Friday, August 12, 2011

Leaving Bratislava...entering Hungary

Despite that my Slovakian doctor told me I had to lie still for 10 days, I continued with my travel plans and hobbled (bags and all) over to the Bratislava bus terminal and caught my scheduled bus to Budapest. Along the way I photographed Hungarian wind mills and braced for entry into another currency, city grid and language. I traded my remaining euros for Hungarian florints and suddenly felt rich. (There are about 200 florints to one dollar). Then I called Veronika, my couch surfing host and she told me which metro line to take to get to her apartment. I managed to negotiate the correct side of the platform despite that all the names when announced sounded to me like whispery gibberish. As I exited the metro, I was accosted by the Hungarian Gestapo (e.g. the transit police). While I was thinking I would hand them one of the tickets I had just purchased, they were ready to hold my passport hostage for failing to validate my ticket in a punching machine before getting on the platform. I hadn't seen the machine and in that most of the passengers use passes, I hadn't seen anyone use it either. I was nonetheless treated like a scumbag truant and told to go find an ATM machine so I might pay the 6,000 flt. fine. I protested say it was my first hour in Budapest and that they should cut me some slack. They growled more as I fled (with my bags and passport) to the bright sun of architecturally gorgeous Budapest.



I proceeded to catch another bus and then a tram (validating my tickets each and every time) until I reached Veronika's flat. Unlike my other hosts, Veronika would be super - busy with her job as an English-Hungarian translator and would have barely a moment to visit. When I suggested taking her out to dinner she said she was too busy and would fix something simple around the house. And so it was. We'd have morning tea, she'd help me sort out where I would go and then I'd wander in, fully spent, sometime in the evening.



Ultimately I did figure out how to negotiate quite a bit of Budapest. Being a non-Hungarian speaker in a largely mono-lingual society was pretty interesting. In that I look like one of them, I was forever being engaged in conversations in Hungarian. Sometimes I’d play along and smile and laugh...and other times, I'd admit that I only speak English:) I figured out how to order food (by pointing and using gestures), buy groceries, buy an ace bandage (again by pointing and gesturing) and negotiate all matter of transportation. While in Budapest I was forever pulling out my camera to photograph the non-stop amazing buildings. Like much of Eastern Europe Hungary is in transition. There’s its rich history beginning with the Romans onto the Huns, it’s unique language (which is neither Slavic nor Indo-European) but does incorporate plenty of English words, the decimation of 600,000 Jews in WW II and most recently its independence from the former Soviet Union.


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