A Wrap-up of Prague and a Bite of Hungary

Yes, that pun was intentional.  Sue me.  :P

In case you hadn’t already figured it out already, this is Alex writing again.  :)

This trip is progressing quite quickly now, it seems.  Jime already wrote to you guys TWICE about Prague, and I still have more to say. 

Edit:  A LOT more, apparently.  This is definitely my longest post yet.  You might want to go grab a drink and get comfy.

We are now in Budapest.  So, I’ll just give you the last few bits about Prague, because they were significant, and the first taste of Hungary (there, I did it again!  I’m like some crazy punning machine!).

In the last few days of Prague, we did NOT slow down very much.  One of the coolest things we saw in all of the Czech Republic was actually OUT of Prague, though.  We took a train out to a tiny little mining town called Kutna Hora.  In Kutna Hora lies one of the most intriguing, unique, and macabre places I’ve ever been.  It’s called the Sedlec Osuary… more affectionately known as “The Bone Church”. 

In the 13th century, the Abbot of the local monastery went to Israel.  When he came home, he brought back with him some dirt from Gogaltha… the holy land… and sprinkled it on the grounds of the local cemetery… essentially turbo-consecrating it.  Consequently, everybody and their mother in Central Europe wanted to be buried there from then on.  The place started to fill up… fast.  And then came the black plague.  Suddenly, the turbo-consecrated cemetery became packed like sardines.  Around 1500, they built an Osuary there, and they dug up a lot of the bones during the construction to make room.  Long story short (longer version is here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary), they decided to get creative with the bones… and turned them into decorations for inside the building.  There’s a chandelier that supposedly contains all of the bones within the human body (we failed to find the phalanges).  They also made towering pyramids of bones and skulls (with no glue or nails!!), and even a boney coat of arms.  In total, in this church, are estimated to be bones from somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people.  It’s SPECTACULARLY creepy, but also fantastic and unique in the world, and was worth every minute of the 1.5 hour train ride to get there (if you’re in Prague some day and want to go, it’s actually really easy to get there, and oddly… there’s a freaking SUPERMARKET right in the main train station, so packing a picnic was never easier).

(I think Jime mentioned something about it being challenging, when you’re traveling, to figure out what foods are what, when you don’t understand the language.  We eventually figured out that this was butter, but what we actually saw on the store shelves was… Vajkreme.   I may be into SOME unusual things, but putting Vajkreme on my toast is not one of them.)

(Also, ketchup comes in tubes.  That’s just weird.  It’s almost as weird as sour cream in a bag.)

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(And now, behold the awesomeness and macabre wonder that is Kutna Hora)

A couple other really cool things we saw there were:

They recently discovered an old Silver mine shaft.  So, we got to take a 1.5 hour tour of this old mining cave.  When they gave us lights and helmets, that was familiar, but when they also gave us little white frocks to wear (historically representative).. I thought those were just a gimmick.  They weren’t.  It turns out this particular cave network was not of the typical “widened for your touring enjoyment” type.  At least not entirely.  They mentioned that there would be parts that were very low (navel level) and narrow (“walk-sideways and suck in your gut” narrow).  They didn’t mention that these happened at the same time, and that this one passage lasted for a good 100 meters.  I had fun with it, but Jime’s back did not enjoy the experience.  Fortunately, the happy little frocks protected our clothes at least.  Still, it was a really neat experience, and our guide was fun.  Well, the main tourguide was in Czech.  But the guy bringing up the rear spoke very good English, so we hung out with him, and he was a good sport, which made the trip more fun.

And now for a  bit of randomness.  One day we were taking a walk around the city of Prague, around the area of the Old Town Square.  We were kind of off course, walking in a sort of back-alley area, but didn’t care because we were just enjoying the buildings and the cobbled sidewalks and roads (which Jimena really likes, btw.  The small-block stone patterns are all over the place is Czech, and the really add a wonderful character to the whole picture of the place), and knew at least roughly where we were going (if maybe not the most efficient route from the tram we had just gotten off of).  Well, right before we came back out into a more public space, I spotted something really cool. Well, cool for me.  Not so cool for the guy who was the source of my amusement.  You see, his car was being towed for some sort of parking violation.  But… it was towed in EPIC style…. by a fucking CRANE on a truck!  No fussing with trying to get in the car, or seeing if they could un-do the emergency brake.  They just picked that truck right the fuck up!  We got there right before they started the lift, and it was… it was one of those unexpected, perfect moments that you hope for when you travel.

