It turns out that I ended yesterday's letter without having given you a full account of either Austria or Budapest. My negative view of Austrians was mostly negated on the last day of my bike trip, as several Austrians helped me, without being asked, with the trailer attached to my bike, and one of them smiled at me unbidden (though she was probably the town nut, as Austrians are forbidden from smiling). While I still consider Austrians cold and uninviting, they have more good in them than is immediately apparent on the surface.
I left my impressions of Budapest unfinished mostly because I could not recall them all at a moment's notice. One thing that I forgot to mention was that I came across a man passed out on the floor of the first bank into which I walked, dissuading me from trying to use the ATM; I later passed a homeless man on the street who smelled like mold. I saw old ladies (and even some men) trying to sell all sorts of junk on the street, like in Russia, and I saw the same types of kiosks as in Russia. These kiosks are barely big enough for one person to squeeze inside them, and they usually sell things like magazines, cold drinks, and cigarettes. (Note: In Russia there are even pharmacies that operate out of such kiosks.) A bored, very surly man or woman spends his or her days sitting in the kiosk and waiting for people to approach it and buy things. The kiosks that I saw in Budapest sold only magazines but were otherwise identical to those in Russia. The people sitting in them did not look happy.
My final notes were that the evening sun was partly what drove me away from the streets of Budapest yesterday (beyond my being tired and hungry); the sun made it very hard to take pictures. My hostel was located in a type of building that I had theretofore seen only in Russia. These buildings consist of an outer door that locks, an inner courtyard, and a set of separate rooms that look out on the courtyard (which is just a section of concrete) and are connected by a staircase. One feels almost locked inside them when one passes through the outer door of such a building: one is surrounded by rooms that have nothing to do with one's destination (these rooms are often apartments but are, if they are on the ground floor of the building, often stores or offices) and has to find one's destination within the building. I noted Budapest's subway and the costs of things but do not know why, and I noted that the train station in Budapest, the capital of the country, was terrible, worse than any train station (including Stuttgart's!) in Germany. In order to get to the ticket office, which initially appeared not to exist at all, one has to pass through an area that is forbidden to people who do not yet have tickets and wait in line in a stifling room with only four ticket counters. Hungarians, unless they are older and more respectable, have no trouble cutting in line and pushing past confused foreigners; it was only thanks to an older man's letting me keep my place in line that I was able to get a ticket at all today. A glass wall separates railway personnel from the people buying tickets: one talks to them through a sort of intercom system, putting one's money in a little tray that can be spun around and receiving a ticket and change in return. There are very few places to sit down while one waits for one's train, and there is only one overhead monitor telling departure times. The only strength of the train station is that smoking is not allowed in it; to one's surprise, people observe this rule, possibly because they would otherwise incur fines.
I remembered why I wanted to mention the subway station: unlike in Moscow, where people often jump the ticket counters (they are machines that let one pass through a waist-high tourniquet when one inserts one's ticket), subway personnel check one's ticket both when one enters and exits the subway in Budapest; I found their commitment to making people pay their fare curious. Despite being a city of downtrodden people, Budapest has its strong points. I forgot to mention having correctly guessed, as I approached it, that the cathedral at Budapest (the style of the interior of which I foresaw based on its outer appearance) would be full of gold and marble. When I got to the entrance, I learned that it would cost 200 forint, or one Euro, to enter the cathedral, and I decided that it would be worth it. The cathedral was unlike any that I had seen so far: it had supporting pillars that were, at their widest, eight or so meters thick, and it had a great deal of rounded arches (as I probably mentioned), which were very popular in classical architecture. I cannot actually remember anything else about it; I was mostly overwhelmed by its opulence. It was clearly constructed, or remodeled, at a time when showing off was considered popular in the church.
I started my day off today by getting breakfast at a nearby bakery and walking to Budapest's city park, which reminded me of parts of Saint Petersburg. The entrance to the park was crowned by a couple of enormous statues (probably copper, because they were verdi gris) set atop foundations held up by tapering rounded pillars, which reminded me strongly of Wurzburg. A giant statue, some fifty meters high, stood between the other statues, which, on their massive foundations, were like wings to the central statue, and both sides of the park were flanked by museums, one of which had a castle behind it. This park alone contained more riches than all of Eger, to skip forward a little; my trip to Eger was extremely cheap, took me through boring countryside, and got me ruminating about the state of the world.
