It seems like I am, generally, an incompetent person. For example, for the last hour, as I had my coffee here in Budapest, I attempted to download the fantastic pictures I took yesterday only to discover I had deleted them all. Fortunately for you, we toured quite a few places that did not allow pictures yesterday and so I will try to hyperlink things into my post and see how it goes. But have some low standards here, people, as I’ve never linked anything before and, in fact, have never even used the word hyperlink before.
We started off our day walking from our apartment up to the Buda side of the city to see the Castle Hill. The government building and Matthias Church are over there. You can’t really see the church in the picture…sorry.
Our goal over there was to see The Hospital in the Rock. Okay pause here to let you know I just spent five minutes trying to link a pic to that. You’re all out of luck – Grace, it’s just like watching me try to put that bed together…funny but also pathetic.
At any rate, the Hospital functioned for the last year of WWII and then again during the uprising of 1956, where, upon the death of Stalin, Hungary made an attempt to oust the Soviet rule that had been in place since the end of WWII. The uprising was not successful and the Soviets were here until 1989. The hospital was built to serve about 60 but often had over 200, sometimes with running water and sometimes without. Apparently, with that population, it was often over 100 degrees inside and everyone smoked cigarettes. The overcrowding, the heat, the lack of water…oh and when they ran out of supplies during battle sieges, they cut the gauze bandaging off of the dead bodies and re-used it.
We also toured the Parliament building and, hey, I just inserted some kind of free photo!
A couple of things are hard in Budapest. One is that Ron is always lost. No matter which direction we are coming from, he will get turned around and declare that we need to go the other way. This would be less frustrating if the Hungarians could get ahold of their currency. The currency here is the Forint (which Ron can pronounce more easily than the Polish Zloty) and the problem with it is that there are about 282 Forints to the US Dollar and so I am constantly extremely focused on trying to figure out how much things cost and every time I need to redirect Ron I forget the math I was working on. Dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe (don’t yell at me people – the menu was in English and they had an actual salad) set us back 60,000 forints. Please do not do that math for me.
Will, our Krakow to Budapest driver, who speaks English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and German, was extremely dismissive of the Hungarian language, saying it is impossible to decipher. During the long car ride, I was certain that he was exaggerating but that is not the case. It’s kind of like being back in Turkey, when I was unable to even master the word Hello.
I’m at a loss in the grocery stores here. There are no English labels at all…even a product that has ingredients listed in 8 or 9 languages never gets to English, which seems weird, but oh well. What it means for me is that most of my food purchases – when you delete out my issues with beef, corn, wheat, almonds and honeydew – seem to be cheese and pork sausage sticks. I realize I could use Google translate to work these things out but all my energy is going to figure out the COST of the item. Cheese at 799 Forints, the water at 299, Ron’s Snickers at 500.
We’re headed out to the Opera House today, the House of Terror and the Heroes Square. I’ll leave you with this. It’s a shot of the art/porn bathroom here in our apartment. All four walls are covered in this stuff. It’s quite something. Tomas, the owner of this place, has a show in Milan in August, if you’re enamored of it.
Travels with Valerie 