Elsewhere on this same walking day trip, we went to see a humorous statue from a famous local artist named Cerny.  It seems Cerny is famous for making art that mocks other famous works, or other things that people typically worship in town.  One really neat example is based on a statue that supposedly lives in the National Museum.  It’s of Wenceslas on a horse.  You know… Good King Wenceslas looked down?  That guy.  Wenceslas is a local hero in Prague.   Go ahead and wiki him for his history.  I’ll wait. 

OK, so, Cerny took this statue, and flipped it on its head, as it were.  He made another statue of Wenceslas riding his horse… except that the horse is dead, and hanging upside down, and Wenceslas is riding on his belly.  That statue now hangs in an old shopping mall, and has become a tourist attraction by its own right.

To wrap up our Prague story, I spent my 37th birthday there!  You may have seen one or two references by me on Facebook mentioning how happy I was to be spending my birthday in a city famous for their beer consumption.  Well, they’re also somewhat famous for their very unhealthy food.  For example, a couple days before my birthday, I dined on a quality fried cheese sandwich, again inspired by Anthony Bourdain.   Sounds great, right??  I won’t lie.  It was TERRIBLE.  Completely flavorless, both in bread and cheese, and not even any sauce on mine (I did add some mustard, but it was of the too little, too late variety).  It was completely NOT worth the Instant Coronary Roulette game one plays to eat it. 

(Do not eat this.  It tastes worse than it looks.)

But anyway, back to my birthday.  For lunch, Jime found me a really nice place in the Mala Strana neighborhood, in the shadow of the big castle.  Big touristy area, but this place was well-reviewed, and had pretty great prices.  We had roast duck, and wild boar, and I of course washed it down with a BIG FUCKING BEER.  It was awesome.  No, there weren’t any more Sauerkraut Fucking Pancakes with this meal, but it was still REALLY good.

For dinner, we were GOING to go to the Prague Beer Festival, but… the person we were going to meet up with flaked, and Jime found me a more fun alternative.  She found me a Couchsurfing meetup for Beer Tasting!  I had many local beers, including a really good Imperial IPA (lovely hop aroma flavor, not too bitter, high alcohol content… cost about $2.50).  For bar food, I also had some obligatory sausage, Jime got some ribs, and somebody else let me try a local favorite called “pickled cheese”.  It may sound terrible, but “pickled cheese” is GREAT beer food.  In fact, I dare say at least 75% of the Czech diet is probably really good beer food.  It’s a lovely country, really.  I could live there… if I had to.

But now we’re in Budapest (pronounced like Budapesht).  Budapest, if you didn’t know, is actually split into effectively two different cities:  Buda and Pest.  Buda is very hilly and green.  Pest is flat (like a pancake, or pizza), heavily-developed, and has about as many trees as San Diego, California.  On a free walking tour, we learned an easy way to remember which side you’re on is with an easy mnemonic:  Big Belly Buda and Pancake Pizza Pest.   The two cities are divided, much like Portland, Oregon, by a big river.  Also like Portland, both sides are connected by several bridges, so the city feels well-connected.  Here, of course, the river is the Danube.   Yep, just like the Blue Danube in the song by Johan Strauss, which you’ll remember from the space docking scene in 2001 (Doot doooo doooo DOOT Dooooooo…. DOOT DOOT… doot doot).  As a side note, Jime and I just waltz-walked across that river today, singing that song endlessly.  Some days, you just have to be silly.

At any rate, our walking tour took us past the fucking ORNATE and gigantic Parliament Building (the second largest in Europe, I believe) as well as St Stephen’s Basilica on the Pest side, then over to the Buda side, and on up the hill to the Castle and the Palace, and the Cathedal of St Matthias.  SPECTACULAR views from up there!  After our tour, our guides took us to a hidden little cafeteria where we had a lovely lunch and a chat.  Turns out our guides are also Couchsurfers!  Well… sort of.  They’re not very active with it.  Still, we enjoyed both of them, so we encouraged them both to come visit us in Costa Rica some day.  We also learned of a really cute way to declare your enduring love for somebody here.  You have a lock engraved with both of your names (or initials), and lock it to a fence, or a bridge or something, and then chuck the key into the Danube (which is doing wonders for the water quality here, I assure you).   We’ve seen these locks  all across Europe by now, but it seems the trend started here.  We went to one of the more popular sites.  Even as heavily-used as this is, it apparently pales in comparison with the main site in another city.

