I took the direct highway to Budapest instead. This was interesting in its own right. Many of the roadside billboards were for western companies, and were written in Hungarian. Many of the Hungarian ones were for hotels, and others for such things as trucking companies, and they were imaginative in the western style, unlike the clumsy signs we saw in East Germany.
The highway from Gyor (the major border city, which in many ways resembled a provincial Italian town) to Budapest was by far the best road we had traveled in the east. There were road stops with western-looking restaurants, and Shell gas stations (selling unleaded gas, no doubt). The only thing wrong was that part of it was only two lanes, with a speed limit of 90 km/h. Later it widened to four lanes and things picked up to 120. I drove carefully, as I was afraid of getting another Hungarian speeding ticket. The Austrian cars didn't seem to have any such fears. I was also afraid that the border guards would catch me for my outstanding Budapest parking ticket from my last trip, but I was being a little paranoid.
It seemed like there were far more western cars on the road this time, but that may have been because I was travelling along the main road. I noticed that although the Hungarians have Trabis and Ladas and Skodas, they, like the Czechs, also have western cars, although the Hungarians' were of a higher class: Mazdas and Fords, plus a few late-model Mercedes.
Getting to the hotel was surprisingly easy. Budapest traffic can be hellish, and rush hour even more so, especially without a navigator, but except for an illegal left turn I had to make, there was no problem getting to the parking garage. The parking attendant wanted to change money (this was getting to be a real refrain), but he was offering 5.5 forint to the schilling and I later found out that the official rate was 5.1, so it wouldn't have been such a good deal. Not like the 100% premium Mark got on Ost-Marks (and we could have done much better), which got us a half-price dinner the night in Dresden.
From the parking lot, I stepped onto the Vaci utca, the main pedestrian shopping street in Budapest. It looks a bit like the Kaerntnerstrasse. Western shops, western-style displays in the Hungarian shops, a McDonald's, a Citibank Budapest, and the Hotel Taverna, a modern complex which is easily the nicest eastern hotel I stayed in: up to western standards in every way [I'll describe the standard-style Budapest hotel I stayed in during the previous trip in the next chapter]. Although I guessed it was four stars, it turned out to be only three. There were several restaurants and bars, no meal tickets, and a nice informal feel. Not extremely friendly, but very lively; lots of life in the lobby. Western prices, too. A beer out of the room's minibar was about three dollars. I went into a grocery store on the Vaci utca. It was well stocked, although the freezer counters and refigerator counters were empty, there was fairly little bread, and the fresh fruit didn't look too good. However, it was late in the day, and even in Switzerland, the fresh fruit isn't so good this time of the year. A can of beer was nearly a dollar, which is a little on the high side for a grocery store. (To their credit, the fruit brandies were $7 a bottle, and the Egri wine was about $3, which isn't bad.) Does Budapest have western prices now? No way - I went to a beer restaurant where I got an enormous plate of food and a large beer (although the Hungarians, like Czech barkeepers, seem to like to skimp on the beer servings), and the check came out to less than what the minibar beer in the hotel cost.
Was the grocery store typical? I had seen some large, well-stocked Budapest grocery stores before, including an enormous one on the Marx ter, a far less fancy place than the one in the Vaci utca, and a store in a non-fancy area near the restaurant also seemed well stocked. (Same empty refrigerator cases.) Both this store and the Vaci utca one displayed Julius Meinl signs. I don't know whether they're owned or run by the big Viennese coffee and grocery company, or merely get their coffee from them.
I noticed that most of the voices in the Vaci utca grocery store were Hungarian. (Likewise, I looked into the McDonald's, and most of the voices in there were Hungarian.) It seems that many Hungarians have the money to spend on these luxuries.
Speaking of Hungarian voices, my impression of the Hungarian language was that it often sounded like a mumbled Italian, with similar cadences. I liked the sound of Czech, especially spoken by women, much better. I did like looking at the strange Hungarian words and trying to figure out that they meant.
My first impression of Budapest, is that it is the future that Prague and East Berlin aspire to. There are still a lot of poor-looking people, the northern approaches of the city look (or did eight months previously) a lot poorer than the prosperous Buda neighborhood in the south through which I entered this time, and the espressos at the famous Gerbeaud's coffee house leave a lot to be desired, but the fact that Hungarians can be such shopping animals in Austria says something about their prosperity. I'll find out some more tomorrow when I go on a walking tour through some other neighborhoods.
Just before going to bed, I flipped through the television channels. Two Hungarian channels, an Austrian one, one French, and two English. On the French channel I found a burlesque number that was positively pornographic. I enjoyed it, and the studio audience of middle-aged men and women (politely?) applauded at the end.
