In December 2006, I was on a business trip to Bangalore, and on the way back I decided to meet up with my good friend Stephanie Yang (high school buddy) who is currently a math professor working for a year in Stockholm. Since I had almost a week, we decided to do a travel packed trip which started in Stockholm. I arrived there from India, and then the following day we took off for Budapest. The Christmas holidays was right around the corner, and we kind of forgot that most of the Western world comes to standstill/crawl around Xmas time. But no worries, we were out to see the sights which were in full swing.
We took a pretty late flight out of Stockholm, and connected via Amsterdam. We got into Budapest pretty late. We didn't even realize that we had booked a car/limo, but sure enough one showed up. Good thing cuz we really didn't realize how much conversational difficulty we were about to have.
We get into the room and fell asleep. In the morning, I woke up and got ready first so I could go and get some cash from the ATM machine. So here's a funny story. So to walk into our room, you actually have to go through a hallway through a door into a small corridor. Now in this corridor are two doors, one was our room, and the other one was another hostel room. Now, the way the keys work, is that the doors use keys to lock both sides. So to get in and lock your room door and the corridor, you have to flip a key 4 times (outside in the hallway, inside in the corridor, then inside the corridor again on your room door, then inside your room to finally lock your room door). Confusing right? Ok not that much, Im just trying to make an excuse for myself. Now one small caveat, the key was used for the dead lock, otherwise, the bottom lock on each door would self-lock. We only had one set of keys, so I then left our room, locked our door, went into the corridor, opened the corridor, LEFT The keys in he lock, and then shut the door behind me. Essentially I locked myself out of the corridor with the keys hanging in on the other side. Lovely start to the day. I go downstairs, and somehow managed to convey that I had locked myself out. These two girls that were working the front desk somehow understood and came up with me. They found some keys , but none of them could unlock the door properly because I had left the other set of keys in the other side. Stephanie was locked in our hotel room. Our only hope at this point was to wake up the person that had checked into the other room inside the corridor. We banged and banged on the window (facing into the hallway) to no avail. Finally, I contrived up a scheme to unhinge the key from the lock on the inside. There was a small metal grating above the door, I managed to pull up a chair, put a broom through it, pull myself up to the grating, stick my head through it, and try to use the broom to dislodge the key. No luck, not enough leverage. Then finally genius came to me, I would take the spare set of keys, and throw them up to Stephanie through the room window. As I tried to explain my plan to the two girls trying to help me (and laughing at me quite mercilessly), they finally understood it just when the person in the other room opened their door and took out the key from the lock on the otherside in the corridor. Lovely start to the day.
First of all, Budapest is a gorgeous city. Somehow alot of the older architectures and what not have survived all the various empires and wars that have rolled through this area. The Danube river kind of splits the city into halves. Literally, one side of the river is called Buda, and the other side of the river is called Pest (go figure). There's a few very beautiful bridges that span it.
As you can see, the river front buildings are quite beautiful and nicely lit up at night.
The Matthias church is a famous church in the heart of Budapest. (below)
Im pretty sure (below) this picture was taken on the Pest side of the city. On the opposite side (in Buda) is what's known as the Castle District (once again go figure). The huge building you see there is the Royal Palace. Im not positive when the last monarch sat there, but obviously there is certainly not one now. The Germans actually used it as a command post in WWII. There was fierce fighting there, and it actually was damaged badly, what we see now is post reconstruction.
(Below). Im not exactly sure what these are called, but they were damn good. Kind of like a doughy cinnamony thing. Really cool to watch them make it as they rolled/cooked over those hot coals in the foreground. Also, given that we were in eastern europe in the dead of winter, a nice place to warm up your hands. We never would have bothered trying them if it wasn't for Stephanie's friend's friend who was kind enough to take us to lunch and give us some tips on what to eat. One thing you'll realize is that English is very skimpy in these parts, and you end up doing alot of pointing and gesturing.
Im not quite sure about the chronological order, but I should add somewhere in here that Stephanie somehow managed to lose her wallet. She freaked out for a bit, then I managed to convince her that it was all good (since she has her Passport), so not to worry. One thing I found intersting also, is that when we landed in the STockholm airport, there was never any immigration officials/passport control, odd.
(Below), we decided to take a trip a bit out of town. Im not sure if we were still exactly in Budapest or not, but definitely the outskirts if at all. There was an old Roman garrison out here which was excavated. It was actually closed, but we jumped the fence and walked around it anyway. We had to take a train (really their version of a light rail) to get out there. While walking around trying to find this place, we happened upon this choice piece of art work.
(the ruins below).
Heh heh,, if you dont know why this is funny, well u'll just have to not know (below)
(Below), unfortunately i didn't take a very good picture of this place, but its a famous little coffee shop (I think called Central Cafe). Apparently all the intellectuals and authors and what not used to congregate here. Budapest used to have one of the richest coffee shop cultures in Europe, but that number has greatly dwindled. You wont find Starbucks here (yet). I thought the food was fantastic, and they had some nice teas. We ran into some fellow Americans, turns out they were from the Bay area, so I jumped into a short discussion about it with them as its my 2nd home.
