around the world in 180 days

About a month or so ago, Beth asked me to write more about the crazy people we’ve met along the way. I remembered this last night as I was falling asleep and thinking about some of the crazy Hungarians we’ve met already. It was a good idea a month ago and it’s a good idea now, so here goes.

One of the first Hungarians we met was an old lady at the train station who held a thick folder that said “Zimmer / Room” on it. We stopped and asked her about the details: how much, where it was located, private bath, how many beds, kitchen, etc. It sounded good. The price was right, it was centrally located and had everything else we were looking for. Still, we learned in India that a room should be viewed before it is rented, so we asked if we could see it.

This lady was about 65 or so. She had short, silver curly hair and looked exactly like the grandmother she probably was. She had more smile lines than frown lines and seemed tired but eager to please. She claimed that she spoke english, but really, she spoke german which she peppered with a few english words. I know enough german so I could understand her, but I had to reply in english. We rode the metro with her to the apartment (five stops, schnell, she kept saying) and then switched to a bus. “Zwei minuten zu Fuss, aber Ich bin Müde, she explained as we sat on the bus for 5 minutes before it left (2 minutes by foot, but I am tired).

“No boom boom,” she said about 15 times once we arrived at the apartment. It was an old Soviet-era building that looked more like a bunker than a place to live. The walls were covered in graffiti and the elevator, which we rode in once, seemed like a horrible and somewhat likely place to die. The apartment was dingy and dirty and smelled like stale sweat. Anna and I stood out on the balcony and tried to figure out how to tell this lady that we weren’t interested. She’d come all the way across town and was very eager for us to rent the place, but it just wasn’t what we wanted, in that it was a scary craphole. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not what we wanted.

When we told her we weren’t interested, she lowered her price a very little bit and then hung her head and said, “Ich bin schade” (i am sad) before we hightailed it down the steps (not the elevator) and out of her life. We felt a little bad, but we didn’t want to pay 30 euros for a place that was scary and dirty. We slept in places like that in India and paid a tenth of that.

We ended up in a hostel back by the train station called the Red Bus Hostel. The night staff there was a 32 year old woman who’d spent 5 years in NYC and 2 more working for Carnival cruise lines in the Carribean, through the Panama canal and in Alaska’s inside passage. She was quite honestly the most sarcastic person I’ve ever met. As we talked with her about her experiences and our own, she’d chastise people who were using the hostel’s computer when it froze, blaming them when it wasn’t their fault and telling them they’d go to Hungarian prison if they told anyone the computer’s password, both of which were totally tongue in cheek and mortifying for the people she was talking to. She told us a bunch of stories about the cruise industry, including the fact that on every cruise 3-4 people die from overeating. That’s a statistic you don’t hear often. She said the ships have big refridgerators to hold the bodies until they get back to port. Gross.

We also met a Romanian at the hostel who was sharing a room with us. He was a big fan of George Bush (which is less rare overseas than you might think) and was dead certain that Rudi Guliani (sp?) would be the next president of the USA. He looked to be about 40 or 45, had a ring of salt and pepper hair that was reminiscent of bozo the clown and was very strange. He left after one night and with a little luck, we’ll never see him again.
These character sketches of people we’ve run across are fun to write and I’ll try to keep doing them as I have the time and the inclination. There are a bunch of people from earlier in our trip that merit a mention and I’ll try to gather the best/strangest together and post them here, one by one.

Sharks drown if they stop moving because they can’t force water over their gills like regular fish can. I’m not sure what happens to us if we stop moving, but we’re not going to find out for a while. We spent 3 days in Munich, 3 days in Austria, now we’ll spend 3 days in Budapest before going to a lake in Southern Hungary for (you guessed it) 3 days.

Budapest had a very different history over the last 50 years than Vienna did, and it shows in the streets of the city. While the Soviets and communism have been gone for the better part of 20 years, there are still some scars visible. Vienna is clean, sparkling, a spotless museum of a town that celebrates it’s history of Habsburg rule. Budapest is covered in graffiti, many buildings are concrete rectangles, and many of the archetectural remnants of the Habsburgs aren’t in the meticulously restored state they are in Vienna.

Still, Budapest seems to have a lot of character. It sits on an economic divide between the eastern world and the western world: it’s one of the few places in the world where we could see a real, Italian opera performed in a beautiful theatre for 4 bucks. We saw “Don Pasquale” and our seats were worth 4 bucks (they were on the side and 4 floors up, so we had to lean forward during the whole performance) but elsewhere in the world, they’d cost maybe 8 or 10 times that price. I’ve never seen an opera before, but it was actually entertaining. We were dressed in our normal traveling clothes and many of the other people were dressed in formal wear, suits and ties and fancy dresses, but we were in the corner so it didn’t matter.

On our last day in Vienna, we went to 2 of the city’s many famous museums: the Haus der Musik, which is a music museum and the MAK, which is an abbreviation that translates to Museum of Applied Arts. The music museum was cool; there were lots of interactive exhibits, but it was 17 Euros, which is kind of a lot for what the place was. I had fun going, but I’m not sure I could recommend it.

The MAK, though, was fantastic. The only reason we even went there is because it was free on Saturdays. It’s a museum of design: a lot of industrial design, like chairs and desks and things, a lot of porcelain, some textiles and a whole wing of modern photography, film and sculpture art. We were there for 3 hours before it closed and it was the sort of place where you could visit every week and always get something new out of  it. A lot of the short films and photography they showed were thought-provoking to the extent that I spent much of our time in that wing trying to wrap my head around some big ideas.

The other thing we did in Vienna that was a little out of character was go to a mass service at St. Stephen’s cathedral, in the middle of Vienna. We’d visited the church the day before and toured the catacombs beneath it and had read that there would be an organ and orchestral performance the next day at 9:30 am. When we got to the church, though, we found out that the performance was was part of mass. We decided to stay anyway and are glad we did. The music was fantastic. The musicians were professionals and it was far and away the best music I’ve ever heard in a church. The strangest thing about the service was that they never collected offering. I’ve never been to a church where they didn’t do that.
Anyway, we’re off to see more of Budapest. There’s castles and cathedrals and who knows what else. Ciao!