Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

The title of this entry is a phrase probably not commonly heard in Hungary twenty years ago, but today, that’s the one we used to purchase what we wanted from the sales kiosk at Szoborpark, Budapest’s Statue Park on the outskirts of the city.

After the fall of communism, the communist statues erected by the old order were removed and transported to this park, where they now form a strange iconic graveyard, a reminder of times (not so long) gone by. It’s a strange place to visit, and the statues are even uglier than I had expected, but it was a worthwhile trip and something unlikely to be found anywhere else. A bus goes there directly from Deák tér and returns you to the same spot, giving you about an hour in the park.

Sarah’s lunch idea brought us to the restaurant of the New York Palace Hotel, whose opulent interior looked like Donald Trump had teamed up with Liberace to design it. Actually, that suggests ghastly taste, but the interior was actually very beautiful; it’s just that it was unbelievably exquisite in style and execution. Most of the guidebooks are missing this place, by the way, as it reopened its doors only one month ago after several years of refurbishment.

After lunch, we heeded Bas‘s advice and headed back over to the city park for a dip in the Széchenyi Baths. We weren’t disappointed. The experience was much less confusing than at the Gellért and the baths themselves were superb, especially the outdoor ones.

The main non-swimming pool has a circular area, where the current drives you around and around. It’s a lot of fun. In the very centre of the circle, there’s a rink, where jets bubble air upwards, giving one the feel of a therapeutic massage. Wonderful!

Eloïse had the time of her life in the water, splashing around and trying to float. She’s a little overconfident at present and kept trying to wrest herself free of our grip, as if she were simply descending from a bed (another trick she both started and mastered during this trip). We had to keep a tight hold on her to avoid letting her dunk herself.

The thermal pools would have been a little too warm for her, starting at 36°C and rising from there, so we pretty much stuck to the basic pool, which was a lovely temperature. Sarah and I each spent a few minutes in the thermal pools, with the other one of us looking after Eloïse. Juggling a baby definitely makes it harder to enjoy certain pastimes.

And so our five day stay in the Hungarian capital draws to a close.

What Budapest concedes to Prague in small-town friendly atmosphere and instant appeal, it makes up for with its fantastic thermal pools and divine cuisine. Nevertheless, for me, Prague still has the edge as the city I would choose to live in, if I were looking for a new home.

And what is home, anyway? It’s become rather an abstract concept to us. Whilst Amsterdam is our administrative base, we have as much reason to be wherever we happen to be on any given day of this trip as back in the Dutch capital.

The feeling is a liberating one. There are no material possessions that we miss and no obligations to tether us. Speaking personally, I have my computer, my personal jukebox, my girlfriend, my daughter and our car here. What else might I need? With each passing day that we are still away from home and travelling, the desire to just keep on travelling grows stronger.

Eloïse, too, is a natural traveller. She is stimulated and invigorated by each day’s new sights, sounds, smells and tastes. For example, she has shown herself to have quite an eclectic palate, enjoying slices of lemon (including the rind), green olive spread and cold strawberry soup. She’s had so many new things to try during this trip; it’s a joy to see her face light up when she discovers a new taste that she likes.

She’s also been a fantastic icebreaker for us, a real social lubricant. Everywhere we go, people of varying backgrounds, languages and cultures want to touch her and enjoy her company. We’re so privileged that Mother Nature brought her our way. I look at her sometimes and wonder how I could possibly have had a hand in something so beautiful.

Anyway, tomorrow we check out of the wonderful Kempinski and head north a very short distance to the Baroque town of Szentendre.

I’ll be very sorry to leave Budapest. There’s enough to do here that you could easily fill a couple of weeks without really thinking about it. Just taking the waters in the city’s many baths is something to be enjoyed time and time again.