(Below) The Hungarian State opera house. I thought that this place was very very cool. We took a tour of the place, and quite a lot of cool stories were told to us. First of all, it was commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The acoustics of the place are phenomenal. Everything about this place screamed royalty. The emperor had his own box, he even had his own entrance and entertainment parlour for his guests. Much of the artwork, rugs, tapestries, etc. are still the originals. Couple of cool stories:
- It was pointed out to us that each of the seats had little vents underneath. And given that it was created in 1880s, it immediately begs the question, what were the vents for? Turns out they used to ship in huge blocks of ice from the mountains, and then using some sort of air blowing technology (dunno what though), they literally air conditioned the place for the warm summer months.
- I have to point out that our guide was possibly one of the most attractive women Ive ever seen, Im not sure why this is important, but Stephanie would agree that for a trip description to be complete, I have to mentoin it.
- Funny story: There was set construction going on in the background when we were in the main auditorium listening to her historical recounts. At one point, she stopped speaking, started laughing, and then pointed out that its good that none of us speak Hungarian. I guess those guys doing the set construction were pretty rough around the edges.
(Below) This was another cool thing that we saw. Its called the terror museum. As we all know, Hungary used to be a part of the Soviet Bloc. I was always under the impression that the Russians did alot for these countries. Now that Ive visited both Poland and Hungary, that isn't true at all. In general, all they did was provide heavy military support for the communist party as to ensure that they remained in power. The building below used to be the Kgb's headquarters in Budapest. The crazy stories of torture, and espionage, backstabbing, abductions, paranoia, are mind blowing. Everyone was paranoid of everyone. The guys at the top were usually replaced every so often never to be heard of again. Its fitting that they have turned this ghastly building into a reminder of what was.
Also interesting is that Russian was taught in Hungary during the cold war. There is still quite alot of resentment against the Russians in these former Soviet states. Its interesting to think that the current generation of young Hungarians are the first ones that weren't exposed to that crazy period in our history.
(Below)
Steph and I decided to relax in the famous Turkish mineral baths located through Budapest. Its all naturally heated water from underground springs. Even though it was close to freezing outside, these baths were nice and relaxing. They have various concentrations of different minerals at diff temperatures (they also have cold pools). . We were too tired to go, but apparently some of these baths turn into raves on certain nights. Seems odd to mix alcohol and hot water with very loud music, at the same time intriguing.
There's a slightly funny gross story here. First of all, it seems that ALL Hungarians are thin, I think its a general eastern block thing. Anyhow,, somehow, all the overweight ones ended up at this spa. And when I mean overweight, I mean like American overweight. Anyway, there was this one older overweight lady getting into the pool we were currently in, and well to put it delicately, she hadn't quite finished adjusting her swimsuit so you could more or less see her private part (the one south of the border). And its not like one of those things where she could look down and notice her mistake, no.. too much stomach flab in the way, nope, she was just walking around completely exposed. Not knowing Hungarian and being too shy, we didn't do anything about it, but then we didn't feel bad because no one seemed to want to mention it to her. Oh well, I guess people stay pretty private within themselves at these spas.
(Below), once again, self evident why its funny, u may have to look at a larger version of the picture.
(Below)
The Budapest subway system. I wanted to mention one thing. So this is something that the Russians actually provided help with. They literally created these lines over 40 years ago. And if you can take a closer look at these pictures, you can see that it doesn't look like much has improved in those forty years. Also, Ive heard (never seen ) that subway stations in Moscow are close to 100meters below the surface. Apparently this is so they can literally house the populace in case of nuclear attack. I'm not exactly sure if its the same reason here, but these subway stations were very far down also. They also had these crazy escalators which just ooozed some sort of communist feel. And man did they move fast. I was discussing my trip with Keya (an old childhood friend who actually lived near Budapest for a year once upon a time), and her and her husband actually saw an old man die on these escalators! He just missed his timing on getting onto the step and ended up falling almost all the way down the length of the escalator. Sad.
I will say this though, brutal efficiency is the best way to describe these trains.
(Below). Ok, I dont know why I decided to take a picture of the toilet, but I just wanted to point out the odd design of this thing. This is a bit graphic in description so please ffwd down if you've just eaten. But if you notice the water in the bottom is located near the front as opposed to any other toilet Ive seen where the hole is located near the back of the toilet bowl. As you can imagine, your poo falls not into the water which covers up the odor, but right onto the porcelain with no water. Well, I dont know if the communists didn't like people to hang out on the toilet all day, but you certainly dont want to spend anymore time than necessary.
(Below) once again, funny for obvious reasons.
(Below) My partner in crime, Stephanie, at the dumps with poppy restaurant.
(Below)
So inside of the hill that the Royal Palace is built on is an extensive system of caves and tunnels. From what I can remember, these were in fact manmade. Today they have been converted into a museum. What I find interesting is the fact that many of these tunnels have cave men art/drawings on them, but they are all done by modern artists. Kinda funny I thought. Its interesting, kind of warm and damp down there. For some reason, they had this one place with ivy covered walls, and a couple of fountains. Weird though because the fountains were shooting out wine. It was pretty disgusting looking wine, not exactly there for consumption . either way, expensive display case.
(below)
heh, so apparently Santa Clause is from Finland.
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