I suppose that the best way to start this email is with an anecdote. I forgot to mention the funniest thing that happened to me during my stay in Melk, if not over the course of this whole trip: a cleaning woman walked in on me as I was getting up and went bananas. I was sitting on my bed in my underwear when I heard someone unlocking my door; I could have made some noise or told the person, obviously someone from the hotel personnel, to wait a minute, but I did not really care if the person came in or not, and I figured that he or she should have knocked on the door if he or she had wanted to know if I was there or not. The woman's reaction to seeing me was priceless: she screamed and backed up so quickly that she almost tripped, her eyes bulging out of their sockets, and said "I'm sorry" in as many languages as she could think of, breathless. While I was sorry that I gave her such a fright, I have to admit to having enjoyed her reaction, as I had never seen such an unalloyed expression of terror on someone's face. Either the cleaning ladies at the hotel at which I stayed are trained not to walk in on people, or this particular cleaning lady had never seen a man with back hair.
My trip to the train station at Vienna was entirely uneventful. The landscape outside of Vienna (to the east) was painfully ugly, with nothing at all visible on the horizon and nothing in the foreground to look at; every miniscule hillock was a blessing. The view from the train grew much more encouraging as we approached Budapest. Hills sprung up to the right and left, and there was a giant variety of different trees, all in different shades of green, just like the trees in eastern Austria along the Danube. The most interesting trees that I saw were ones with white leaves, which could not have been more than eight meters tall. I saw trees with yellow leaves and whole groves of trees with leaves that were silver on one side, nodding their heads in unison to the wind. One needs only to look at copses like the ones that I saw today to be convinced that life is extraordinary; the stretch of land between Vienna and Budapest would be heaven for a botanist.
I immediately regretted having come to Budapest when I got off of the train. The train station looked like a Russian train station, leading right out onto the street instead of leading one into a central vestibule full of information, like in Germany or Austria; the day was mercilessly hot; and I could not find any streets corresponding to those on the Google map that I had printed off, which was, as usual, grossly inaccurate. It was obvious that I had stepped into a second-world country as soon as I left the train station: there was no information that might be of use to anyone but a local in sight; alcoholics stumbled around outside of the station or sat on benches nearby; the bus depot, a mere series of bus stops, was a miasma of heat, noise, and cigarette smoke; and the avenue in front of the train station seemed like a sort of heat trap, sucking sunlight in from all around and turning it into a liquid that, like puddles of melted budder, oozed all over everything in its vicinity, soaking through one's skin. People got on and off of the buses in front of me with their eyes trained straight ahead; they drove past the train station, honking and yelling at each other; and they walked all about me like a swarm of bees. I was completely superfluous to their world and did not speak a word of their language. I wished that I had never left western Europe.
I immediately regretted having come to Budapest when I got off of the train. The train station looked like a Russian train station, leading right out onto the street instead of leading one into a central vestibule full of information, like in Germany or Austria; the day was mercilessly hot; and I could not find any streets corresponding to those on the Google map that I had printed off, which was, as usual, grossly inaccurate. It was obvious that I had stepped into a second-world country as soon as I left the train station: there was no information that might be of use to anyone but a local in sight; alcoholics stumbled around outside of the station or sat on benches nearby; the bus depot, a mere series of bus stops, was a miasma of heat, noise, and cigarette smoke; and the avenue in front of the train station seemed like a sort of heat trap, sucking sunlight in from all around and turning it into a liquid that, like puddles of melted budder, oozed all over everything in its vicinity, soaking through one's skin. People got on and off of the buses in front of me with their eyes trained straight ahead; they drove past the train station, honking and yelling at each other; and they walked all about me like a swarm of bees. I was completely superfluous to their world and did not speak a word of their language. I wished that I had never left western Europe.
I was lucky enough, after a few minutes, to find a railway worker in front of the station who spoke German and told me how to get to the station near my hostel. When I ducked into an underpass and bumped into a couple of people whose job it was to help tourists, I learned that I had to take a bus and then go two stops on the subway to get to the train station that Google maps had taken to be the main one. The rest of my trip went off without incident: a woman who spoke German told me where to get off, the man selling tickets at the subway spoke English, and I found my hostel within fifteen minutes of leaving the subway. I checked into my room, set out to explore the city, decided not to overdo it wen I started feeling tired and hungry, had dinner, and returned here to relax and write this letter.
Budapest is what happens when you take Vienna, fill it with poor people, and install a Soviet bus, tram, and subway system in it. The city has an incredibly-rich history but no future whatsoever: it is dirty and full of beggars and homeless people; it has cracked sidewalks and buildings that are falling apart; people in the city have the pinched, tense expressions that one can only attain after years of living in constant hardship; and the women here dress more provocatively than in the West and walk with a hurried step, as though they were desperately chasing after something. One wonders if the young people sitting and drinking beer on park benches know how bad a state their country is in. They look perfectly relaxed, and yet many older men have the blank, hardened expressions of criminals. Budapest is a city in which one holds on to one's belongings with both hands (While Germany is a country in which people will alert you if you drop a 20-dollar bill or overpay at the supermarket.); a sense of hopelessness permeates the air and hovers over the city - a sense that I thought only existed in Russia.