We did our own little touring today.  We went out to see a really neat cave, formed by the hot water vents that make all the fancy turkish thermal baths here.  The cave was not the biggest I’ve ever seen, but it was definitely big.  It was also different from every other one I’ve ever seen.  All the ones I’ve seen before were either limestone or volcanic tubes.  So, it was really interesting getting to see different types of features.  Also, it was wheelchair accessible, which meant that it was easy for Jime to walk in.  No ducking, twisting or heavy bending.  Yay for Jime’s back!  Alas, no happy white frocks, but waddayagonnado?

After the cave, we headed down towards the river and grabbed a quick lunch (with DELICIOUS dessert!) in a park right across from the Parliament building, which is magnificent to behold, but which we shall not tour until tomorrow.   We’ve really been enjoying the desserts here, so we tried 3.  The first two were great.  In fact, they were so sweet, tey made the coke taste bland.  The second one, we were worried that it might be butter cream, which I like OK, but Jimena does not like at all.  So, she had me try it, which I was happy to do, because it looked delicious.  I took a big bite and… it was not butter cream.  It was butter.  I bit… a mouthful of butter.  As my friend Bob would say… That shit ain’t right.  On the plus side, at least our coke tasted good again.

(Two delicious desserts, across from the beautiful Parliament building)

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(This LOOKS delicious, but it was NOT delicious.  Not delicious at all!)

After lunch, we went to another area of town on the Buda side and saw a “Cave Church”.  It was amusing, but a bit anticlimactic after the “real” cave. If you wiki it, the history of the “Budapest Cave Church” is a bit interesting, but the place itself wasn’t the end of the world for us.  It’s weird and gimmicky on the inside, but prettier from the outside.

Speaking of gimmicks… we finally got to see a Body Worlds exhibit!  Or rather, a blatant copy of it called The Human Body.  In any case, they used the same plastination process as Body Worlds, and provided equally intricate representation of internal veins and arteries along with the stylistically posed bodies of dead men.  With the couple dead women in the show… they were not so stylistic.  It’s like they didn’t have any idea how to handle a woman’s body.  It was actually quite sad.  After about 10 men posed in energetic, sports- and arts-themed scenarios… the first woman they showed was there to demonstrate being fat.  She was just hung there, unceremoniously, and she didn’t even have a FACE!  WTF?  The second “Woman” wasn’t even a woman.  It was a completely unrecognizable “chunk” of a woman, used to demonstrate… wonder of all wonders… human reproduction.  So yes, women, according to this curator, are apparently inconvenient beings whose only function is to reproduce, and even that wasn’t clear.  Obviously, Jimena was the one who spotted this trend at first, but after the 7th “male” body in a row, we were both on the look-out for what the first woman would be.  We assumed the reproduction demo would be it, and that would have been offensive and ignorant enough.  The “fat” demo took it to a new level.  That was just… a massive failure of gender comprehension.  Other than that, the exhibit was pretty goddam neat!

(The conductor, for my band geek friends)

(The intricate network of blood vessels in a leg)

And now, some words about our sponsors (aka our hosts here)…

Our first few nights in Budapest, we stayed with a guy named Andras, who picked us up from a Last Minute Couch Request forum online.  We had written about 15 individual requests for this city, but hadn’t heard hardly a peep from potential hosts.  We finally gave up and reserved a hostel, so we’d at least have a place to go when we landed.  Of course, 5 minutes later, I get the email from Andras, offering up his place for the first 4 nights!  Well, if we hadn’t booked the hostel, he probably would never have found us.  :P

On our first night with him, he took us out to his favorite local restaurant, which turns out was actually more like a private dining club.  Apparently, you can’t just walk into this place off the street.  You have to know somebody.  In fact, you can’t even SEE this place off the street. It’s down some poorly-lit stairs under a building.  At any rate, the food there was GREAT!  And pretty cheap too.  We each ordered something different from the local flavors and shared everything.  It was a great start.  The next night, we stayed in with Andras and cooked some Porkolt… basically a traditional Hungarian dish that everybody else in the world calls Goulash.  Here, the real Gulyash is more of a soup.  We also made a really interesting pasta to put the stew on… sort of little balls of dough.  We made the pasta from scratch, and made the balls with a special device that to me looks exactly like a flat cheese grater.  The idea was, you poured some dough on the cheese grater, then used a little metal spatula/paint scraper to scrape the dough across the holes, and let little dough balls fall out… right into the boiling water below.  They take about 2 minutes to cook, and you know when they’re done, because they float.  The consistency reminded us a bit of gnocchi.   For our part, we showed him how to make our favorite bread recipe.  He loved it.  We loved it.  It was a great dinner!

