The view from the Castella.

Part of the Budapest castle.

Another part of the Budapest castle. What is the thing about making a statue of a man mistreating a horse? I don’t get it. I really don’t.

Old and touristy. In the heat almost unbearable. Amazing view, but I didn’t feel like staying. So I started back down to the river again.

 

The Hungarian parliament building from across the Danube.

When I was a teenager and liked hanging out at music festivals, I was introduced to langos. Langos is a fast food consisting of a flat, deep fried bread with different kinds of toppings. Sour cream, cheese and onions were given, but I also liked to add roe on top. Oh, I loved langos. The ultimate festival food.

It wasn’t until this spring that I learned that langos actually originate from Hungary. So, when we finally were in Budapest, I made Mr. P try a langos.

They were just as good as I remembered them – greasy and full of empty calories. But big, too, almost too big. Mr. P couldn’t finish his. I had to help him with the last piece. And he wasn’t conscious enough to say if he liked it or not. Major food coma.

I was told by the guy in the hostel reception to go to the Budapest Great Market Hall, and I do like markets.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. It was a busy place, full of tourists and locals alike, buying fruit and sausages and pastries and on the platform one floor up they sold Hungarian fast food and overpriced souvenirs. I bought breakfast and tons of apricots.

The hostel that I stayed at for my two nights in Budapest was called The Maverick.

From the street, it didn’t look like much. Like in so many other parts if the city, the square and adjoining street were under heavy construction, with machines making a lot of noise from early morning to late evening. When I arrived here from the train station, I first thought, how is this going to go? Am I going to be able to sleep at all?

But as soon as I entered the building, all noise just disappeared. The building was old and huge, and with an entrance hall like this, I can just imagine what fancy people lived here when it was new.

I could almost hear the silk and satin dresses rustle when I walked up these staircases to the hostel floor.

 

The dorm was pretty similar to most other hostels I’ve been at, many beds crammed into a room, with books in many different languages on shelves of odd furniture. Except for the ceiling being, like, four meters high.

A pretty classy hostel, the Maverick in Budapest.

Mr. P in front of the Great Synagogue.

 

Mr. P in one of the Shoes of the Danube, a monument to the Hungarian Jews that were shot and thrown into the Danube by members of the fascist Arrow Cross Party in 1944. It was made by sculptor Gyula Pauer and film director Can Togay, and consists of 60 pairs of shoes. Also note the Japanese man with the huge camera bag in the background. He just had to walk right into my picture, just like his fellow Japanese man had to disturb the evening mass in the basilica, hadn’t he?

After visiting the Great Synagogue, I continued my walk through a calm evening Budapest, finally pleasantly cool. Unmissable is the St. Stephen’s Basilica, a huge thing in the middle of everything. It was completed in 1906, after 50 years of construction.

Being a Catholic basilisk, it was of course covered in gold decorations on the inside. I happened to be there right at the time of evening mass, and there were signs restricting the tourist access. I was happy just standing in the back, listening to the priest (or whatever they might be called in the Catholic church) singing the sermon and giving the congregation the bread and the wine – but a couple of incredibly annoying Japanese tourists just had to go continue past the restricted tourist access line and take pictures of the dome and the organ. Seriously, where’s the respect?

The square in front of the basilica.

Look, they have Metro(pol) in Budapest too!

Big parts of Budapest is under renovation – I’ve heard documentaries on the radio about all this redoing and street name changing here is part of a nationalistic turn in the Hungarian politics. I have no idea about that, but as a tourist, if felt kind of bummed for not being able to come closer to the magnificent Hungarian Parliament, this spiky piece of neo-Gothic architecture on the east side of the Danube.

I want that on my door!

Once I reached the Danube, with the slight breeze and the evening sun on its way down behind the hills on the other side of the river, the air was perfect. I sat down, watching the water flow by, listening to a radio documentary about Bosnia, 17 years after the signing of the Dayton Agreement. It is not an uplifting story, about how the division of the power into three, to give the Bosniaks, the Croats and the Serbs equal voice, has made most political decisions impossible to make and has consolidated the segregation, rather than beat the religious tensions. I sat there, by the Danube, thinking that soon I would be in Sarajevo and the sun was warm and my feet were aching but that was OK, because I was in the middle of it all. I was in the middle of Europe, this continent heavy with history, all kinds of history – and I was there. A group of young people were practicing the bongo drums just a short way off and thanks to the construction work and the long detour that required one to make to get to this particular part of the path by the river, there weren’t that many people who bothered to come here. I could have stayed there, to see the sun disappear behind the hills – but I was hungry, and I wasn’t sure how to find my way back to the hostel, and I felt I had to start heading back before it got dark.

