Tag: Hungary

Budapest #3: The Synagogue, The Elgin Marbles, and the China Syndrome

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Let me tell you straight off, we did not make it into the synagogue in Budapest. Yes, it was on the short list of things we were told we had to do. Yes, we went and found it twice. But on the day we found it and had actually set aside the morning to see the inside of it, we arrived after several hundred other people had the idea to see the inside of it, and got there before us, and stood, in a great scrum, with their shit together a bit more ours.
Crowd outside the synagogue, Budapest

When I was in high school a friend and I went to London to visit another friend whose family had moved there. We dutifully tried to do every touristy thing imaginable, as if filling out a Bingo card, including two whole days at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at spoons and armor, and getting on the wrong train to what ended up being my favorite museum in London (the Imperial War Museum) and being heckled by a crusty old guy who cackled about us being from Shepherd’s Bush. But try as we might we never made it to see the Elgin Marbles, and it became the thing we giggled about the most. Nothing’s more hilarious to teenaged girls than an inside joke.
I also never saw The China Syndrome. The China Syndrome came out in 1979, starring Jane Fonda, who I thought was generally ok in movies, and Jack Lemmon, who I thought was pretty awesome, and I think it was playing at the Esquire Theater, or maybe the Shady Oak, and though I made a big show of saying that I was going to see it, reasoning that it was a movie I might have actually wanted to see, checking the movie times and everything, I used the excuse to go get stoned with someone. I no longer remember who it was. Back then, I did not make up weird specific lies about what I was up to, usually, because I had very good grades and reasonably nice friends and my mother’s attitude was we could do what we wanted as long as we stayed out of trouble, which really meant, fundamentally, that we didn’t get caught. Probably, there was a family thing that I was avoiding going to by inventing the seeing of a movie I never intended to see.
The time I didn’t see The China Syndrome was not the only time I smoked pot in high school, but I have no memory of how I obtained it on any occasion. It seems unlikely I would have known who to get it from. Also, no way would I have spent money on it when there were sweaters to buy. Anyway, The China Syndrome came to stand for lying to your parents so you could go do dumb stuff.
To this day I have not seen The China Syndrome. I did not even know what it was about until I looked it up.
When we meant to go to the big synagogue in Budapest, but didn’t, it was not an Elgin Marbles thing (just not getting around to it), or a China Syndrome thing (saying we would when we never intended to). We had a morning plan and it was seeing the synagogue. We also had an afternoon plan, so the collapse of the morning plan meant immediate implementation of the afternoon plan.

On the tram


Our consolation for missing the synagogue was taking the tram up to the yellow bridge, known as Margit Híd. The people who put streetcars in cities back in the day knew what they were doing; the people of Budapest who have fought to keep their clunky old electric trams know what they are doing.  The afternoon plan, now the primary plan was to walk back over to the Buda side of Budapest to find the Tomb of Gül Baba, an Ottoman dervish and Islamic poet who died in 1541. It is said to be the northernmost Muslim holy place and the oldest historic landmark in all of Budapest. Hungary has been overrun many times in its history, and the Turks had their turn under Suleiman I back in the 1500s.
It is marked not by a fading sign in Hungarian but with one of those man-sized bronze statues they have of all the great men of Hungary, all over the city. There he is: Gül Baba standing at the entrance, on a smallish plinth, and there, just around the bend, the backdrop: a closed and padlocked gate, flanked with an old Budweiser sign and a smaller one for the now-closed café. 
I heard the crow before I saw him

This quiet hilltop was guarded by a single crow, solemnly serving in his uniform of a dark gray jacket and black, black wings, and he cawed and bobbed in genuinely surprise at our arrival.

The tomb is an octagonal little stone building with one door and one window and a domed roof. We were alone there, walking slowly over broken pavement and weeds. Two dogs were having at it, loudly, in a hidden yard, below, their barks piercing the quiet sunshine. A car struggling to get up the narrow, rutted street, bottomed out, scraping violently on the cobblestones. Having been alerted to its presence, we took this to be the right way back down the hill.

Budapest #1

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We’ve been here in Budapest a couple of days and so far we’ve been delighted by things small and not small. The perfect spring weather helps. 

Today, we started with hotel breakfast, where they did not manage to burn the bacon to my liking but it was still delicious. After that, we went for a walk in search of maybe a hat or sunglasses but found ourselves walking one of those streets that shows up in the guidebook as “where you should go shopping” but we would only describe it as “where you should never go under any circumstances unless maybe you wanted to make video footage of terrible restaurant barkers.” Bleh. Tourist traps! But then, we wandered over to the Central Market Hall where they sell, you know, like, real traditional Hungarian cured meats, and the spices, and wines, and all the fruits and the vegetables, like Budapest’s version of the Pike Place Market. It was gorgeous and full of Hungarians. 

