the story of how the ghetto of Pest, last of the ones created in the war, managed to survive. The story then moved on to another type of internment, the forced labor of the Communist movement. Soon after the Russians pushed out the Nazis, Hungary joined the Warsaw Pact, which put them under Soviet jurisdiction. Initially, the Communist party had been tiny, and this showed in the poor voting results after the way. But, as intimidation and paranoia instigated by the secret Soviet enforcers grew, it became harder and harder to be resistant of the eventual Communist takeover. Villages already damaged by WWII were further destroyed and depopulated by the Soviet attempts to move the “socially undesirable” and potentially resistant people to labor camps in other parts of Hungary and even in other parts of the Soviet sphere. The openly antagonistic ended up imprisoned by the secret police and sent to 60 Andrassy, which brings me to the most gut-wrenching exhibits. An elevator, completely dark except for a video of a former guard describing the process of hanging someone on the gallows, brought visitors down to the basement, where the cells had been recreated. In another room, there were gallows on display, each with slideshows of letters and notes that the condemned would write to their families. I was a bit glad that I couldn’t read Magyar, actually. Finally through the exhibit, I continued up Andrassy and got some ice cream at Lukaks, the old haunt of the Soviet secret police.
Then, I headed to Heroes’ Square, the most splendid square in Budapest and at the entrance of their vast City Park. Here, there was a semicircle of statues of the key figures in Hungarian history, especially the Arpad dynasty. In the middle of the square was a memorial to the Unknown Soldier, and, behind that and above all the rest of the statues, was a tall pillar that supported an angel holding the orb of Hungarian political power and a double cross, a symbol of Hungarian Christianity.
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| The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Heroes' Square |
After all that, I decided that it would be a good idea to buy my ticket to Sarajevo early, and it’s a good thing I did! The line at the international tickets line was dozens of people long, and everyone with their number in line was watching the LED display for their turn. That is until the numbers just turned off, and everyone just rushed to form actual lines in front of the two open windows. Craziness! So, after another half to 3/4 hour of waiting in a line this time, I finally got my ticket.
By then, I was starving and headed to Vorosmarty square for dinner. There I met a hoard of drunken Brits who were there for a bachelor party. Lots of swearing, lots of machismo, lots of inappropriate behavior for a public square, and definitely a whole lot of entertainment for me, a single girl sitting right next to them. The food was great too.
Day 11
So, since I had decided to forgo Pecs for an extra day in Budapest, here it is! I started the day trying to find the public bus to get to Etele ter bus station. Unfortunately, with construction of the fourth metro line in the city, the bus stop was moved, and it took me a while to find the English side that indicated such. Well, I made it to Memento Park (aka Statue Park) perfectly fine, so I can’t complain. After the fall of Communism and Soviet control in Hungary, officials decided to collect most of the propagandist statues and monuments in the city and surrounds of Budapest and put them in one place. Thus came about Memento Park. It has a recreated grandstand, with a copy of the Stalin boots in the background. The boots were all that remained of a huge Stalin statue after a 1956 uprising in the city, so it was, in a way, a symbol of anti-Soviet resistance. Also in the park were many statues from the era, with ones depicting the people often looking very crude and anonymous and ones depicting specific Soviet leaders in more traditional, realist sculpture form. So, despite the ideals of Communism, it was more of the same, with an elite ruling “class” and the working folk being oppressed. The park itself was a bit ironic... Using the remnants of Communism in a quite capitalistic way. There were postcards, posters, and even mugs to help you remember the occasion. I didn’t partake in the consumerism though, minus the free postcard that you can tear off your admission ticket.
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| Lenin's boots (a replica), the only remaining part of the statue after it was torn down |
After the statues, I headed over to the City Park for a picnic lunch and the Turkish baths. They need to have those in the States! It is almost an all-in-one experience. Since I was more interested at the time in relaxing, I switched from regular to mineral baths, at a couple different temperatures, and back again. I was reading a book most of the time, which led to some stares, but I still took some time to just soak. Of course, that’s not all there is at this bath. On my way in and more so on my way out when I got lost in the maze, I discovered that there were also regular outdoor swimming pools, sunning areas, a patio café, saunas, massage parlors (separately priced), pedicures, and an aerobic gym. There was even a mineral pool that you could swim circular laps in. Amazing!! So, after that I was all nice and relaxed and ready for my 12-hour trip to Sarajevo the next day.
