They stand behind their fruits and vegetables, and hawk them with quiet, almost plaintive voices, unlike Hungarian newsvendors, who shout out their headlines. It's enough to make you feel guilty enough to buy a radish.
I took a long walk through some places I'd never visited before. Starting at the second market, I walked through Rose Hill, an area of individual villas and houses, with a few small apartment blocks thrown in. The houses were large, and some had a fair amount of land around them. Some were in a dilapidated condition, while others were very well kept. I wondered who lived there, although it was clear that some of the residents were diplomats. It's probably the nicest place in Budapest to live.
Passing over the top of a hill, I descended through some woods to the section of Obuda. On the way down, I stopped and looked into a sports club (actually I got lost and wandered into it) that seemed to be pretty nice except that it had a sunken tennis court surrounded by concrete stands that were sagging. I'd never seen anything like it, but it was obvious what had happened: the ground was sinking under the concrete. I was surprised that nobody had thought of that before they built it. It reminded me of something that Jan had shown us in Prague. A popular restaurant located inside an old monastery had been closed. The monastery was on a hill with a complicated drainage, which the monks, who ran the restaurant, attended until the state kicked them out and took the place over. The state doesn't know how to manage the drainage, the hill is starting to fall away, and now the restaurant has to be closed because it's unsafe. Pity.
Coming out of the hills, I passed by what looked like a peasant shack (behind an incongruously grandiose gate) and entered Obuda. The streets of Obuda were lined with the single-story buildings of the village it obviously once was, and this eventually blended in with high-rise blocks as I approached the center. The blocks, incidentally, were done with more taste than others I'd seen. Probably not a bad place to live.
I passed by another market, this one a single-story building of stalls surrounding a courtyard with tables, where I bought a piece of fried dough that I had seen other people eating earlier. It was good and greasy. Nearby was a department store, or rather a multilevel shopping mall. There was a bookstore, some restaurants, and several clothing stores, and the department store, which looked at about the K-Mart level. I saw empty shelves there: the selection of socks seemed very skimpy - only a few were left.
Under the neighboring Florian ter is an underpass with an extensive group of excavated building foundations which might be Roman, but I don't know. After that, one unexpectedly (or it would have been unexpected if I hadn't known about it in advance) is the tiny central village core of Obuda, Fo ter, which contains shops, restaurants, and a museum. The museum itself is found in a palace which is itself unexpected, surrounded by nondescript walls and invisible from the street.
Fo ter, like the castle district, is restored, although I liked Fo ter better. There's a Disneyland feeling in the castle area that I don't get in the old and castle areas of Prague, for example. I know that people live there, but I get the impression that it's a place for tourists, and I can't imagine Budapesters walking around there the way they do in Prague. It's probably not a fair comparison, though, because the Budapest castle area is a little harder to get to, more isolated. Also, the Prague stuff is really old, while most of the Budapest castle was damaged or destroyed in the war. And even the modern buildings around the Budapest castle are done with a sensitivity to the surroundings.
I returned via Margaret Island, which contains a beautiful park. There are thermal springs on the island, and one pond I walked by was steaming in the cold - a very strange sight. I put my hand in the water, though, and it wasn't too hot. I walked by the two thermal resort hotels on the island. In the parking lot were Ferraris and Mercedes, with German and Italian license plates. Some people in the park were flying falcons, something I'd never seen before.
When I got back to the Vorosmarty ter, the central square of the city, near the Vaci utca, I went shopping in the nice grocery store. No salamis, and all the pear brandy was gone. I bought what I could: szlivovice, two bottles of Egri wine, and some pickles and sauerkraut. Coming back to the hotel with my booty, I dropped a bottle of wine in the lobby. The desk clerk commiserated with me and said he hoped it wasn't anything too good. I told him it could have been worse.
So I went back out to track down the rest of my goods. It was 5:00, and the evening shopping rush was on, which made the downtown area of Budapest very lively. On the Vaci utca, a number of elderly women were lined up selling furs. I wish I knew their story. Are they new furs, or are they old treasured pieces that they're selling to foreigners for a little spare change?