I have focused too much on Budapest's negative side, though. It is a very beautiful city, in its own way, and is full of surprises: one could spend several days here, like in Vienna, and not grow bored. Hungarian architecture so far seems to be an imitation of Austrian architecture, as the facades of buildings are just as decadent as in Vienna, and the city streets are just as wide, nearly-treeless, and full of cars (which makes walking through it much less pleasant than in many German cities). Budapest has a spectacular cathedral full of marble and gold, reminiscent of the cathedral in Wurzburg; I suspect that its design was inspired by Italian architecture, though I cannot be sure, never having been to Italy. The views across the water are nice; there are a great many buildings across the water (on the "pest" side of the city) that bear witness to its rich past; it has the most impressive synagogue that I have ever seen; and the city streets have the same gigantic, city-block-long cities as Vienna. Despite the pervasive feeling that one could be robbed or assaulted at any moment, Budapest is a fascinating city, and I wish that I had more time to spend in it.
I have one more anecdote to add - I cannot resist - before passing on to other matters. As I was walking along the river today I consciously heard Ukrainian being spoken for the first time ever. (I have surely heard it before, but I must not have realized it.) One would think that the most natural reaction to hearing people speaking Ukrainian would be to laugh at them, but I actually found the language intriguing. It has none of the softness and delicacy that even out the edges of the Russian language, but it does not sound like Russian being spoken badly - it is a language of its own. It lacks any pretense to musicality (Songs in Ukrainian sound hilarious. I have heard it sung before once.), but its similarity to Russian is intriguing, like that of a bonobo to a human being.
It turns out that I have one more thing to say about Hungary. The train tracks got worse as soon as we passed from Austria into Hungary (just as the roads are said to do when one goes from Switzerland to Italy), and I saw several women in the train who were dressed as expensively as possible. There are plenty of chic clothing stores in Budapest - like any other poor country, Hungary still has its share of citizens who are filthy rich - and it appears that people feel the need to show off their wealth here. This is true in many places, I suppose, but it showed up more saliently on the train ride here, at least to me. My plans for tomorrow are to explore the part of Budapest that I did not see today (that is, one of the other parts, a central and important one; there is too much of Budapest to see it all in two days, let alone two half-days) and go to Eger, which will only take two hours by train. Trains leave for Eger every half-hour or so, and it is said to be a very beautiful city. An employee at this hostel assured me that the people at my hostel in Eger would be able to tell me how to get to the Aggtelek karst caves, and the hostel employees emailed me today to find out when I would be arriving in the city. As usual, I feel that I thought of much more during the day than I ended up saying, but I guess that that is the way in which things go when one is travelling - one cannot record all of one's impressions. It is nice to be back in a city and to know that I am headed to a big enough city that I should have no trouble getting to Bratislava and, from there, to Brno, from which the rest of my trip should be smooth sailing. I have discovered, in addition to learning that one cannot visit every little town of historic interest and that many such towns are best seen from the window of a passing train, that jumping constantly from city to city makes it harder to shower (as one's things do not have time to dry), in addition to making it harder to eat cheaply and healthily. I hope to spend more time in central bases (as I did in Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne on this trip) in future, especially as it is inconvenient to spend half of a day seeing one city en route to another. It is best to leave one's luggage in one specific place for several days running and visit as many surrounding cities as one wants unfettered. That seems like a positive note on which to end this email. I do not know if I will have Internet access before Thursday, but time will tell. Goodbye!
I have one more anecdote to add - I cannot resist - before passing on to other matters. As I was walking along the river today I consciously heard Ukrainian being spoken for the first time ever. (I have surely heard it before, but I must not have realized it.) One would think that the most natural reaction to hearing people speaking Ukrainian would be to laugh at them, but I actually found the language intriguing. It has none of the softness and delicacy that even out the edges of the Russian language, but it does not sound like Russian being spoken badly - it is a language of its own. It lacks any pretense to musicality (Songs in Ukrainian sound hilarious. I have heard it sung before once.), but its similarity to Russian is intriguing, like that of a bonobo to a human being.
It turns out that I have one more thing to say about Hungary. The train tracks got worse as soon as we passed from Austria into Hungary (just as the roads are said to do when one goes from Switzerland to Italy), and I saw several women in the train who were dressed as expensively as possible. There are plenty of chic clothing stores in Budapest - like any other poor country, Hungary still has its share of citizens who are filthy rich - and it appears that people feel the need to show off their wealth here. This is true in many places, I suppose, but it showed up more saliently on the train ride here, at least to me. My plans for tomorrow are to explore the part of Budapest that I did not see today (that is, one of the other parts, a central and important one; there is too much of Budapest to see it all in two days, let alone two half-days) and go to Eger, which will only take two hours by train. Trains leave for Eger every half-hour or so, and it is said to be a very beautiful city. An employee at this hostel assured me that the people at my hostel in Eger would be able to tell me how to get to the Aggtelek karst caves, and the hostel employees emailed me today to find out when I would be arriving in the city. As usual, I feel that I thought of much more during the day than I ended up saying, but I guess that that is the way in which things go when one is travelling - one cannot record all of one's impressions. It is nice to be back in a city and to know that I am headed to a big enough city that I should have no trouble getting to Bratislava and, from there, to Brno, from which the rest of my trip should be smooth sailing. I have discovered, in addition to learning that one cannot visit every little town of historic interest and that many such towns are best seen from the window of a passing train, that jumping constantly from city to city makes it harder to shower (as one's things do not have time to dry), in addition to making it harder to eat cheaply and healthily. I hope to spend more time in central bases (as I did in Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne on this trip) in future, especially as it is inconvenient to spend half of a day seeing one city en route to another. It is best to leave one's luggage in one specific place for several days running and visit as many surrounding cities as one wants unfettered. That seems like a positive note on which to end this email. I do not know if I will have Internet access before Thursday, but time will tell. Goodbye!
Budapest: a city of former riches.
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