I left my impressions of Budapest unfinished mostly because I could not recall them all at a moment's notice. One thing that I forgot to mention was that I came across a man passed out on the floor of the first bank into which I walked, dissuading me from trying to use the ATM; I later passed a homeless man on the street who smelled like mold. I saw old ladies (and even some men) trying to sell all sorts of junk on the street, like in Russia, and I saw the same types of kiosks as in Russia. These kiosks are barely big enough for one person to squeeze inside them, and they usually sell things like magazines, cold drinks, and cigarettes. (Note: In Russia there are even pharmacies that operate out of such kiosks.) A bored, very surly man or woman spends his or her days sitting in the kiosk and waiting for people to approach it and buy things. The kiosks that I saw in Budapest sold only magazines but were otherwise identical to those in Russia. The people sitting in them did not look happy.
My final notes were that the evening sun was partly what drove me away from the streets of Budapest yesterday (beyond my being tired and hungry); the sun made it very hard to take pictures. My hostel was located in a type of building that I had theretofore seen only in Russia. These buildings consist of an outer door that locks, an inner courtyard, and a set of separate rooms that look out on the courtyard (which is just a section of concrete) and are connected by a staircase. One feels almost locked inside them when one passes through the outer door of such a building: one is surrounded by rooms that have nothing to do with one's destination (these rooms are often apartments but are, if they are on the ground floor of the building, often stores or offices) and has to find one's destination within the building. I noted Budapest's subway and the costs of things but do not know why, and I noted that the train station in Budapest, the capital of the country, was terrible, worse than any train station (including Stuttgart's!) in Germany. In order to get to the ticket office, which initially appeared not to exist at all, one has to pass through an area that is forbidden to people who do not yet have tickets and wait in line in a stifling room with only four ticket counters. Hungarians, unless they are older and more respectable, have no trouble cutting in line and pushing past confused foreigners; it was only thanks to an older man's letting me keep my place in line that I was able to get a ticket at all today. A glass wall separates railway personnel from the people buying tickets: one talks to them through a sort of intercom system, putting one's money in a little tray that can be spun around and receiving a ticket and change in return. There are very few places to sit down while one waits for one's train, and there is only one overhead monitor telling departure times. The only strength of the train station is that smoking is not allowed in it; to one's surprise, people observe this rule, possibly because they would otherwise incur fines.
I remembered why I wanted to mention the subway station: unlike in Moscow, where people often jump the ticket counters (they are machines that let one pass through a waist-high tourniquet when one inserts one's ticket), subway personnel check one's ticket both when one enters and exits the subway in Budapest; I found their commitment to making people pay their fare curious. Despite being a city of downtrodden people, Budapest has its strong points. I forgot to mention having correctly guessed, as I approached it, that the cathedral at Budapest (the style of the interior of which I foresaw based on its outer appearance) would be full of gold and marble. When I got to the entrance, I learned that it would cost 200 forint, or one Euro, to enter the cathedral, and I decided that it would be worth it. The cathedral was unlike any that I had seen so far: it had supporting pillars that were, at their widest, eight or so meters thick, and it had a great deal of rounded arches (as I probably mentioned), which were very popular in classical architecture. I cannot actually remember anything else about it; I was mostly overwhelmed by its opulence. It was clearly constructed, or remodeled, at a time when showing off was considered popular in the church.
I started my day off today by getting breakfast at a nearby bakery and walking to Budapest's city park, which reminded me of parts of Saint Petersburg. The entrance to the park was crowned by a couple of enormous statues (probably copper, because they were verdi gris) set atop foundations held up by tapering rounded pillars, which reminded me strongly of Wurzburg. A giant statue, some fifty meters high, stood between the other statues, which, on their massive foundations, were like wings to the central statue, and both sides of the park were flanked by museums, one of which had a castle behind it. This park alone contained more riches than all of Eger, to skip forward a little; my trip to Eger was extremely cheap, took me through boring countryside, and got me ruminating about the state of the world.