Speaking of change, when you walk down the Vaci utca, you can almost always see small clusters of people riffling through wads of bills. It looks vaguely sinister.
I found a grocery store where I bought my salami and hot peppers, then took a walk down the street. I stopped in a couple of bookstores. In one, I looked at a map of Prague by a Hungarian publisher for 14.50 ft. I wondered how it compared with my Falk map, which would probably cost several hundred forint more. I was sure it would be just as good. What I didn't expect was to open it and find the very same map, right down to the Falk imprint (although it wasn't slit and folded like a Falk map). I also went into a Russian bookstore, and somehow, I don't know how, since my recognition of the Cyrillic alphabet is not that good, I glanced at a book and just knew it was a copy of Arthur Hailey's 'Airport'. Sure enough, it was.
Speaking of languages, I've been speaking German to everybody here except at the hotel. I figure it's the foreign language that most people here who know a foreign language are likely to know, and sure enough everybody to whom I've spoken in German has answered in German. Even the old woman who sold me my day ticket for the bus and subway answered me in German. That doesn't really say anything, though, since the same thing could just as well have happened with English.
[On the last trip, I once returned to my parked car after a day of walking around, and found three teenagers standing around it, taking pictures of each other. When I tried to start a conversation with them, I found that only one of them spoke German; the others only spoke Russian as a foreign language. None of them knew any English.]
It may be just the day and the circumstances, but there seems to be more 'real life' on the streets of Budapest than in any of the other eastern towns we visited, more people in the stores actually buying things, or just enjoying the evening. Except for the language, which was impenetrable, I felt more at home there than in any of the other Eastern European cities. In any case, the evening air was brisk, the crowds were lively, and there was an energizing feeling to walking in the shopping streets of Budapest between 5 and 6 in the evening. I walked quite far.
I think I'm going to go home tomorrow. I'm starting to get sick, and I think that although it would be nice to see Ljubljana and Yugoslavia, I really wouldn't get much of a chance to see either one in daylight, since I would be spending most of the day driving to get there. It would be better to make the marathon drive back to Zurich (12-14 hours, I think) and then spend a day at home relaxing.
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January 6, 1990 -Budapest/Zurich
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[If I had decided to go on to Yugoslavia, perhaps the trip would have continued like this (since that was the way I had returned during the previous time I was in Budapest):
[In the morning, we left the hotel. Interestingly enough, we were staying in a hotel for Eastern Europeans, that being the only hotel IBUSZ in Budapest could book us in on such short notice. We had stayed the previous night in a private apartment, but the friend I was travelling with was disturbed by this arrangement, so we moved to the hotel. The room was dormitory quality, and the bathrooms and showers were not only shared, but were communal, with lots of shower stalls and toilets, like a dorm, or a locker room in a gym. The hotel was full of bus loads of Bulgarians on tours. They seemed to spend much of their time in the lobby drinking. Real party animals.
[We left the town and headed towards Lake Balaton, a large lake in western Hungary which is a popular resort area. We turned into one of the small towns on the lake, which is very long and narrow (the lake is not very visible from the main road), and stopped for a minute. Right after we stopped, a family that had been fishing nearby came over, pressed paper cups into our hands, and filled them with Hungarian champagne. We talked for a while (in German, they didn't know English), the father made lewd jokes and told us we had to come back to see Balaton in the high season when all the tourists were there. I asked him if they caught many fish, he just laughed and said no. They just liked to sit by the lake and relax and drink a little wine, and if they were lucky enough to catch a fish, well, that was fine, too. We left feeling good, this being one of those experiences you like to have while travelling.
