Hungary & Italy Part 2 of 2 (Italy)

 

Alright, now that we’re leaving Istanbul, I can finally start to write about Italy.  Technically, I’m still sort of on schedule. I’m still in the next country writing about the previous country.  Of course, none of that will be true in a few hours, but hey… at least I started on time!

So, I mentioned before, but Italy was a bit too rushed.  I think if we had to do it over again, maybe a minimum of 5 days in each city would have been enough.  Any less than that, and you feel like you can’t relax!   Also, in our first stop there, Padova, we didn’t have Wifi internet, so it was a bit more challenging to research and plan ahead.  Fortunately, our hosts were VERY lovely people, and they let us borrow their computer a few times so we could check email and buy train tickets (which they helped us figure out how to do).

But despite all that… we really did enjoy Italy!  I think our favorite spot was probably Venice.   Every city had things we enjoyed very much, of course, but there’s just something magical about Venice as a whole that really captured our hearts.  They place feels like a real-life Disneyland!

From Padova, you take a 1-hour train to Venice.  It costs 4 Euros each (about $5 or 2500 colones).  The train drops off right at the main canal, so when you get out of the train station… WHAM!  VENICE!  You are immediately surrounded by gorgeous buildings, beautiful bridges, and bright green waterways, full of all the various canal boats:  Gondolas, ferries, motor boats and water taxis.  And of course, you’re also surrounded by thousands of people.  Venice is a VERY popular tourist destination.  But you know what?  It’s totally worth it.

Following the suggestions of our hosts in Padova, Davide and Alessandra, we decided our first task was NOT to see any specific places, but just to get lost.  Getting lost in Venice is an official tourist experience.   To start with, there are signs EVERYWHERE that tell you which way to go to get to the most popular buildings and churches.  But even then, it is NOT possible to get directly or efficiently from Point A to Point B.  If you’re in a hurry, you’re screwed.  Either you’re going to be late, or you’re going to pay through the nose for a water taxi (as they say in Costa Rica, es una renta.  It’s a rent payment).  A “Vaporetto”, which is like a water… bus system… costs 7 Euros per person (almost $9 or 4500 colones), and they PACK people onto those things like sardines.  No fun at all!  So, if you’re doing it right, you skip the Vaporetto, and you get lost.  And you enjoy it.  And you get there eventually.  Or you get somewhere else, and you enjoy that instead, for the day.

So, on our first day, we followed instructions, and we just wandered, with no particular destination in mind.  We loved every minute of it! It was even sunny and beautiful all day for us.  We did see one famous sight, the Realto Bridge, which has lots of shops on it, but really was underwhelming, because they’ve done a really shitty job of taking care of it lately.  But in any case, we went into every little back alley we could find, and just enjoyed all the buildings, and all the lights and shadows and waterways and bridges, and smelled the flowers*, and just absorbed the sights and sounds of the place. 

*On occasion, you also can’t avoid smelling the water.  You’ll wish you hadn’t, though, since it’s full of untreated sewage.  But as long as the heat isn’t too bad, you’ll probably only experience the occasional whiff.  Oddly, drinking from the many water fountains is perfectly fine, and heavily inspected.  But do NOT fall in the canals.  It would be bad.   Moral of this story?  Don’t go to Venice when it’s hot.  Also don’t go on a heavy rain day, when the water is known to overflow and flood some areas.

Speaking of sounds of the place, within 5 minutes of walking away from the train station on our first day (a Sunday), we heard singing.  There was this random men’s chorus just singing in a corner.  There were about 20 guys in that group, and they were WONDERFUL!  And they weren’t even asking for donations!  We waited until the end of their set, and they never even passed a hat (for donations), they just moved on to another spot.  They were so good, we followed them.  And on the way, we saw ANOTHER chorus… and another and another.  They were all over the place!  Some all men, some all women, some mixed.  All were very good. 

Our hosts didn’t know about them, but between us all, we guessed that maybe the City of Venice just pays them to walk around and create magical little moments for people.  Whatever the case, it was certainly a magical experience for us.  That first chorus especially was so good, they made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  I got a video or two of some of them.  Of course I couldn’t capture everything, but… I think you can at least get an idea (we’ll post that to youtube soon).

 

On our second day there, we decided that if we only had a couple days to spend in Venice, maybe we should at least TRY to see one of the most famous sights, San Marcos Square.  Remember when I said it was impossible to get anywhere easily?  San Marcos was our lesson for that.  We HAD a map, and we believe we took the most direct walking route POSSIBLE to get there, but it still took us TWO HOURS.  And those were not enjoyable hours.  Those hours were walking fast, through the crowded, busy tourist main streets, stopping to check the map over and over.   This meant we did NOT get to slow down and enjoy all the side alleys, or smell any flowers (we figured we could at least do that on our way back).   That day, we just wanted to see “the big thing”.  Well we got there eventually… and the big church that was there, that was free to see, had a big line, 3 days long.  So after all that, we couldn’t even go in.    Of course, by this point, we were tired, hot, hungry, annoyed from the un-ending crowds, and we had to pee terribly, because public bathrooms there are few, far-between, and cost money (the trick is to buy a coffee somewhere, but we didn’t have time for that).  And then, just as we were at least taking our consolation prize of snapping some photos from the outside of the church and the square, the sky opened up and we got a BIG aguacero (rainstorm from hell).  In Costa Rica, they’d call this “el colmo”… basically, the last straw.  The ONE thing you didn’t need to make your day truly perfect in how wrong it had gone.