If we didn’t leave now, however, we’d take root here; we like it a lot. Buda, with its many historic buildings and old town, is at the touristic heart of the city. No visit would be complete without visits to the Mátyás Church, Halászbástya (Fishermen’s Bastion) and Budavári palota (Buda Palace). We saw those yesterday, when we took a #16 bus from Erzsebét tér to Várhegy (a.k.a. The Vár or Castle Hill). For breathtaking panoramas of the city, also, one has to ascend Gellért-hegy to the Citadella and Liberation Monument.

Then there’s Pest, with its cafés, coffee houses, restaurants and shopping; but not to forget St. Stephen’s Basilica, the city park, Parliament, the zoo and innumerable other sights and attractions, not to mention the amazing architecture that abounds all over the city.

Anyway, as stated, tomorrow night we’ll be in Szentendre, as we slowly start to head north-east, back towards the Slovakian border.

The lyric that forms the title of this entry is borrowed from Killing Joke and very appropriate.

We’re spending our third night in the Hungarian capital of Budapest tonight. We had planned four nights in total, but have already decided to extend our stay to five. We’re staying in the luxurious Kempinski on the Pest side of town, where we have a lovely room and just about all the amenities you could wish for. In the course of this trip, we’ve stayed at just about every kind of pension and hotel you can imagine, but this place is definitely the most upmarket. We’re feeling very pampered.

Budapest is a fairly large city, much larger than Amsterdam or Prague, for example. Consequently, it’s taking us a lot of time to get things done. We were also quite poorly prepared for this city, having done most of our reading on Czechia and Slovakia. It really does take quite a lot of advance research to get the most out of a place and, one way or another, we hadn’t found the time to do it on Budapest. Consequently, we’ve done few touristy things thus far and have scarcely ventured over to the Buda side of town.

We sauntered along the very elongated and wide Andrássy utca this morning to the famous Gundel restaurant, apparently a Budapest institution, for its reputedly top-notch brunch. And a top-notch nosebag it was, too, I must say.

There was a minor hiccough getting in, as we were dressed in shorts, but we came prepared! After zipping on some trouser legs, we were into the dining-room and sidling along into a nice window seat, scarely noticed by the overdressed rich people all around us.

After that, it all becomes rather a blur, as we were waited on hand-and-foot, and made innumerable visits to the starter tables, the main dish tables and, ultimately — you know it — the dessert section.

The concept of time having become meaningless somewhere around the 27th dessert, we waddled out of the Gundel some unspecified amount of time later, our brains sated, our waistlines inflated. It was warm outside, so off came the unzippable trouser legs once again, their purpose amply served.

We headed directly for St Stephen’s Basilica (Szent István-bazilika) and spent quite some time looking around the cathedral, including a visit to the Chapel of the Holy Right Hand (Szent Jobb-kápolna), where the thousand year old mummified hand of Hungary’s first Christian ruler lies at the back of the chapel in a case, for all to marvel and cringe at.

After a visit to the hotel’s spa this afternoon, we were feeling lazy, so we opted for dinner at the hotel restaurant, which turned out to be nothing short of excellent. Rarely have I eaten so well during the course of a single day.

As I type this, I’m sitting in the hotel’s lounge downstairs, having just enjoyed an excellent after-dinner cappucino. Sarah’s upstairs, putting Wiesje to bed and watching today’s stage of the Tour de France.

Incidentally, you can follow the Tour using Google Earth, together with the appropriate KML file. Very cool, indeed. And what an interesting Tour it promises to be, too; with Basso and Ullrich dropped at the last minute on suspicion of doping, and Vinokourov also out, due to a decimated team (five of his team-mates having appeared on the list of suspected doping users), it has to be anyone’s race this year: a bizarre turn of events to be sure. I wish we could be in Valkenburg for the finish of the third stage, but we’re having such a good time here. Oh, well.

Yesterday, we went to the famous Gellért Baths, just over the bridge in Buda. Eloïse loved the various pools and had a big smile on her face the whole time we were there.

