irony in a mustache

“I’ve got this card to mail to America and this one to Georgia,” I told the postal worker, sliding each card as I spoke across the window opening, representative of my sending them across the continents.  I had clearly written the names and addresses on each card. 

She picked up the card addressed to the Georgian address.  “You have to put the country on this.” 

“I’m sending it to Georgia.”

“So to America?” the woman asked.  As she talked, her double chin hung and swayed from side to side. 

“To Georgia.  The country I’m sending it to is Georgia.” 

“You mean the state in America?”

“It’s not in America,” I told her, speaking slowly.  “It’s a country.”

“So it’s in England?”

“No, it’s not in England.  It’s not in America.  It’s a country in the Caucasus.”

She stared at me, not moving.

I turned to the line that was forming behind me.  “Can someone tell me how to say Georgia in Hungarian?  I mean the country?”

“Georgia,” everyone said, but with a slight accent, as if they were saying “Jor-jee-a”. 

I turned back and repeated it to the clerk.  She still seemed a bit as though she had never heard of the country, but went ahead and stamped the card.  I assumed that card was now headed for an unheard of address near Atlanta.  I knew now I was in the first country of my trip where the language was complete jibba jabba.  Well, ever since Sweden and the Baltics, but at least Russian is common enough in the Baltics. 

From Cluj, I had taken the direct train to Budapest.  It was fairly cheap and I was able to buy the ticket right up front.  The train was clean and modern, complete even with power adapters, something I wasn’t expecting in a train this far in the East, especially after my experience with Balkan and Romanian trains and seeing how broken down they were.  My plan for Budapest was to apply for my Russian visa there, wait a week, and then move on to Ukraine or Moscow, depending on how long it would take.  That would give me enough time to experience the city and the easy ability to get on to Russia – a plan not slightly ambitious, since the train from Budapest to Moscow was a little over thirty hours, and one that likely didn’t have electric outlets, which meant I couldn’t work on writing much.  Anyone who’s tried their hand at writing in a train with paper and ink should know that the only practicality in writing would be with a laptop.  The sway and bump of the rails is no companion to writing legibly, and believe me, I don’t need any help to write illegibly. 

In Budapest, there lived my friend Amanda.  Amanda was another Peace Corps volunteer, but she had volunteered in Armenia.  Our paths had crossed a few times when I had visited Armenia, first to watch the Armenia-Mongolia hockey game (poor Mongolians didn’t even know how to skate, they lost 0-15!) and party it up in Yerevan, and then when she came one weekend to Tbilisi in Georgia.  Now she was living in Budapest, busy working on a masters degree in international politics or whatnot.  She warned me ahead of time that she would be completely swamped by her studies, as she had finals the very next week, but that I was more than welcome to stay on their extra mattress in the living room.  So two subway transfers later, I found myself at her place near Nyugati Station, one of the main stations in Budapest. 

Living with her was a giant of a man named Roman, who stood some seven and a half feet tall and whose single pec was larger than my head.  This barrel chested behemoth worked as a bouncer at a gay club in Bratislava on the weekends and studied for his masters in Budapest on the weekdays.  He had a girlfriend in America, and after I discussed how annoying it was to get a visa to Russia, he replied: “Come on man, that’s nothing compared to an American visa.  I’m a European Union citizen and they still treat me like a criminal over there.  They ask you all these questions, take your fingerprints, eye scans and everything.  Why the interrogations?  I’m just visiting my girlfriend!”

Since I wasn’t with Pavlos, I decided to take it slow, catching up on some writing and just walking about the city, and I could also cleanse myself of alcohol.  Pavlos was going to catch up in a couple of days, so I could catch up on my drinking then, but for the time, slow and quiet.  Preserve money and health.  I could meet with some couchsurfers for tea, but I wouldn’t break my rule for drinking until the third day when there was a couchsurfing meeting, which is where I had to meet Pavlos at anyway.  

Budapest is a beautiful city, not unlike Prague in its look and feel.  In fact, as it’s slightly cheaper than Prague, it’s only a matter of time that it steals Prague’s mantel as the hipster Mecca.  Instead of judgmental conversations in American coffee shops starting with, “Have you been to Prague?” and your level of hipness being determined on the question, it will soon be, “Have you been to Budapest?”  And then the guy will scratch his ironic mustache and tip his trucker hat a certain way depending on your answer.  Or if you say no to that and to liking Arcade Fire, you know the girl that’s sitting across from you whose attention you once had after mentioning your accordion playing, would suddenly find you a bit too common for her tastes.  But now – now! – I have both an Arcade Fire album and experience in Budapest, preempting the hip appeal in artsy cafes and unemployment offices all across America.  

 

Budapest used to be two cities, Buda and Pest, long ago united into a single entity.  It developed as one of the final outposts of the Romans against the German barbarians across the River Danube, the hill that Pest is built on a perfect place for fortifications, offering a long view either way down the broad river.  It was later taken by the Magyars, an Asiatic tribe that had come in with the war raiding of the Huns.  They settled their and developed their own civilization, taking much of the land around them.  It really developed under the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the Empire’s Eastern capitol, with period architecture of New Empire and Neo-Renaissance really flourishing throughout the city.  During World War II, Hungary took an eager part in siding with the Nazis, and sent tens of thousands of Jews on to German death camps as their solution to the Jewish question.  In downtown Budapest, one can still walk through the Jewish quarters, which is where the old WWII ghetto was, where the Jews were put and stored until they were ready to be shipped out.  Now the Jewish quarters is one of the liveliest neighborhoods in Budapest, filled with cafes, bars and night clubs, though everyone is vaguely aware of the area’s dark past.  As a crown to the neighborhood and its legacy, the second largest synagogue in Europe stands proudly, as a testament to Jewish defiance. 

On the edge of the Jewish quarters

Much of the day, I spent trying to find a decent coffee shop.  Budapest is filled with Starbucks-style coffee shops, like California Coffee Co. and Costa’s Coffee, but it’s much harder to find the independent places.  In the Jewish quarters, there was one I found called Massolit, which was a bookstore and a coffee shop.  The barista, Livia, claimed it was the best coffee in Budapest, along with the other coffee shop she worked for.  I was excited simply to find an English language bookstore, since I had recently finished reading my last book, Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short stories about people who had lived (and died) in Sarajevo during the Balkan Wars.  

at Sirius

I later met a Hungarian couchsurfer, Sara, who agreed to show me around.  She was a tall, skinny girl dedicated to her bicycle.  She worked for an anti-racism NGO and liked to folk dance.  She showed me to a tea house called Sirius, which was near the museum.  The tea house had a Victorian style in the entrance, with old wooden furniture perfect for an English style tea time.  In the back rooms, it was much more Bohemian, with walls covered in brightly painted murals, split floors where you have to climb up to the seats and pillows being the main type of chair.  The menu had over a hundred different teas and five coffees, lacked alcohol but they did serve hookah in the main room.  Not a bad place to sit and pass an hour or two in conversation.