Hungary Talks about Communism

By now, we’ve been through tons of formerly Communist countries. We’ve seen the architecture and heard a couple stories. I remember our host in Bulgaria, Polly, told us how there was no place to buy Legos when she was growing up except one that only accepted US dollars. She told us how her grandfather, a pediatrician, saw a Greek patient who paid him in US dollars, allowing him to buy her a Lego set. Other than that, though, we have hardly seen any cases where the societies we have visited publicly addressed their Communist pasts. Budapest changed that, offering us an opportunity to see what Communism and Soviet occupation were like in Hungary.

One of the main historical museums in Budapest is the House of Terror. The museum tells the story of two successive occupations, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets. It is housed in the building that first hosted the Nazi/Arrowcross (the Hungarian Nazi Party) secret police, and then hosted the Soviet secret police. We were told that many of the latter were simply hold-overs from the former who had been forced to sign a paper saying how they had made a mistake and were ready to serve the Soviet Party. Others were not so lucky – Germans in Hungary, Hungarians with German-sounding names and then plain old Hungarians were carted away to Soviet labor camps. The museum told of how people who climbed the ranks in the Soviet Party were almost uniformly eventually executed by their own party members on trumped-up charges. At all points, I was struck about how open the information was, not only portraying Hungarians as victims but also as participators.


Most strikingly, the last room in the museum condemned those who had participated in creating the terror that haunted Hungarians throughout both of these regimes, saying that neither their lives before or since these atrocities can excuse them. Going further, this room had their names and pictures plastered all over the wall, each with the year they were born and many with the year they died. Others, the pictures reminded us, are still around. At every step, the museum was very artfully curated, leading us sometimes into darkish rooms with gloomy music, into rooms with terrifying video footage and eventually into the basement where prisoners were held. It was effective – I think Tim and I both were scared being in there and it took us both some time to recuperate once we left.  We don't have any pictures, but this video actually both shows pictures and summarizes the museum really well.


The following day we went to another, much more lighthearted, display of Communist history: Memento Park. This park was formed in the 1990s after Hungary ceased to be communist and decided that it didn’t really want all of its Communist statues sitting around as a constant reminder of the history. They moved a bunch of memorable statues to a park a bit out of the center city, which has now become quite the tourist destination. We lost no time in having fun with the statues, Tim looking rather heroic and me looking rather cheesy:

It was clear we weren’t alone in making fun of these statues a bit, and I’m not only talking about other visitors. Hungarians seemed to have had a ball making fun of statues like the one above, who they joked was a cloakroom attendant, running after someone to say “Sir! You forgot your scarf!” Another example of people making fun of statues happened when someone hung a sign around the statue below that said something like “Stop smirking, Lenin – after 150 years we’re not Turks either.” The sign was referring to the 150 years of Turkish occupation that had happened centuries before.

A further mockery of the same statue is below in a sign we found in the park:

Just before leaving the park, we also came upon a super interesting exhibition. It was playing a video, a documentary about Soviet secret police. The beginning of the documentary said that it had come upon several video clips in a secret office, videos that were made by the police organization detailing how to raid a home, how to keep watch on someone with the help of secret cameras, how to craft boxes out of inconspicuous objects in order to send secret messages, how to efficiently use blackmail in order to recruit someone into the secret police, etc. It was actually hilarious, though we doubted it was supposed to be. On the other hand, we were struck by how utterly paranoid these people must have been.


To decompress from all this learning about Communism, we paid a visit to the Szechenyi Baths, one of Budapest’s many thermal mineral baths that are still up and running. It was actually pretty relaxing, and though I didn’t dare take my camera out (in addition to there being water everywhere, it was also raining outside), it was very pretty and clearly very old. Apparently Hungary has natural spring water that at points comes out as hot as 77 degrees Celsius!! That’s really hot, when 38 C is a blazingly hot day and 100 C is when water boils. Older Hungarians, we’ve been told, commonly get prescriptions to go to the baths as treatment for joint pain. Sounds pretty relaxing to me.


Ok, I’ll stop there for now. Stay tuned to hear about Bull’s Blood in Eger!

Mulberries and Pretty Views in Buda

As Emily mentioned in her last post, while in Budapest we stayed with friends of her family.

I think sometimes the Communist apartment block gets a lot of flak in the US for being drab, oppressive, you name it. One counter-argument to that idea is that, while the buildings themselves are not very decorated, they are usually surrounded by wide swaths of soothing greenery. Here, for example, is the view looking out the window of the room we stayed in in Buda:

However, old Budapest is plenty ornate! We made our mandatory pilgrimage up to the so-called Fisherman’s Bastion, a very beautiful if not very practical-looking faux fortification.