The guidebook warns that the pools are confusing, and they certainly are. There is very little information in English, and the information that they do have is at odds with reality. Inside, there’s an endless series of pathways and passages, and renting a towel requires having money on you after you have changed and headed out to the pools in your swimming trunks (your wallet now safely tucked away in a locker back on the other side of the building). It’s also a complete mystery to me where one books and pays for a massage (not that we had time for one on this occasion).

In the end, we gave up trying to rent towels and opted to drip-dry. It was so warm that it was scarely an inconvenience, anyway.

The weather has cooled off in the last few days, rendering life much more pleasant for us. May the stint long continue.

The Netherlands are out of the World Cup and the Dutch cabinet fell a couple of days ago. With that and the Tour de France doping scandal, I’m wondering what else will happen before it’s time to head home.

We picked up a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Austria yesterday, so we’re now ready to take on Vienna about a week from now. Before then, we’ll be travelling to a couple more Hungarian towns and back to Slovakia to visit the capital, Bratislava.

I have to get a haircut in the morning; then it’s on to more sight-seeing. So much to do and only a couple more days in the city in which to do it.

We’ve now been on the road for a full month, have left some 3200 km behind us, done several loads of laundry en route, and made it as far as Eger in Hungary. This marks Eloïse’s tenth country in thirteen months, not including our silly excursion into Ukraine earlier this week. What a shame she won’t remember any of this when she’s older!

It’s still crotch-squelchingly hot, at about 33°C, but the weather forecast brings hope for the coming days. The key word here is fagylalt, which was zmrzlina in Slovakia; better known to you, I suspect, as ice-cream. One has to fend off the heat somehow.

This is actually our second day here, having arrived at about 13:00 yesterday from Rožňava. We had lunch and spent the afternoon walking around town until the heat forced us inside.

Today, we ascended the 97 steps of the town’s very slender minaret and then attended an organ concert at Eger’s cathedral, the second largest in the country.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll amble over to the Lyceum (we were too late today) to see the Diocesan Library and the Camera Obscura, before driving on to the capital, Budapest.

Even fewer people here seem to speak English than in Slovakia, which is saying something. After almost a month in Czechia and Slovakia, whose languages are quite similar, I’d grown quite accustomed to seeing certain words on menus and such, and using certain phrases. Suddenly, all of that knowledge has been rendered useless and we find ourselves staring at words that we can scarcely begin to utter. No matter, another few days and we’ll have mastered this tongue-defying language!

I’d like to write at length about the Domica cave system we visited near Rožňava, and the Aggtelek, which is actually part of the same system, but just over the border on the Hungarian side, but I’m in the hotel foyer and the meter is running, as they say. Suffice it to say that the caves were utterly breathtaking and I’ll write about them and many other things when we eventually return home.

With the caves that we want to visit in the vicinity of Rožňava being closed on Mondays, we had another day to kill in Košice. Because we’d already seen most of what Košice had to offer, however, we spent only a couple of hours there before driving out to the eastern borderlands, where we hoped to find some picturesque landscapes and wooden churches.

It’s pretty rural out there, I have to say. The one wooden church that we tried to look at turned out to be made of stone. That’s odd; exactly the same thing happened to us the other day, near Bardejov.

With the border just ten or so kilometres east of us, the proximity proved irresitible (to me, at least), so we pulled out our passports and headed up to the border crossing with Україна (or should I say Ukraine?).

That proved to be biting off rather a lot to chew. To put it mildly, a lot of bureaucracy was involved in crossing that border. It took quite some time, involved lots of paperwork, much confusion, some consternation, and more than our fair share of stop-start-reverse driving. It’s not every day your name needs to transliterated, using the Cyrillic alphabet.

Ultimately, though, we made it across and headed for the nearby town of Ужгород (that’s Užhorod in Slovak and Uzhhorod [transliterated from Ukrainian] or Uzhgorod [transliterated from Russian] in English).

The heat was sweltering today; about 34°C. It was already about 15:00 by the time we got across the border and we were afraid of getting stuck on the way back (not to mention the fact that we had no гривня (Hryvnia) on us for lunch), so we basically drove through the town and then headed straight back to the border, without so much as getting out of the car and setting foot on Ukrainian soil.