[We got to the border and stopped at the Hungarian side first. I was surprised that I could actually change my forints. I bought Yugoslavian dinar at what was probably an inferior rate, but I was happy to get anything at all for the forints. If I thought that the forints were relatively worthless, the dinar were amazingly so; my wallet suddenly became extremely fat, filled with tens of thousands of dinar. I liked the engravings on the notes: they were the expected workers and miners and peasants, but the portraits had a human feeling to them, they were not heroic, but showed people who had seen some pain and suffering and life, which I suppose made them heroic in their own way after all.
[When we left the Hungarian border post, we entered a no-man's land with guard towers and gun emplacements. I began to get nervous. I didn't have a Yugoslavian visa, and although I had heard that I could get one at the border, what if I couldn't get one? Would they let me back into Hungary? What happened to people who were stuck between borders? As we approached the border post, a dapper Yugoslavian border guard stepped up and saluted us with a jaunty 'Buongiorno'. He spoke English, too, and when he asked for the visa and found we didn't have one, he responded with a mock-horror 'No visa?!,' then returned after five minutes with our passports, which now had Yugoslavian transit visas, good for overnight.
[There's not really that much to say about the rest of that trip. We ate dinner in a hotel in Ljubljana, where I was impressed by the brightly lit streets and buildings, the fashionably-dressed people, and the good and inexpensive food. We spent the night in the resort town of Postojna, where there are famous caves, and the next day headed into Italy, eating lunch in Venice and returning to Zurich that evening. It always struck me as a pretty amazing day and a half: lunch in Budapest, dinner and overnight in Yugoslavia, lunch the next day in Venice, and back in Zurich by the evening.
[But back to the trip at hand:]
Driving back from Budapest, I was in a preoccupied mood. I figured I needed gasoline, so I changed my smallest bill: 50 (Swiss) Francs. Unfortunately, every station selling unleaded gas had a long line and I didn't feel like waiting. So I'm driving down the road, listening to the funky music on Hungarian Radio Danubius, up to my wazoo in otherwise useless forints, wondering what to do. I pass a bunch of stands selling furs like the ones I saw in the Vaci utca, but what would I do with one? Finally just before the border I found a Shell station. Unfortunately, it seemed like the rest of the free world had the same idea. I wait.
I've seen a number of trucks coming in the other direction with large red crosses painted on the front, or signs saying 'Rumanien Hilfe'. Part of me feels that's where I want to go, but another part wants to go home, and besides, there's no time left. Also, would I even have the guts to go?
I'm hallucinating that I understand Hungarian. As I was driving back, I heard the DJ on Radio Danubius say something, and from the rhythm I said to myself, 'If I understood Hungarian, I'd swear that he said he was about to play 'Twist in my Sobriety.'' Sure enough, that was the next song on the radio. Maybe he said it in English but I wasn't paying attention. Later, outside Vienna, I do understand everything the DJ says. That's because I'm listening to Blue Danube Radio, an all-English station complete with smarmy, hyperactive AM-style DJs.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, and I drove back through a pretty snow-covered nighttime landscape of Arlberg ski villages. My reverie was interrupted when I heard the harsh Swiss dialect coming over the radio. I had to laugh, because for all my complaining about it, it made me feel like I was home.
When I got to the Swiss border, my car was covered with the accumulated grime and mud of two and a half weeks in Eastern Europe. I was sure that the border guard would stop me and say, 'Clean that thing before you bring it in here!' It must have been too dark to see, because he let me through without comment.
On the last day, I drove almost twelve hours straight, and passed through four countries (Hungary, Austria, a sliver of Germany, Austria again, and Switzerland). I violated the customs regulations in at least two of them. I carried more than 100 ft out of Hungary (well, if I couldn't spend 'em, I wanted 'em as souvenirs, and I didn't want the Hungarians to save them for me for next time - who knew if there would be a next time, and would the money even be valid then?), and I brought far more than the two liters of duty-free liquor I was allowed into Switzerland. But one of the things people have been talking about recently is free movement across borders, and I was just making my own contribution.
[Coming next: an epilogue, and an account of a trip I took that March to Dresden, when things had changed even more, and the East Germans were about to have their first free elections.]
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