But right there, sitting by the monument of the shoes by the river, listening to the documentary about Bosnia and the young Hungarians playing the bongos, I felt like I was part of it all. A citizen of Europe.

The Great Synagogue in Budapest is the largest Jewish house of worship in the world outside of New York City and was built in 1859. It is a beautiful building, somber but delicately decorated, and wonderfully cool after walking around in the afternoon heat outside.

 

The Holocaust Memorial behind the synagogue. It’s the Tree of Life, and every leaf has the family name of a victim inscribed upon it. The memorial is standing on one of the mass graves of the people that were murdered by the Nazis in 1944 and 1945.

 

 

 

There is also a small, tranquil cemetery within the synagogue grounds – according to a sign this is where many of the dead were buried during the ghetto days during WWII. The stones were added afterwards, by surviving family members, and put around the graves where the dead was thought to have been buried. Later, the vines were allowed to grow on the graves, as a way to make it a more tranquil resting place.

It is a heavy history that surrounds this synagogue, stories I don’t really know what to do with. Like the incredible, amazing books by Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything is Illuminated”) and Nicole Krauss (“The History of Love”). I can’t grasp it.

It was hot in Budapest too, when I arrived there around midday. And all around the train station, there was construction work going on all around and I couldn’t find the bus stop for the bus that I was supposed to take to my hostel. So I started walking instead, with only a vague feeling of where I should go. But I had a map, and as long as I have a map I’ll always survive.

I did find my way, eventually, and after dumping off all my bags on my hostel bed, I asked the receptionist to tell me where I could find real Hungarian food. Food is important, and I had been told that Hungarian food is amazing.

And seriously, it was. I ordered some kind of stew with paprika, onions, tomatoes, egg and pieces of an incredible Hungarian sausage. It felt simple, like something people would eat at home, but still so good – spicy, but not too hot. Robust, but still fresh.

I finished it all and would gladly have ordered some more, but the young waiters had already looked at me strangely from behind the bar – blue-eyed girl, sitting by herself in a Hungarian restaurant with this huge portion of stew, cleaning up the last drops of sauce from the plate with the bread. I also needed to be able to walk out of the restaurant.

So, I paid and returned out into the Central European heat.

I left Karin’s apartment early this morning. Karin, my lovely couchsurfing host – who probably was the part of my Vienna visit that I enjoyed the most. She cooked dinner for me and had so much to tell about Austrian agriculture and West Africa. And sleeping in her guest room was exactly what I needed, after my long days of sight seeing. And she lived in a very nice, calm neighborhood – close to the center, but still quiet.

But now, I’m sitting in the train bound for Budapest. A guy across the isle from me is reading “Game of Thrones”. A couple of Austrian teenagers are mixing drinks in empty soda bottles, and spraying soda all over their table, laughing loudly. And I just finished a very long and nice conversation with UC, a Indonesian engineer who lives in Los Angeles and is now traveling with his wife, daughters and mother across Europe. He’s been to Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague and Vienna.

And UC said that we seem to be so independent and brave, us European young women. I am the third that he’s met who’s traveling by herself. And I guess, in a sense, maybe we are. Independent, at least. Bravery requires things you’re afraid of doing, but you do them anyway. Riding on a train in a European Union country just doesn’t scare me, not the tiniest little bit.

The Budapest train station.

To round up my sweaty and slightly frustrating day in Vienna, I took the u-bahn northwest to the Donauinsel. It is an artificial island that was created in the middle of the Donau, as a way to prevent flooding in the river. During normal flows, the part of the river that is between the Donauinsel and the northern riverbank is sealed off so that it becomes an artifical lake. Then, when there are high flows in the river (for example during spring when the snow is melting in the Alps, they remove the seals and the water suddenly has double the amount of space to flow through. That’s why, during the high flows earlier this summer, many central European cities were flooded, but Vienna was not.

Donauinsel, the artificial island, has been mad into a narrow and very very long park, where people walk around, skate, bike, lie in hammocks, play music and swim. And it is so very green. It was exactly what I needed, after my long day in the city bustle.

By the time I arrived at the Donauinsel, the sun was already on its way down and the air was considerably cooler than it had been in the middle of the day. I felt that taking a swim in the Donau might make me too cold, so I didn’t. But my feet were sore and letting the small waves wash over them with that icy water felt lovely. Another time, on a hot day like this, I could have spent an entire day on the Donauinsel, reading and then cooling down in the river.

When the sun was almost down, the mosquitoes attacked with full force, though – so I decided to take the u-bahn back to my couchsurfing host Karin. Waiting for the train, I watched the sun setting in a pink impressionist sky behind the mountain tops – a color display that just couldn’t be captured by the camera sensor.

But it’s odd, though, with big cities that aren’t by the ocean. I can’t get perspective. Despite the mountains and the river. And somehow, I feel trapped.