It is hard to know where to start in relating my thoughts from the past few hours, especially as I have to shower and get to bed soon. Eastern Europe is a great place to visit if you want to feel depressed. People's lives here are terrible, and the disconnect between a foreign traveler and a local is, unlike the disconnect between a foreign traveler and a German, immense. One cannot imagine what it is like growing up in the poverty in which most Hungarians live; one can taste the hopelessness of their situation, as though it had seeped into one's nostrils, gotten into the water, settled in the crumbling steps and cracked siding of the walls of its national monuments, and fallen over the entire country, like radioactive fallout. There is a famous Russian adage that goes like this (more or less): A landowner taxed all of his peasants. From those who had ten bushels of corn, he took nine, and they were miserable; from those who had nine bushels of corn, he took eight, and they were miserable; from those who had seven... and so on, until he reached a family that had no corn at all. The landowner took nothing from them, as there was nothing to take, and they were happy. The moral of the story is that people who have nothing are happier. While this is an encouraging chorus for destitute people to sing to themselves, I do not buy it. People who have nothing are not happier than those who have something; they are miserable. This can be judged both by the degree of violent unrest in poor countries, by their lack of artistic and scientific contribution to world culture, and by the fact that people very often leave poor countries for richer ones in the hopes of building a better life for themselves. Living in poverty breaks people's spirits and infects whole countries, so that babies are born into a world of depression, hunger, and want from which they can only escape by emigrating.
One of the questions that arises from all of this, for a person who knows nothing about economics, is: why not make everything cheap in a country that is doing poorly? That is, why not lower the price of food, housing, clothes, and other necessities (perhaps with incentives; e.g., for people who have jobs) so that everyone in a country at least have a place to live? Why not have plumbers, electricians, and taxicab drivers work for free in the expectation that they will get theirs back in the form of help from the state (e.g., some form of government-mandated pay)? I do not much understand how one country can be rich and another poor except that some countries have more raw goods (e.g., ore, oil, and forests) than others, some have more developed secondary and tertiary industries than others, and some have more qualified laborers than others. Why not use whatever qualified laborers there are in a country to build a bunch of factories for free, get people working in them, strengthen the economy with the output of those factories, and send people to university for free in order to develop tertiary and quaternary industries to further process the factories' products? I doubt that the farmland in Hungary is so bad that the country cannot produce enough food, for example, to feed its people, and I doubt that there are too few building materials to ensure that everyone have a house. Medical technologies here are probably on the same level that they were in the west a few decades ago, or even better; why not send people to the doctor for free if they have problems with their health? I can understand the benefits of having a competitive, capitalistic economy in countries that are doing fine, like Canada and the U.S.A., but why force people in poorer countries to struggle for their lives when they barely have anything to begin with? I am reminded of the metaphor, used for different purposes, from The Lord of the Rings of butter spread over too much bread. Countries like Hungary probably have just enough butter - goods - to cover their bread, the population, but it is spread inefficiently, so that there is too much in some places and too little in others. It strikes me that shutting down all of the chic restaurants, stores, and shopping malls in Budapest for the next twenty years while the rest of the economy recovers would be a good idea, as a more effective distribution of the country's resources might allow it to get back on its feet if people worked together.
Unfortunately, I am running out of time to write, especially because I need to recharge my laptop battery and cannot do so from the little table in my rom. If you are going to travel to eastern Europe, you had better have a damn good reason to do so, as there is nothing to see here for the unguided tourist. I have decided not to bother even trying to see the Balkans on my own next year, as eastern European countries are incredibly difficult to traverse without a guide, and they have very little to offer, on the surface. I am glad to be in Eastern Europe at the moment, as I have learned to avoid this side of the Continent as much as possible and am fulfilling a very specific goal, which is to see the karst caves of Aggtelek and the High Tatras mountains in Slovakia. I will write more to you tomorrow; I need to recharge my laptop. I am going to write notes to myself for tomorrow's blog post.
Even city monuments in Eger have missing siding.
Unfortunately, I am running out of time to write, especially because I need to recharge my laptop battery and cannot do so from the little table in my rom. If you are going to travel to eastern Europe, you had better have a damn good reason to do so, as there is nothing to see here for the unguided tourist. I have decided not to bother even trying to see the Balkans on my own next year, as eastern European countries are incredibly difficult to traverse without a guide, and they have very little to offer, on the surface. I am glad to be in Eastern Europe at the moment, as I have learned to avoid this side of the Continent as much as possible and am fulfilling a very specific goal, which is to see the karst caves of Aggtelek and the High Tatras mountains in Slovakia. I will write more to you tomorrow; I need to recharge my laptop. I am going to write notes to myself for tomorrow's blog post.
Even city monuments in Eger have missing siding.
No comments:
Post a Comment