Speaking of really great dinners, our 2nd hosts (where we are until tomorrow morning) have made us TWO really fantastic dinners.  The first night was probably the penultimate Gulyash (soup).  The spicing was strong, and deep, but not hot, with paprika (Which, it seems, should be pronounced like POP-ree-kah, not like pap-REE-kah.  Apparently, in Hungarian, the emphasis is always on the first syllable… not even just in paprika, but apparently in EVERY word.  See, you even learn foreign languages with me).  Nandor and Idliko are wonderful, warm, inviting hosts.  Idliko doesn’t speak more than a couple words of English, so Nandor has been doing a lot of translating, but he’s very good at it, and doesn’t seem to get tired.  Despite that small language barrier, we have still felt a really nice connection with both of them.  Their warmth radiates out beyond language.

Last night, we had dinner with some other CS folks at the home of a 3rd “almost” host, name Zsuzsana.  Don’t even try to pronounce that.  Suzy is close enough.  We made bread, some chinese boys from Singapore made some soy sauce chicken wings, Zsuzsi made some really neat fruit dumplings, and a Colombian guy brought coke.  Much like our new friends Juan and Miguel Angel from Barcelona, we REALLY hit it off with Zsuzsi.  We stayed talking until late into the night, when her actual couchsurfer arrived (which was part of the reason she couldn’t host us to stay, even though she wanted to).  We will be making an effort to spend at least one more day hanging out with her.

OK, here we are… the last topic of conversation:  The Lemurs.  If you haven’t already seen this mentioned on facebook, the story is this: we got to pet lemurs at the zoo.  SEVERAL of them.  There were 8 Ring-Tailed Lemurs in this particular exhibit at the Budapest zoo near Hero’s Square.   But unlike any other zoo I’ve ever seen or heard of, these Lemurs were not behind glass.  They were behind a tiny little fence that a lemur doesn’t even blink to jump over.  Or, they could just walk under it.  You see, this exhibit was apparently designed as a lemur “Encounter” area, if you will.  This was the entire reason we came to this zoo.  And this is why I love couchsurfing.

The fuck you say?  What’s that got to do with petting lemurs at the zoo?  Get back to the goddam lemurs!  I will, I will… just a sec.  Remember my birthday?  It was about a week ago (yes, I’m saying it took you a week to read this far).  Well, at the little beer tasting CS party we went to, I chatted up this one gal who had just been to Budapest 2 weeks prior.  Well, she’s the one who told us about this zoo, and about the lemurs.  For some reason, she didn’t realize how freaking incredible and rare the lemur thing was.  I’m guessing she was developmentally disabled.  Or dead drunk.  Those are really the only viable excuses.  In any case, at least she mentioned it!  So, because we are wise, and because I was not THAT dead drunk, lemurs instantly became our most important activity for this country. 

So yes, we went into this exhibit, and there they were… Eight Leaping Lemurs (Leaping Lemurs, Batman)!  Two of them were babies and one or two were still juveniles.  In the beginning, they were just hanging out in the middle of their lawn area.  But they were still cute.  They jump around like VERY playful and energetic kittens.  But.. like… the Michael Jordan of kittens.  They are AWESOME to watch!  And they are DEADLY cute.  And when somebody brought in a bit of apple, they came right out and took it from him, right next to us!  That was the first time I got to pet one.  I was hesitant and cautious at first, but while I won’t go as far as saying they enjoyed it like a cat likes to be pet, they were otherwise completely nonchalant about it.  And that was enough.  Not getting bit was enough.  These super-kitties are VERY used to people.

After the dude ran out of apples, and eventually when the crowd died down a bit, we sat down to be quiet and just watch for a while.  They we saw them eating berries from a bush right behind us, and we got the idea that… hell.. we may not have apples, but we apparently have berries.  And berries aren’t foreign foods.  They wouldn’t have them in here if they were bad for them, right?  So, when nobody else was around, we picked some.  And they came!  The lemurs came to see us!  They ate berries out of our hands, and off the ground in front of us, and we both got to pet them.  Lots of them.  Even the babies!  They even climbed on and over us a bit in their amusement and joy.

I won’t lie, this was one of the coolest experiences in my life.  If we had to cancel the trip tomorrow, this alone would have made the entire trip worth it.  This alone is worth a ticket to Budapest.  This… is pretty much the coolest and most joyful goddam thing that’s ever happened to us.

<Insert jealous outrage here>

And that’s all I have to say.  I can’t top that.  Other cool shit will happen to us on this trip, I know.  But that shit was amazing.  I gotta leave it there for today.