Delayed Slovakia, Vienna, and Budapest

Not long after crossing the border of Hungary, Alison and I find ourselves in the 4th largest city in Romania: Timisoara, “the city of flowers”, the “first free city” in Romania. Timisoara is where the Romanian comunity overthrew their communist dictators in the week long violent riots in 1989 (check out Wikipedia: Romanian_Revolution_of_1989) . More interestingly, Timisoara is the birthplace of my dear friend Emanuel. He lived here only for a few years as a child, but I figured that if I am going to Romania, I ought see his city; and thus, for better of for worse (“Why are you going there?!”) we find ourselves here.
I have absolutely no conception of time here. I am without a time-keeping (ha, keeping!) device and therefore am unaware. Consequently, the many filled days that have quickly passed since my last post seem like a quick blur and I can’t even believe that time was passing or that it existed or that it is a thing that runs the world. Because of this huge gap in my blogs, I owe you back-up stories. And so we begin.
The last time I wrote we had only spent one day in Slovakia and I was just beginning to ease into Europe and understand it all. I think that now that we are moving further east and into areas that are less western European and that aren’t a part of the EU (and therefore haven’t taken on a lot of the same EU things that all EU countries like to have), the culture finally feels to me to be distinctly different. We have been moving progressively into less western-feeling culture and I think where we are now (Romania) is the most drastic of a cultural difference from what we’re used to.

Slovakia ("BUMmin' Around"), and 24-hour Vienna trip: The remainder of our time in Slovakia was excellent. Once again, I can not stress how nice it was to stay in someone’s house and to break into traveling so easily with the wonderful accommodations of the Blahovas. So I begin with the second day: This day we decided to go into Vienna with Maja and her friend Jenni. We packed a picnic lunch and made the drive from Slovakia to Austria and into Vienna. We first went to the Schönbrunn (fatty palace where the Hapsburgs lived), remained mostly in “the gardens” because they were so beautiful and we had our picnic here and then the tired Maja and Jenni (and also the non-tourists who have done this before) stayed around while Alison and I trekked up to the top of the hill and looked at the view of Vienna. Then we trekked around on some little trails and chatted, enjoyed the beauty, and met a very adorable little girl in a pretty dress and hat who was lost but eventually found her mommy. After the palace we went into the city proper where Alison and I once again went off on our own and explored the impressive St. Stephen’s Cathedral. It is just absolutely gorgeous and officially my first piece of stunning European architecture. We also got to go inside which was sweet because we haven’t gotten to do that at all places. One of my favorite parts of that church is the roof, which is surprisingly colorful and a really interesting style. We then strolled around Vienna, exploring small side streets, making our way to the Museums Quartier, attempting to penetrate their glorious library (hard without a card but cool to look at from outside!), saw other cool old buildings, had dinner outside in front of their grand parliament building (there was an film festival going on and a bunch of food). We met back up with the girls only to learn that Marie’s friend Clay had called Maja’s phone while we were gone and we promptly made plans to meet up with him and Maja and Jenni went back home to Slovakia while Alison and I made the decision to “figure out” how to remain in Vienna until the sun comes up.
We met up with Clay at an open café in the middle of the Museums Quartier and had some drinks. Clay is amazing and Alison and I got along with him really well. I’m super glad I got to meet a good friend of Marie’s. I now know that she was in excellent hands while abroad and that is good. Clay, Alison and I then walked over to another bar, Donau, and around 2am left to find Clay some kaiserkreiner (some sausage thing wrapped in bacon that Marie used to rave about) at a food stand and after quite some walking, we found it, Clay left, and Alison and I attempted to penetrate the Viennese night. Per Marie’s recommendation, we searched for a place called Flex, which was apparently open until quite late, but we got royally lost and couldn’t find the place for the longest time (it is in such a secret location, Marie!). Eventually, we made it, and grabbed beers and danced to that crazy Euro techno awesomeness. We made some friends who wanted us to continue partying with them when the club closed, but after their other friend “Yemen” came up to us with greasy hair, looking like somewhere in between a car salesman and a ring leader (of a circus), we definitely declined the offer. On our walk out, we ran into an Indian and a Pakistani guy (“excuse me…you look…are you Indian?” ßthat was for sophie. They find me everywhere ahh!) who wanted to help us on our 24-hour game by inviting us to hang at their place. Although the Indian guy was very sweet, saying things like “we are like family because you are also Indian”, we know that travelers must always be on their guard, so, no mother, we did not go with them. Instead, (and this is the much safer option, right?) we just roamed around Vienna allll night. We went exploring, wrote a joint poem, crept up into a fancy hotel and ran up to the top floor to see if we could catch the sunrise (we couldn’t), saw St. Stephen’s at its finest (sunrise), and then found a very nice man at another hotel who helped us out with figuring out how to get back to Bratislava that morning. Around 6 am, we left. The story doesn’t end there, though, because we get on the train and the train stops at some place and then turns around and starts going the other way (WTF?) before it has gotten to Bratislava. We asked around the train and we were told to get off at the next stop and hop on the next train heading east. We did. And we were in the middle of nowhere and then I started my period and then we feared that a train might never come because there was only one track and how could one train be heading west while another train is heading east on the same track? But it came! Hooray! And we arrived back in Slovakia, tried to figure out the phone to call Maja, and she picked us up all cheery and wonderful like always. We slept the whole day.