We tried to go into a museum and see if they had a bathroom, but no… not without paid admission.  We surrendered and decided to call it quits for the day.  Also, there was no affordable food near-by; only expensive restaurants, because this was of course the tourist center of the city. We were getting miserably soaked. We had seen signs for a Chinese restaurant on the way, so we hunted that down.  They were also expensive, but at least cheap enough that we could afford to share a single plate, so we could use their bathroom, and get out of the rain for a few minutes. 

Well, we made it there, and even they were pretty expensive.  So we ordered a plate to share, so we could at least use the restroom and not be starving.  And you know what?  They actually bitched at us for only getting one plate!  Screw YOU, people!  It’s not like you were stuffed with customers when we came!  At least we’re buying SOMETHING!  So, we “enjoyed” our Shitty Fried Rice (like Chicken Fried Rice, but with no flavor), and got the hell out.

We went back the next day, and went back to the original idea of not having a real plan.  We wandered, we saw some of the more out of the way places, and we saw the edges of the city and a big port where some of the bigger boats could dock.  We even saw an old sailing ship that the Italian navy still apparently uses for training.

We even found ourselves a really cool exhibit about Da Vinci’s inventions. Basically, whoever made this exhibit had taken a lot of his drawings, and built them up! They were not all life-size, but they were all pretty darned cool. Some were models of basic principles, like a fly-wheel (a machine that stores spinning energy), a water screw (a device that you turn to easily lift water), or demos of various pulley systems. Some others were miniatures of some pretty vicious military weapons he made, like a sort of tank with 20 spinning cannons on top, or a device to knock ladders off of castle walls. They also had a REALLY cool design for an instrument he made, which was a sort of mini guitar on one side, and the head of a dragon on the other (see the dragon’s face in the mirror).   All in all, a very cool museum.

A bit about Padova, now.  Padova is a fairly small, mostly residential town (as far as we could tell), but one that’s well-connected by train.  It’s also completely OVERFLOWING with Jasmine!  So much so, that very often, that wonderful fragrance just smacks you right in the face as you’re walking down the street.  Of course, it helped that we had the wonderful fortune of arriving there right at the peak of the bloom, which apparently lasts less than a month.  Yay us!

So, in between our Venice visits, we spent our evenings with our hosts Davide and Alessandra, eating some of the best gelato of our lives, learning how to cook a really yummy risotto, and even making it to a neat local festival they  found for us in their neighborhood.  Also, while walking through their neighborhood, they showed us a really cool thing they have there, which they (our hosts), call a “robot cow”.  Basically, it’s a vending machine that sells fresh, whole milk (unpasteurized, even)!  You can buy a bottle there, or bring your own.  The milk is pretty cheap, and it’s supplied by local farmers every day (in fact, a few times a day).   The milk is also DELICIOUS!  I bought a couple liters. 

So, that’s enough about Venice, I guess.  Let’s move on to Florence, Pisa and Rome.   First of all, though, the trip TO Florence was pretty sweet!  We finally got to ride in one of the SUPER fancy high speed trains!  I never felt like we were going super fast, but perhaps that’s because they’re just so damned smooth.  They’re designed so the whole train leans into the turns, to make the ride more comfortable.  Still, the trip was plenty gorgeous besides. 

At any rate, Florence was cool, and certainly very pretty, but it wasn’t our favorite place.  Partly, this was because here we finally broke our perfect couch-surfing streak, and had to spring for a hostel.  Well, even taking a couple beds in a 12-person mixed dorm, still cost us just under $50/night for the two of us.  For reference, our planned budget for each day on this trip is $50/day to cover EVERYTHING, including food, local busses, entertainment, etc.  So, blowing that all on a hostel really sucked. But, that’s life. 

The result of all that, though, was that we didn’t feel like we could actually afford to eat anywhere fancy. On top of that, te museums were INCREDIBLY expensive, so we tried to keep our touristing to stuff we could see for free.   Jime and I can appreciate beautiful art, but we are not exactly huge art fans, so this was not a life-long dream for us to see.  Plus, we knew we were going to go to the Vatican museum.  Oh, and to top it all off, I had my head-lamp stolen from the hostel.  Bastards.