We were pleasantly surprised to find a group playing folk music, including this hammered dulcimer-like instrument.

Fisherman’s Bastion seems to have been devised with the sole purpose of offering awesome views of Pest, including the grandiose Parliament.

I’ve been marveling at the mulberries ever since Turkey when they were still green on the trees. Now a good number of them are ripe, and we found a very easy to pick tree in the parks by the Bastion.

Wandering over to the Castle (it seems we forgot to take pictures because of the steamy weather, sorry), Emily caught a candid of me:

Lastly, we stopped along the river one morning to snap this picture to show a little bit of how the flood waters were just a few weeks ago. The discoloration goes up maybe 10 feet above the current water level, covering a big part of the trees. This is a little island in the Danube in Budapest:

We are currently on a nice train headed through Slovakia towards Prague, and we’re taking advantage of the time to catch up on blogging. Two upcoming posts:

Hungary talks about Communism

We drink Bull’s Blood in Eger

Little Big Post

Oh hello!  This post is dedicated to our family friend Brigitta and her lovely family members Andrea and Zsolti, who are hosting us in Budapest now.

On our last day in Vienna, we took a day trip to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.  It was only about an hour by train (both cities are pretty close to the border).  From Bratislava's train station, we got some rather mixed messages about how Slovakia views itself:

  

We moseyed on into town from the station, checking out the local graffiti on the way:

As we contemplated the understatedness of the above, we formulated a plan for the rest of the day.  Guess what Bratislava's two main attractions are?  If you've been paying attention thus far, you will probably be able to guess that they are a castle on a hill and a big church.  We hit up the castle-turned-museum first, which was a bit of an odd experience.  The museum was almost eerily empty except for the occasional yells from the group of kids on a field trip.  Whole rooms were basically empty, and the rooms that did have stuff in the tended to have little or no interpretation of their stuff.  That said, the castle itself was reconstructed to reflect the building's original Baroque fancyness (I'm giving Tim bunny ears in this photo, if it's too small to see...).

After the castle was, of course, the church.  We were a little disappointed thus far, seeing as the castle was empty and the outdoor areas were all about 97 degrees.  Luckily, the church was both interesting to see and a much nicer temperature.  On the left is the elaborate stained glass in the church, and on the right is the crypt, which had graves from as long ago as the 17th century:

After all this, we walked around town a little and went to a microbrewery we had seen good reviews for.  This place was *legit*.  They only really had a couple beers, but they were delicious, and the food was amazing.  We had a slightly currant-y dark lager and a German (non-microbrew) weissbier.  Seriously some of the best food we had had for the entirety of the trip.  (We tried a pickled sausage served with onions and hot peppers!)  We left Bratislava happy and went home to pack our bags for Budapest.

We arrived in Budapest in the mid-morning after taking a train most of the way from Vienna and a bus part of the way to avoid parts of the tracks that had been damaged from the flooding of the Danube, which had gotten pretty bad in the past few weeks but has since improved somewhat.  Our first stop in Budapest was where Tim used to live:

After walking around his old neighborhood a bit, we picnicked on the banks of the Danube, which had left a beachy sand covering on the pathway next to it from the flooding.  It was actually kind of nice, and we were certainly not the only ones taking advantage of this tiny little beach under shady trees. Seeing as it was another blazing-hot day, I also happily stuck my feet in.

 We then ventured on to - you guessed it - a church (Budapest apparently also has a synagogue, but it was closed on Friday afternoon and Saturday).  This church was relatively new - finished in 1905 - and it is beautiful.  It is the St. Stephen church, named for the guy who apparently founded Hungary.  They even have his right hand in a box.  The picture below shows the box holding the 'Holy Right', and the text is taken from the Wikipedia article on St. Stephen (link above).  You can also find a quite detailed photo of the rotting right hand on that page.  It's lovely.




