Budapest, Part I

I have been meaning to write posts on this city, and why it continues to "stick" with me, for months. A new job, a new pregnancy, holidays and not a small dose of blog laziness prevented me from doing it, though; I really wanted to post something, but I didn't want it to be perfunctory. Here goes...

I first visited the city in 1999 as a student. Some friends and I were in Paris and were amazed to see that the "Orient Express" still existed; we resolved to take it. It turned out that there IS a restored kind of Orient Express that travelers can take, but it is clearly out of a student's budget. The more common alternative is to take a regular Eurorail train that simply follows the Orient Express Route (which was, in 1999, Paris- Vienna- Budapest- Bucharest. I've since learned from wikipedia that even that route is now obsolete).

We were also excited by the fact that the journey was a long overnight one- weary from having visited about four cities in six days, we needed rest. We boarded the train and took to our cuchettes with zeal, happy at the opportunity to sleep in a laying down position (as opposed to sitting in a train chair).

The next morning, we awoke to Central Europe. Once the cuchettes were stowed we sat and watched as the farmland moved past us outside the window. We quickly realized that the twentieth century itself was already passing by this part of the world: when farmers were using tractors, they were ancient ones from a much earlier era, and we saw oxen being used in their place on occasion.

Once we disembarked in Budapest, we quickly realized that the time machine we had witnessed in the country extended even here: the train station was as grand as a Parisian one, if a bit shabbier, and women could be seen here and there wearing kerchiefs. We weren't given long to take in the scenery, though: any passenger who looked like he might need somewhere to stay that night was soon mobbed by people offering to put him up in their home or in an apartment somewhere. We worked through this crowd, the first of its type we had seen in Europe, and collected ourselves before deciding to stay at a (yet unbeknownst to us) strange and out-of-the-way hostel far out on the Buda side of the city.

(As a side-note: little did I know that Mr.P's childhood friend and chef in his Hungarian bakery business also stayed at the same hostel. In fact, he was probably staying there while we were, and Mr. P was also in Budapest at the time of our visit there. Together we even remember some of the unusual characters that stayed at the hostel, long-term- yet we did not meet each other in the city.)

Almost everything about our experience in Budapest was foreign: gone were the universal sights of Western Europe, and, by extension, any major city in America. If you travel to Paris, there is much that you will also find in London, Rome, or New York: cities that are used to tourism, where much is written in English, and it's pretty easy to get the "gist" and make your way around. But it was good for us to see another side of Europe, one that had not been marketed for easy travel as much as the other parts had. First of all, the language, Magyar, which is not even Indo-European (you'd have a better chance figuring out the meaning of sanskrit rendered in English characters than Magyar), was amazingly foreign. Reading maps and subway signs added to a feeling of being overwhelmed and new to the city.

More important and beneficial for us, though, was the fact that we had been placed in a city that still bore the scars of a very difficult century- one of the most difficult ones in history. As modern Americans, we've been spared seeing our cities devastated and have remained, for the most part, culturally innocent to the devastations of war, especially on our own soil. September 11th showed us a fraction of what much of the world went through for the past century.  Even Paris, Rome, London: they all had been damaged in the two World Wars, some much worse than others. But none of them had then been taken over by an occupying force that, when it didn't destroy what had been there for a century or more, had let it decline and neglected it. We saw very grand buildings, Baroque, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco, that were in varying states of repair or disrepair. And we saw plenty of depressing Soviet concrete block buildings that were no competition for the grand old Belle Epoque beauties that surrounded them, even as these older ones crumbled. The subway lines consisted of one that is the oldest in continental Europe, a beautiful, well-preserved jewel worthy of riding for its own sake (the M1), and others that were built later: deeper-dug, Soviet era ones, with cars that still have Russian inscriptions on them (the M2 has the best examples). The time machine-sense continued throughout our visit.  And we kept saying, as we learned more about Hungary and what had happened there (and by extension, throughout much of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe): these people have been through and suffered so much. 

(the Vorosmarty ter station. If it looks like a New York subway station, then there is a reason's why: the New York stations, built later, had entrances modeled on the Budapest ones. Image from http://hampage.hu/trams/fav4/e_index.html)

(the Opera station, taken from Wikipedia commons)

(two images of the newer subway lines, from Wikipedia Commons)

More to follow in another post....

Mr. P and a friend walking in the Buda side of the city. Photo taken by me in 2006.

Comments

[jackie parkes]

Sounds incredible!