Although we had partied hard the night before, we knew that we had another celebration coming that night. Maja and her friends had been planning on having a party that evening and when we woke up, we basically got ready for the party and went over to her friend Milan (or Hugo)’s house and drank a Slovakian liqueur with peaches in it (real ones in the bottle) and sang many songs while Hugo played the guitar adorably. Her friends are really fun and Alison and I really liked hanging out with them. We left the apartment and went down into the center of town to a place where we could dance. Hugo is a crazy guy and, accordingly¸ a crazy dancer and we spun around many times in circles. Then everyone needed fresh air so we went walking and running and spinning some more and made our way to the big castle on top of the hill in Bratislava where we had sweet views of the city at night (all cities are just gorgeous by night. They are so much kinder; you can taste a sweetness).
The following day we went swimming at a lake with the whole gang and said our goodbyes. The evening found Alison and I in the city for dinner and for WiFi where we planned a little bit more of our Budapest trip. We would leave in the morning. When we got home Maja, Alison and I stayed up chatting and sharing photos of important people in our lives so that Maja could get an ample life update. Bed ensued.

Budapest ("Boyfriends, Baths and Bikes"): Budapest, Budapest. Absolutely amazing. Breathtaking. Awe-striking. Unforgettable. Happy. Intelligent. Creative. Teeming with life—good life. People soaking it up. So we changed our plans quite last minute and instead of going to Romania and\then going Hungary, we chose to go to Hungary first (it seemed to make more sense according to the people we were talking to in Slovakia). We tried really hard to find another couchsurfer who could accommodate us at the last minute but that day we seemed to be failing so we booked a hostel which actually ended up being pretty\excellent. Arriving in the Budapest train station, the station was gorgeous (go figure), but the walk in the heatheatheat with huge heavy backpacks, not so fashionable.We found Casa de la Musica (hostel), moved in, and then got advice on where to exploring the city via stroll. Oh my god were we blown away. I wish I knew more about the technical term for architecture, but I don’t. There is just such a mix of interesting buildings in Budapest and these gorgeous buildings are EVERYWHERE. It is not just a few of them that are stately and impressive in the centre of town, but these buildings that seem to capture you as if they were universes of their own, were every and anywhere. And of course I like then when they are slightly falling down or not entirely being kept up in immaculate condition because it gives a sense of reality and time, things actually being lived in and used, building that show the face of their identity and of their country, what it has been through. All different colors, all different feelings, all different styles. It’s like a unique architect took this ONE building into his hands and it was his little baby and he made it the best it could be. It’s like every one of them is like that. I’ve never seen this before. We strolled around a lot and eventually grabbed dinner at this place where our waiter stopped being nice to us when we specifically asked for tap water instead of the mineral, sparkling and bottled stuff he was trying to sell us (oh, America). He then became our “bff” in Mallory and Alison lingo. We still refer to him as such. And then, super-Americanly we brought out leftovers home (people don’t do that) and tried to take it easier that night by not going out (we were rather ridiculously exhausted) and attempting to write stories only to find ourselves chatting with some boys from the hostel over bottle of wine. One of the boys we met at the hostel works in Spain (San Sebastian) and I chatted with him for a little bit about that endeavor and I got his info (hopefully I didn’t lose it. I think I did). It was around this time that I started thinking about going to Spain earlier than later (like after Helsinki, France and Portugal) and heading there right after Berlin!