The king's right hand, known as the Holy Right, is kept as a relic. Hungarians interpreted the incorruptibility of his right arm and hand - with which he had held the Holy Crown aloft from his deathbed when asking Virgin Mary to be the Queen of the Hungarians - as a sign that the Blessed Virgin Mary had accepted the king's offer to her of the Hungarian people, and she remains officially their queen.
 - Wikipedia




Anyway, after the church we hit up a beautiful park where there were pillows laid out for people to sit on in the shade of trees next to a small lake.  It was great, if still really hot.  Also we got a langos, which is a Hungarian snack basically involving a funnel cake, except instead of sugar, you put a garlic sauce, sour cream and cheese on it.  Certainly not the healthiest, but oh-man delicious.  Later on, we got a bit fancier food for dinner, including a cold raspberry-and-melon soup (yum!):

Today we took things easy (again) to beat the heat.  One of the things we saw today was the Fisherman's Bastion, which was pretty cool:

So, as of now, Budapest is really high up on my list of places we've been.  It's a truly beautiful city that kind of looks like Istanbul and Vienna were smushed together, with some of the Communist-looking architecture of the Balkans peeking in a little further out of town.  The prices are super reasonable and so far the food has been amazing.  It is clear that our hosts are incredibly welcoming even though we can't understand their Hungarian, and they can't understand our English.  Tomorrow, we're looking forward to hopefully a bit cooler temperatures and more beautiful architecture.  This is the life!

Also, I put up a link to our Serbia pictures - enjoy!  Ljubljana pictures will be going up soon.

Much love from Hungary!

The Mariazellerbahn

One of the draws of Austria for us was the super-scenic, small-gauge, decrepit antique railroad called the Marizellerbahn, leading from a small town outside Vienna all the way to a small town in the Austrian Alps called Mariazell, home of great views and a church with a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary.

Even the company running the train was adorable. Note how the 'o' on the left looks like a bear. GAWWWW

The ride there was in fact super-scenic and super-slow. The train is scheduled to take 2 and a half hours to cover the 76 kilometers up to Mariazell. (Do the math. It's bad.) Our train in fact took over three hours, which means even more alpine views for us.

The train station was a short walk from town via this gorgeous path clinging to the sides of the hill:

 Town itself is adorable and of decent size - it apparently receives a million pilgrims a year!

The church itself was just incredible. There were a decent number of older Austrian pilgrims about, many of whom had taken the train with us. Apparently the church was originally a smaller (but still pretty big) Gothic church (center), and was later on expanded in baroque style. The three steeple look is a bit funny and classic of old churches - everything has been added to or reconstructed at one point or another!

Unfortunately they were very serious about taking no pictures so we obliged. The interested can read more on their website. What they did allow us to do was buy a piece of Mariazell-themed chocolate for a euro. We obliged. The chocolate was good.

We also wandered around town a bit. We wanted to get a beer and lunch at the local brauhaus (microbrew) but it was closed :( We settled on a nice homey Austrian place instead.

We found this window display while walking around. Don't ask me. I don't know.

While doing a bit of shopping, we also tried a bit of locally-produced herbal liqueurs. They were great and very herbally!

After having been hot all day, it rained and cooled off a bit in the afternoon. This means we also got much less-washed out pictures of the countryside on the way back. One is below:

 

In general, I've been a bit disappointed by the weather - hot and sunny almost all the time, whereas central Europe can easily have summer highs as low as 70 and has a reputation for being rainy. Today I saw one screen saying we hit 97 in Vienna and it felt like it! In another few days, all of central Europe is supposed to cool back down.

Today, we decided to indulge our nerdy side and visit the globe and Esperanto museums. I enjoyed this 17th century map for being so blank through our home - the Great Lakes and Midwest.

The Esperanto Museum was awesome if very short. Esperanto is a constructed, artificial language that was designed to be the new international language. Apparently, it would put interpreters out of a job! (The man on the left being waved away has a hat that says interpreter.) I am obviously therefore opposed:

They talked a little bit about some of the history of Esperanto. It was created in the 19th century and has always been a bit cooky. People have dreamed of it ending war and bringing humanity together in brotherhood. Unfortunately, it turns out that those billions of potential brothers are too attached to wars and their own languages to participate in this utopian dream. Alas.

They had a great exhibit where you played a Pac-Man clone and had to eat up the ghosts with little grammatical parts on them to create sensible Esperanto. For example, they would present the rule to you and then might say "What does 'I write' mean in Esperanto?" and give "mi skrib-" and so you have to eat the "-as" ghost because "-as" is the present tense ending in Esperanto. More fun that it sounds, actually.

 Don't know what this is. Awesome, though.

 

We also found this beautiful church wandering around Vienna, called Minoritenkirche. It seems to be a gothic church (right) with offices for a school, other Italian-language Catholic stuff in Vienna, and possibly offices for the Franciscans (left).

In it is an absolutely incredible mosaic replica of da Vinci's Last Supper. Glare was tough in this picture; hence, the funny angle.

