Budapest, illustrated
I'll start the story over again from the beginning.
I was blogging on the plane. Not all of it was interesting.
"I look outside the window of the airplane and notice that the clouds have disappeared to reveal glorious white mountains below. The Alps. To the south they flatten into fields of clouds again. I see a dammed river. For a moment the poles of a ski lift glint in the sun.
'You fucking me makes me bilingual'"
That was the music I was listening to, by the way.
When checking into my Paris-Budapest flight, I realized how accustomed I've become to the ridiculous security on any flight that has anything to do with the US. The guy checking my passport didn't recognize the Hungarian visa, asked what country it was for, and didn't seem to care about the answer. For the first time in years, I made it through security without taking my shoes off. They seemed not to care that I had twice the amount of allotted baggage. People smoked in the airport lounge.
When I arrived in the Budapest airport, I made it through passport control without even talking. So much for that $60 visa.
The trees around the airport were completely frosted over, like white ghost-trees. I didn't take any pictures, because I figured I'd see more of the same once we got into the actual city, but I haven't.
I took pictures of the apartment. It's hard to capture a single room, so here's a picture of the windows in my room.
I have since come to realize that our apartment is not particularly good compared to those of other students. Its biggest failings are 1. lack of common space (the bedrooms serve ok, but there's not much furniture) 2. lack of a gas stove, and 3. lack of a bathtub. Its main advantage is location, being quite close to the language school, the college where the math classes will be, and within a couple minutes' walk of two large grocery stores.
Last night we were invited to a dinner party at the most spectacular apartment I'd ever seen. It was only a few blocks from our own, and must have had 14-foot ceilings in every room. One of the bedrooms was absolutely palatial, and probably could have held our whole apartment. The place looked like it should have been decorated with fancy Victorian furniture and full of women in large gowns.
Either my standards for housing in big European cities are rather low, or the BSM people really went all out in finding us apartments.
It's very gray here. The skies are gray quite a lot, which is to be expected since it's winter, but they also don't seem to be that into public greenery around here, and many of the buildings are stained pretty badly from soot and kind of crumbly. The old ones are charming and all, but I'm going to need plants at some point. I honestly didn't notice anything about the air quality here (though I have had a cold since I arrived), but the people from Minnesota are really suffering from the smog, too.
Here's a gray street. It's in a kind of touristy area of town that they took us to on the guided tours during the first week of classes. The bottom storefronts are full of swanky shops. McDonalds is apparently considered somewhat posh here, to give you an idea of the standards.
They also took us to the big central market on the tours. It's neat. Cheap vegetables that are good in winter are dirt cheap here (onions, carrots, potatoe), and things that I consider "normal" are weirdly expensive (celery).
The first time we went to the market, we were advised to try a langos. It's a sort of savory fried donut-type thing that you can get with toppings. I got mine with sour cream and cheese. Oh, man. I only made it about 2/3 of the way through before I got grease overload and had to give the rest away.
Last weekend, they organized a bus tour in the morning that most people opted to sleep through. I at least got to see most of the major tourist sites so I'll know what to go back to.
We went to Hero Square, which was built for the 1896 Exposition in Budapest. Big phallic monument with lots and lots of statues honoring Hungary's past.
It's between two major museums. On the other side of it is a lake that in the winter is turned into a gigantic ice skating rink, the very same one that I failed to skate at earlier. On the other side of the lake/skating rink is a fake castle thing that was also built in 1896 to showcase various architectural styles.
The tour guide told us about the gigantic compulsory worker meetings that she used to go to with her parents during the Communist era, where the party leaders would address the working masses. She took the same sort of amused ironic distance with respect to Hungary's past that the other guides and older teachers seem to, like they've been scarred by the repeated invasions and destruction. It's foreign attitude to me, the history-free Californian.
We went up to Castle Hill on the Buda side and took pictures of the view.
Higher up on another hill is a monument to... I think it's the worker. Built by the Communists. The guide pointed out the obvious stains where there used to be a big red star on the column.
The view up there is pretty spectacular.
There aren't really any tall buildings here, which is kind of interesting. Multiple guides have pointed out places where some very old one-story buildings still remain. And with the super-high ceilings common to the old buildings around here, there aren't very many floors to a not-tall building either.
They do cheat on their floor numbering, though. Of course there's the European thing of not counting the ground floor. That's fine. But the building housing our language school also has a 1/2 floor, and it ain't no little mezzanine floor either. It's full-sized in every way. Apparently this is common. Weird.
I bought a metro pass last week, and have since taken all sorts of transit everywhere. There are three subway lines, yellow, red, and blue. They also have numbers, but I never remember which is which. I think I put them in order. The yellow one is just under the ground, and was built for the exposition in 1896. It plays a cheesy little song when it arrives in a station. The red and blue ones are more modern, and have these awesome deep escalators descending into the abyss. I think the blue one is the deepest.
A word on the escalators here. They turn them off and switch directions in the metro stations. The hand rails do not move at the same speed as the steps. They move, of course, but some are as much as several feet ahead or behind by the time you get to the top or bottom. Yeah, it's fun to see if you can try to keep your hand in one place for the duration of a trip. Also, people seem not to believe in walking on escalators.
It is also a proper subway in that rush-hour trains come every 2 minutes, and trains are never more than 10 minutes apart. Score. Unfortunately, they stop running sometime after 11 pm.
The stations are little shopping centers in themselves, and full of sad-looking people passing flyers out. The most obnoxious is a shoe store near Astoria with these flyers proclaiming "VEGKIARUSITAS" in fluorescent green letters, that has a veritable army of wrinkled flyer-ers in matching green-and-white tshirts on the way to school.
This is the view out of the Keleti palyaudvarig metro stop, also known as Keleti pu. (but absolutely not to be pronounced that way, as most tourists do), with view of the named train station. This is the stop I will see every day when I'm too lazy to walk to class once our real courses start.
