around the world in 180 days

We’ve just arrived back in Budapest after spending the last three days on the shores of lake Balaton, in southwestern Hungary. We stayed in a town called Siofok that was a popular weekend beach destination for Austrians and Germans. It was strange, but we had more language difficulties there than anywhere else on our trip. Almost everyone spoke Hungarian and German, but English speakers were rare.

I’m willing to call the Strand at Siofok the best beach in the world because every other beach I’ve been to has been full of sand, which then gets in your swinsuit, in your hair, sticks to your legs, arms and chest and gets in your blankets and towels. There are some people who love sand on a beach, but I’ve come to regard it as a nuisance. The Strand at Siofok had no sand at all. It was a large grassy area that went right to the edge of the lake, which was a perfect temperature and stayed about 3 feet deep for maybe 500 meters from shore. We had a great time sitting in the sun and jumping in the lake when we got too sweaty.

Tonight we’re on our way to Krakow in Poland. We’ll arrive at 5 in the morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I’m certain, being the morning people that we are, and try to find a place to store our bags until we can check into our hostel. We’ve got 4 days in Krakow, one of which we’ll use to see Auschwitz, and other to see some salt mines that are supposed to be quite remarkable.

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 ... [Continue reading this entry]