Emily noted the meta (and beautiful!) altarpiece. In it, angels are holding a painting.

Tomorrow, we're on a day trip to Bratislava. Send us some comments if you please!

The View from the Cafe Car

My first impression of Austria came when we stepped onto the bright red Austrian train in Ljubljana.  The cars seemed freshly painted, sans the graffiti we had seen on other trains.  Inside, the compartments were clean and modern, with glass doors and marked seat reservations.  There was even a cafe car, complete with white tablecloths, black leather chairs and windows that looked out as the train sped through the Slovenian, and then Austrian, countryside.

We happened to go to the cafe car at an ideal time: right as we were traveling through the Austrian Alps.  My reaction to the whole scene was not something I expected.  Rather than feeling relaxed, like any other vacationer taking in the sights, I felt oddly surprised.  As background information, this is the first trip I’ve planned without the help of either parents or some sort of structured program, and the first trip I’ve paid for entirely with money I have earned myself.  It was certainly a surprise to recognize that I bought myself the opportunity to be lazily sipping tea while I watch the Austrian Alps go by.  It felt far too adult.  (I’m kicking myself now for not taking pictures of the landscape.)

Vienna offered more of the same sensation, with grandiose buildings at every turn.  We had also been given an incredible wealth of information about things to do by the staff at our hostel, which actually just made it difficult to decide what to do.   Our first morning, we floundered a little bit, overwhelmed by all of the options, and then stepped into a church where we heard organ music playing.  As it turned out, the organist was actually just practicing, but sitting helped us regroup a bit.

From there, we went to the incredible Kaisergrüft – the crypt of the Austrian monarchs.  It was creepy at points - at left is a reliquary (yes, those are real bones), and at right is a sarcophagus. Still, it was really interesting to see.

After that we went to St. Stephansdom, the giant church in the middle of the old city.  It’s still used for masses, baptisms, etc.  Just outside of it, guys dressed like Mozart try to get you to come on their tours or to their museum.  (Let me tell you, they love their Mozart around here.  Mozart is their cash cow.)

 

Emerging from St. Stephansdom, we found ourselves in the middle of a protest.  Pushing away images of Istanbul, we realized it was an anti-LGBTQ demonstration which was mostly attended by pro-LGBTQ people waving rainbow flags.  As we walked further, we realized that this was apparently Vienna's Gay Pride week, and that we had just missed the 'Regenbogen Parade.'  Also note grandiose building in the background, because that's how Vienna rolls.

After a dinner of Wiener Schnitzel, we settled down at the hostel, called Do Step Inn.  I have to say, this hostel is infinitely better than our Belgrade hostel.  It's clean and extremely well-run.  For our second day, they helped us find options for nighttime live music, which led us to the surprisingly good show from a Swedish band called Slow Earth.  They kind of looked like a bunch of 19 year-olds on summer break, but they did a good job.

The day activities for yesterday and today consisted of an art museum and the Vienna Jewish Museum, respectively.  I'll let Tim talk about the art museum, since I think he can do the best job of describing the star painting there, but I'll just say that the Jewish Museum was fascinating.  On the ground floor, instead of just giving out information, they lay out the central questions that the museum deals with, and give space for guests to write out their own questions and comments.  They also display former questions and comments from guests that address the central questions - debates like "To what extent should a Jewish Museum focus on the Holocaust?"

The main exhibit in the museum was about Jewish humor as it developed throughout the 20th century.  They talked about wordplay, cabarets, revues, and satires.  They had one or two rooms that addressed how Jews satirized Hitler.  Below is the theatrical satire by George Tabori that shares a title with Hitler's memoir.  This is from 1986, but there were a lot of examples from much earlier, including during the war.

Further on, they showed newer examples of Jewish humor like Woody Allen's films.  It was a fascinating exhibit.  At the other location of the same museum, centered where the Jewish quarter of Vienna used to be in medieval times, we saw the excavation of a synagogue that had been demolished in 1420.  It made for a really interesting afternoon.

Tomorrow we are planning a day trip to Austria's Pielachtal Valley, the home of the dirndl, which is apparently a fruit similar to a cherry.  After that, we're looking forward to another day in Vienna, which we're hoping to fill with some pretty unique-sounding museums and a trip to the Viennese opera.  Looking forward to reporting back about all.

Much love from Vienna!

feeling the sLOVEnia

I write to you from Ljubl- actually, no, I'm already in Vienna.  We arrived tonight and will start exploring the city tomorrow - but in the meantime, I'd like to tell you all about Ljubljana, Slovenia.