Back at the border crossing, we were right to have been concerned. A mammoth convoy of lorries and cars was queued up into the distance, their occupants walking around in the sun, as nothing was going anywhere.

With Eloïse getting fidgety in the back of the car, I decided to drive around the queueing traffic and squeeze my way alongside it to the front. This rather surprised the Ukrainian border guards in army fatigues, but it had the desired effect. We were told to drive to the front of the queue, where we were stamped out of Ukraine. Then, we were told to drive to the front of the next queue, to be processed back into Slovakia.

Once at Slovak border control, I got talking to a very nice border guard with very good English. It turned out he wasn’t Slovakian at all, but German. He usually works at Munich Airport, but had been temporarily stationed here to keep an eye out for football hooligans trying to make their way to the World Cup via unlikely routes. Well, needless to say, he hadn’t spotted any so far, and he commented that hooligans tend to fly, not drive to Germany via Ukraine, Slovakia and Czechia. I think it was all one big holiday to him.

He explained to me that the slowness of the border crossing has a couple of causes. Firstly, they don’t yet distinguish between EU and non-EU residents, so everyone has to stand in the same queue.

Secondly, he told me that most of the Ukrainians coming across actually make the trip three times a day, carrying large numbers of cigarettes and a full tank of petrol (some 300 litres in a large vehicle). Once on the Slovakian side, they sell the cigarettes and petrol, syphoning it out of their tank. The queues we saw apparently remain long all through the night and, at their worst, can take eight to ten hours to process.

You can bet that I’m very glad I decided to be bold and drive around the commercial traffic. Otherwise, we might still be there now!

On the way back, we stopped off at the Tesco in Michalovce to stock up on supplies, then continued to our final destination of Rožňava, arriving there at about 18:15.

We’ll visit one or two caves tomorrow, then spend a second night here, before heading into Hungary Wednesday morning. Mercifully, our hotel room is rather cooler than the outside temperature.

And so it came to pass that Eloïse obtained the first stamp in her passport, on a rather pointless jaunt into Ukraine. A futile exercise, to be sure (blame Papa), but an interesting experience, nonetheless. Moral of this story: don’t lose sight of the fact that border crossings outside the EU are not necessarily one small step for those who would traverse them; especially land border crossings.

Thanks, by the way, to Nick and Onno for sending us their recommendations for Hungary.

I’ll make this brief, as I’m in an Internet café in Košice in south-east Slovakia, about 50 km from the border with Hungary and 100 km from the one with Ukraine.

We’re here for two nights, this being the second, after having overnighted in the delightful little town of Bardejov, at an absolutely fabulous pension.

The high point of Bardejov was, undoubtedly, the National Ukrainian Folk Choir, who were singing, playing music and dancing on a stage on the main square as we walked into town for the first time. The concert lasted for an hour, and the music and singing were absolutely stunning and made it very tempting to continue to drive eastwards.

Earlier that day, we had been rafting in the rain at Červený Kláštor in the Pieniny National Park. That was a lot of fun.

Here in Košice, Slovakia’s next largest town after Bratislava, it’s a very sticky 31°C; too hot to really contemplate doing much at all. The town is very nice, though, and there’s an excellent ice-cream parlour on the main square (as, indeed, there was in Bardejov). They do know how to make good ice-cream (or zmrzlina, as it’s known locally) in this country.

We’ll probably spend tomorrow night in Rožňava, just this side of the Hungarian border, so that we can visit some more caves on Tuesday. Then, that afternoon, we’ll drive down into Hungary, where we’ll spend somewhere between five and seven days, including a visit to the capital, Budapest.

After that, we’ll return to Slovakia and visit the capital of Bratislava, before heading to Vienna in Austria, and then back towards the Czech Republic, to take in towns in West and South Bohemia. In short, there’s still lots to come on ths trip!

Hungary threatens to be even hotter than it is here. We can only hope that the weather takes a turn for the cooler.