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December 23, 1989 - Zurich/Nuremberg
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Mark and I set out on Saturday morning for Nuremberg. The trip is uneventful, as is the border crossing into Germany. [Once a German border guard made me empty my pockets and searched the whole car, but not this time.] We stopped in Augsburg for lunch, and look around the cathedral, supposedly the tallest in the world. There's not much left of old Augsburg (I would guess it was destroyed during the war) except for a heavily renovated pedestrian shopping district [one of the most pleasant features of German cities; every city seems to have one] and some clusters of old buildings. There's a sign on a wall indicating the site of the old synagogue before 'the Jewish citizens of our town' were sent to the camps.
We get to Nuremberg after sunset. It's a spectacular place, with an almost complete city wall larger and more impressive that that of Carcassonne [which is a fairly small place]. Inside the wall, old houses stand next to new buildings constructed with sensitivity to their setting. The inner city is no museum, but rather a busy living place. This is the last night of the famous Christmas market, and we want to see it. I'm a little disappointed, though. The goods in the stalls are a bit repetitive and a lot of them seem kitchy to me. I'm not sure if that's really the case, though: what may be kitch to me might be taken seriously as real folk art by a German. I've noticed that Europeans, including Germans, are wired into their pasts much more than Americans, and take traditional toys, traditional music, and traditional dress much more seriously than most Americans. The closest thing I can think of are people in the western and midwestern US who like to dress in western clothes, listen to country music, and like square dancing.
Although we look forward to dinner, our appetites are spoiled by a single slice each of Nurnberger fruit cake bought at a stand in the market. Unfortunately, not only was it heavy, it wasn't even very good. We leave the market and wander around town for a while, then come upon a cozy pub-restaurant near one of the gates, where we stop in for a beer. We start talking to a German man at the table next to us. He was with some friends, all of them were somewhat drunk. He was 61 and retired. He thought that the Americans didn't need to be in Germany anymore, although he took pains to assure us that he thought that the presence of Americans helped the Germans develop the way they had. When he heard that we lived in Switzerland, he joked that we should tell the Swiss to hold on to his money; that he was still alive. We drank Rauchbier, a strange smoked beer from nearby Bamberg. According to the man, there's a saying that one only acquires the taste of Rauchbier after the third one. Well, by the end of the third liter we certainly had the taste for it, although there were a lot of more unpleasant beers you could have said the same thing about. One strange thing about the smokiness of the beer was that it led to a sensation in the throat not unlike that of smoking a cigarette. The man enjoyed speaking English; he seemed happy to practice it. What did he really think? I think he was sincere in all of it - not just trying to be nice. He had never been to the east, and the presence of Americans made him feel secure. On the other hand, with all these changes, why should they remain?
He suggested we go to Bamberg, where the Rauchbier is made, and said we might have a long wait at the border. He liked to say 'Goddam Germans' in reference to his drunken friends, but they didn't understand him.
December 24, 1989 - Nuremberg/Leipzig On the autobahn to the border we see more and more of the little Trabis, heavily loaded for travel or with Christmas gifts. Most are on their way back to the border. We see lots of Trabis on the side of the road with their hoods up. Just before the border we see signs warning US soldiers not to go over the border without authorization. Then the border. Concrete wall, guard towers, fence, but no barbed wire. The guards are courteous and the crossing only takes about an hour. There's no search; they just ask where we're going, make us buy the visa [what I got from the travel agency wasn't the visa per se, but simply a confirmation number to indicate that the government had approved the visa] and pay the highway tax, then we pass through.
Along the road, there are hand-painted welcome banners for the 'German brothers,' and people standing on overpasses waving to us. Do they realize the car is Swiss and not German? Probably not. I'm impressed that there is so much good will on this side, like that last month in the West. I think all this may have something to do with the announcement of visa-free travel for West Germans and West Berliners that just started that weekend.
Lots of heavy industry and military bunkers along the road. Coming into Leipzig, the scene is surprisingly grim. The buildings are ornate but I had no expectation of how much they would be falling apart. They're also far dirtier than the buildings had been in, for example, Budapest. The people flash headlights at our car in greeting. Some pedestrians stare. We get to our hotel, but it's closed. The manager tells us we're their only guests, and they've taken the liberty of making a reservation for us at the Hotel Astoria across the street. The Astoria seems like a grand hotel in the old style and is reasonably western in style, and has Christmas decorations and music. As soon as we get into our room, Mark starts talking about the black-market value of the Ost-Mark, which makes me very uncomfortable. I'm sure there are microphones in the room, although I don't know if anybody is listening anymore. The stench of the air hits you as soon as you step outside; the air is filthy from the brown coal bring burned. The streets are deserted - it's Christmas Eve and we're not really getting the right impression of the town. The city looks unfinished - some parts are very rich and fancy, others are falling apart. The selection in the shops looks reasonably rich but not much variety, and is not displayed very imaginatively. There are Christmas decorations everywhere, which I find surprising. |
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