We had chosen Ljubljana as a destination on our trip for its reputation, in some places, of being the most beautiful city in Europe.  Other sources describe it as the European city that looks most like a Disney set.  I kind of agree.  Coming from Belgrade, where it felt like we had one foot in the first world and one in the third, where our hostel almost certainly had bedbugs, where I found out that I had had my identity stolen (everything is ok)... I was ready for a city that was pretty, and hopefully clean and relaxing too.

I got all of these things.  This is Ljubljana's main square and famous pink church, which (true to reports) kind of looks like something out of EPCOT.

Another thing I got that I had not been expecting was a city that is ragingly livable and easy to get around.  They have a bike-sharing program which is 1 Euro for a week-long subscription (3 Euros for a year), and then it's free for the first hour.  Because Ljubljana is a very small city, the first hour will get you anywhere you want to go in the city.  It was both mine and Tim's first real experience with bike sharing, and it was such a great break from tired walking feet.  In general, this city effing loves their bikes - at one point on our way home, we were in a group of ~10 bikers waiting to cross the street.  Again, helps that the city is small enough so that nobody's commute is too long to bike - but still, pretty cool.

The first real day we had, we went to go see Ljubljana Castle (every town around here seems to have a castle on a hill... more on that later).  We had beautiful views of Ljubljana, and I discovered a panorama function on my camera... fancy that!

That night, we met up with our CouchSurfing host at his home, grabbed some picnic ingredients and went to the nearby Tivoli park.  It was the perfect temperature, and we sat down to picnic with delicious bakery bread, red pepper dip, salami, and salad with apple and feta.  Beautiful and relaxing?  Check.

From there, we biked into the center to join in on a CouchSurfing meet-up that apparently happens weekly.  It was pretty interesting - lots of people from all over the world, speaking English.  When we got there, they were talking about the riots in Turkey.  They were eager to hear our stories from the events, especially one of the guys, who was Turkish.  He was really a character... he said that his theory is that America has orchestrated all of the events in Turkey (when I laughed out loud, he made sure to tell me that he's pro-American).  Why, you probably ask?  Well, clearly, Turkey is strategically placed near Iran and Russia, the US's two biggest enemies, and if the revolution in Turkey succeeds, well, naturally there will follow pro-America revolutions in Iran and Russia, thereby eliminating America's enemies.  It was... entertaining.

Anyway, back to the beautiful country of Slovenia!  Our second day there we planned a day trip to the Slovenian town of Bled, which our guide book says was "designed by the god of tourism."  We would tend to agree.  Bled is the home of a ridiculously blue glacial lake, with a castle-topped cliffside and - yes, there's more - a tiny island in the middle of it with a church on it.

It's ridiculous.  They even have swans, followed around adorably by their cygnets (yesss got to use the word 'cygnets')...

The lake is small enough that you can walk around the whole thing, which is exactly what we did, making stops along the way to, ya know, check out the 1000-year old castle and stuff.  Also see note at "every town around here seems to have a castle on a hill."  By the time we got up to the castle, we could see why they build them at the top of hills - we couldn't have laid siege on that thing had we wanted to.  Anyway, cheesy tourist destinations aside, the castle was amazing.  Behind us is the tiny island-with-a-church.

After spending some quality time with the castle, we hiked back down (there was a very impressive collection of hiking trails!) and continued on our walk around the island.  At one point, we rented a swan-shaped rowboat (mind=blown) to row out to the church.  Here you can see the church, and then in the background is another view of the castle.

Designed by the god of tourism indeed.

The following day, unfortunately our last day in the beautiful Ljubljana, we prioritized seeing an exhibit our CouchSurfing host had told us about called "Imagining the Balkans."  Eric, if you're reading this, we highly recommend the exhibit, though it won't be in Skopje til about a year from now.  The exhibit basically examines the common cultural heritage between the Balkan countries, with the understanding that despite some pretty hard-line nationalism (which we've described previously), these countries share a lot of history, language, and culture.  Perhaps the most exciting thing for me was that we had actually seen quite a few of the things that this exhibit reproduced, which I think means that we must've been doing something right on our Balkan tour.  Also, we saw the Steel Crown of Romania, made from a Turkish cannon. Putting your enemies' dismembered weapons on your king's head seems appropriate, right?

So yes!  Ljubljana definitely won me over, and I'm glad that we had it on our list of places to visit, and a bit sad that we had to leave so soon.

Goodnight from Vienna, and we hope to have some more lovely experiences to share soon!