In Budapest, we did quite a lot, but we were also spending time trying to figure out couchsurfing. The first night we got an email from a CSer in Budapest who gave us a phone number to call. He was quite elusive on the phone and I was so very confused and intrigued. Sure, sure. We always have room, he said. He and a girl host people at “The Place”. He said to come into the cottage, that he most likely will not be there, but there will be a key on top of the fireplace and a note underneath explaining “how things work”. Enjoy “The Process”, he said. Hmm. We ditched that because we looking further at their profiles and it was the sort of stuff like “dancing like fireflies in eachothers’ hearts” “the glorious force of etenarnal souls ahhh” (c_____ shit, sophie) and it seemed like it kind of ran like a cult where the group had to self-govern and like forage together and stuff.
We just didn’t want people telling us what to do and we weren’t into intentional mystical soul-opening encounters in isolated communities where they are just too enlightened to deal with you other, normal drone-slave people. Maybe if we’d had more time in the country it would have been an interesting experience, but our time was limited and it was therefore not on our map. Luckily, Josezf came through. On Day two, Alison and I walked around the city, crossed the Danube river from Pest into Buda. Budapest is divided into two parts. Pest is on the eastern side of the river and Buda on the west. Pest is the newer, more cosmopolitan part of the city and Buda is older, has castles and caves and is more residential. Most tourists, at least budget tourists, stay over in Pest, though traveling between the two is quite easy. Al and I had a picnic on a bench in front of the huge St. Stephen’s Basilica in Pest (we randomly found a bench and it happened to be there). We snagged spots on a free tour about communism in Budapest and I am embarrassed to say that, although the information was really interesting to both of us, when we stopped for a little lecture in the park and got to sit on the grass, both Alison and I began falling asleep. We were just so tired. Oops. We actually decided to leave the tour in the middle and we went back to the hostel where we figured out where we would stay for the night, dipped in the pool (a plastic blow up thing) with one of the guys that work at the hostel and chatted about Romania, then had a dinner of cheesecake and lattes (because we wanted to). The cheesecake was weird.
After dinner, we were planning on moving our stuff out to Joszef's apartment, but when we shared this new information and his address with our hostel running friends they were skeptical. The area, although only only a few blocks away from our hostel, is filled with tricky gypsies and Alison and I were planning on walking by foot around like 10pm with huge backpacks to draw everyone's attention. So our plan became that I would ride on the back of our friend Alex's motorcycle and him and I would check out the situation. The situation was okay, Alex and I decided and then the three of us walked over to Joszef's, Alex left, and Alison and our new friend chatted, checked out some stuff on the internet, talked about music and film (Joszef is an "indie" music buff).
The next morning Alison and I spent the day at the thermal baths. The thermal baths that people still use today in Budapest are Turkish. They are indoor and outdoor in these really gorgeous old buildings, and it's kind of a like a huge huge huge public pool complex, only the baths are mostly heated. There was a whirlpool, fierce sauna, an ice shredder thing where you brought ice into the sauna and put the ice all over yourself, let it melt while you also melt in the sauna, and then there was a freezing cold bath outside of it to counteract. Check out? http://www.budapestinfo.hu/en/things_to_see/thermal_baths . That night Joszef made us salata de vinete, a Romanian dish that I used to eat with Emanuel a lot. Joszef is originally Romanian and I mentioned my connections to the country, dropped the name of the dish, and we made it for dinner that night. Afterwards the three of us went out to explore the underground music scene at some reallyreally excellent venues, open garden bars, and a club underneath a pool/fountain thing in the middle of the city that had a clear roof so that you could see the water above. The music was good, but the clubs excellent. Budapest has a really delicious night scene and Alison and I made like 2342352 boyfriends there. There were all of these fights that night because all of our Hungarian boyfriends were finding out about each other and getting pretty upset. We felt bad but obviously can't help it. The night ended around 3am.
On the morning following, Alison and I shopped for a picnic, rented bikes and rode around the city, eventually landing on an island in the middle of the Danube where we had a lovely picnic in the middle of a park. We then rode to the other side of the city, to Buda, and explored the castles and the castle district a little more, and chatted about our experiences abroad last year and all of the social and political issues that we still haven't been able to get out of our heads over "American coffee" (the cheapest on the menu. Go figz). Afterwards we made Joszef dinner (our little present to him), and, because we had to wake up early, spent the evening planning Romania (aka figuring out how to get there), and then watched a really excellent film that Jozsef recommended, Factory Girl. Andy Warhol was Slavic, don't ya know.