Központi Vásárcsarnok


After that, we crossed one of the many scenic and lovely bridges over the Danube to the Buda side of the city, and on an impulse headed up the hill to the citadel. This park is full of crumbling steps and dilapidated railings and increasingly stunning views and an uneven path up to the fortress at the top and I would recommend the climb to anyone just coming to the city and seeking a way to see it all, because you get to see it from above. After that we walked down the other side to Bartók street and chose a random café for lunch and it was great and then, after admiringly watching those yellow streetcar/tram things going by we took one back over to the Pest side where our hotel was and could not figure out how to actually pay for the trip.

BARTÓK BÉLA ÚT

After that, we needed a rest but then after that we went and had high tea and then we got dressed because we had bought opera tickets.

It was the Janáček opera Jenůfa and if you don’t want spoilers about the plot of this opera skip the next paragraph.
If you don’t mind spoilers, I will start off by telling you that I always Google the plot of operas before I see them so I know what I’m getting myself into. I am a good audience member in that I laugh at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts and mostly I need to know in advance when I need to be prepared to be sad or happy or whatever. So let me just say (here come the spoilers) that this is an opera about a dead baby. And it did make me cry, twice, but briefly. I am also a bad audience member in that I get bored easily at the opera, and I’m not what I would consider an actually educated opera fan but I have gone to a bunch of them over the years and I usually enjoy them if they are not too long. I don’t mind extremely sad operas or even the ones where people take a long time dying on stage and singing their guts out at each other (looking at you Tristan and Isolde). 

Anyway, the old opera house in Budapest is glorious and seems gently well-preserved in a not-kept-wrapped-in-plastic-to-preserve-the-freshness kind of way. It’s extravagantly gorgeous, with painted ceilings and a lot of marble and gold leaf, but not gargantuan like the Met in New York. And our tickets were the nicest seats in the house, in a little box on the dress circle, and were about $50 each, which doesn’t even buy cheap seats in New York.
Most of the guidebooks to Budapest will recommend seeing the opera house, because it is very beautiful and special, and, yes, it is those things, but it is also an opera house and you are supposed to see an opera there.

Operaház

So if you go to Budapest, you should not go to the opera house and take a freaking guided tour. You should put on your dress or a tie or both and go to the freaking opera. The tickets will be much less than New York, the opera will be good, you can read the supertitles in English, the sparking wine at intermission will be more than adequate, and then, at the very end, when you are clapping and watching the many singers and principals and the orchestra and the conductor and all the many members of the audience sharing this experience, you can reflect, as I did, upon the many, many hours of musical education and practice that went into this one night happening. And you, like me, might be really grateful that there were people ready to teach all those musicians to sing and/or play, way back like 30-40 years ago.

Barcelona #4: Montjuïc

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There is of course what a person could do and then there is what a person should do and then there is the limp little fact of what a person does do. Today’s limp little fact is that in the presence of the Traveling Companion doing what he did yesterday (sleep until late afternoon), I did the same (sit around the hotel room) without the presence of mind to order coffee, go get coffee, or do anything else at all. I know I will be sorry on my way home that I spent a vacation in as nice a place as this doing very little at all, but there it is, the limp little fact that most vacations are for loafing.
Outside, it is perfectly sunny and 57F. The locals are wearing boots and buttoned overcoats with mufflers wrapped carefully around their throats. For about 3€ you can have a café con leche and a ham and cheese croissant, and it will be the best you’ve ever had. You can then sit at your tiny table and read and pick at crumbs on your plate for as long as you would ever want.  Outside, everyone looks like they’re freezing, but they’re over-reacting.
Once I harassed my Traveling Companion enough to get him out of bed, we took the subway to Montjuïc, an urban mountain park in western Barcelona. The subway beat us last time, but this time we mastered it. The ticket kiosks only accept my cash and not my credit card, and consumed all of my smaller bills and coins, but we got our tickets and got to where we wanted to go. The menuing is pretty one-dimensional in these kiosks, offering baffling pictures of the various tickets available, and most of it is so poorly translated into English as to remain unknowable. From the Paral’lel Stop (which really does have that peculiar apostrophe), you can transfer to the funicular railroad which lifts its passengers to a point about half-way up the mountain. From here, you transfer to a cable car, which requires more tickets but round-trip is an option for once.
Half-way up, we visited the Fundació Joan C, a museum displaying the breadth and depth of Miró’s work, from sketches, collages, pen and ink, and sculptures to the bulk of his efforts: paintings. I always loved Miró; his work was so free and slightly surreal and experimental and just cool. My Traveling Companion found his work to be one-dimensional and really not very interesting.  Me:  “Oh, I love this!” Him: “Meh.” At least his admission to that museum was free.
Next, we took the cable-car up to the top of Montjuïc, to the castle on the top. I did not know while we were visiting that there is a long history of executions held there, from anarchists and Catalan nationalists to Republicans and Fascists. The spot offers commanding views of most of Barcelona, including the port and the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. Best of all, there were magpies in the trees.
Yesterday in my boredom I read a book about the basilica we had visited the day before. Today I am back to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I haven’t gotten very far.  My father used to claim that he and his buddies wanted to go to Hungary in 1956 to fight the Soviets, not unlike what Orwell and Hemingway did in Spain. I am almost certain my father never seriously wanted to go.