Meanwhile, we also got to spend a lot of time with an old friend of Jimena’s from grade school, Vanessa, which was super cool.  She took us on a few walks through the city, and up to a park on top of a hill with a great view of the city below.  We even got to spend time with her family, just hanging out in a little piazza near our hostel.  Especially since we didn’t have a couchsurfing arrangement for this city, it was really nice having that personal contact to make us feel a bit more connected.

In Florence we mostly walked around, saw all sorts of stuff from the outside, saw a really cool bridge, and went into one really gigantic church. We did enjoy some very fine picnicking, though, after Vanessa told us about the Central Market, which had all sorts of really great meats and cheeses and breads. When you’re only buying enough for a sandwich, even we could afford a bit of the fancy stuff. :)

(pretty train)

(pretty fountain)

(a pretty mannequin museum, apparently featuring mannequin Cylons)

(Cheeeese!!)

While we were in Florence, we of course took a half-day trip out to Pisa, to see the Leaning Tower.   We had been warned by many folks that there was really nothing else in Pisa worth seeing for a tourist (Pisa disagrees, of course, as they have maps and signs for several different things that we didn’t care about).  So, a half day was perfect.  Well, we can now confirm for you that yep… the tower is indeed leaning.  It’s weird!  It’s also very cool.  And, we were apparently very lucky in our timing, because up until very recently, we learned, the tower has been under continuous re-construction for about the last 10 years.  During that time, it was covered with scaffolding, so you couldn’t see the whole thing.  Well, for us, it was perfect!  You can even climb to the top now, if you want to pay $20 and wait for 6 hours.  We just decided to watch from below.  We also chose to do all of the obligatory “hold up/knock down the tower” type poses that, honestly, are required of any tourist with even the SLIGHTEST sense of humor.  Yes, everybody does it.  Yes, you have to do it too when you go there, or you fail at life.

After Florence, it was off to Rome.  One more excuse to ride a bullet train.  :)  They don’t get old for me.  Rome was also a non-couchsurfing city for us, but we did try something a bit more interesting than a hostel.  Jimena remembered about this thing called AirBnB.  Basically, it’s just like couchsurfing, but it’s paid.  You pay to stay in a room in somebody’s house.  And, as it happens, in Rome, the costs for a hostel were the same as for the room we found with AirBnB, so AirBnB it was.

It was nice, actually.  Our host, Susanna, was super friendly, sweet, knew the city well, and welcomed us on arrival with a map, and pointed out several locations close by for food and groceries and even primary bus routes.  Plus, while we were there, she very kindly bought us breakfast a couple times, and even let us join in on a dinner party she had, which was sort of a lesson on how to make a proper Carbonara sauce (hint:  there is no cream in it, but there is LOTS of bacon!  Well, they use a special cured kind of meat that’s fancier than bacon, but bacon will do).  A very delicious lesson indeed!

(I don’t care what you call it.  It’s… BAACOOOON!!)

As for the city of Rome, I’d say we enjoyed that more than Florence.  Despite serious atheist concerns from Jimena, we saw the Vatican Museum, and no, the church did not get struck by lightning. The Vatican museum had one cool room, which was the ancient Egypt exhibit, featuring artifacts dating as far back as 2400 BC.  But the rest of the museum was less interesting to us.  A lot of statues by people nobody knows about, with no explanations.  Yeah, yeah, they’re pretty.  Whatever.  Honestly, other than the Egypt rooms, this is one of the worst curated museums we’ve ever seen.  And, you have to go through ALLLL of it before you can get to the Sistine Chapel, which is at the end.

(Mmmmm  mummies!)

(This statue had no name.  I name him Leatherus Facecus, III)

The Sistine Chapel is pretty incredible.  Again, we had good timing here, but they just recently finished restoring all the paintings!  So, whereas over the past decades, the colors have been faded, dark, and covered in soot and dirt, they were now vibrant, colorful, and spectacular!  This apparently came with a catch though.  The catch is that they no longer allow photography.  Apparently the restoration was financed by a Japanese company, and as payment, that company now owns the rights to all photographs of the place!  This was a FANTASTICALLY stupid deal for them to make.  Jimena looked it up, and it seems the restoration was only around $3 million!  There’s no way either Italy, the Vatican, or even Rome couldn’t have paid for that, and reaped a profit in short order.  But nevermind all that.  They can yell “No photos!” all they want.  Nobody listens.

(Let’s see how long it takes them to “Cease and Desist” me.)

Oh, and interestingly, we learned that if you take the “right door” (which is supposed to only be for guided tours), instead of the “left door”, when you leave the Sistine Chapel, you exit right next to St Peter’s Basilica, one of the biggest and grandest cathedrals in the world, where the Pope gives occasional sermons, and where they apparently crowned Charlemagne as the first Emperor of Rome.  Neat church!  There are many other interesting and bizarre facts about this church, but I won’t go into them here.  It is mighty pretty, though!

(I swear the streaming sunbursts were there when we arrived)

We also saw the Colosseum, and even took a special tour that let us go underground as well as up to the higher floors. The tour guide sucked balls, and was too fast and boring as hell. But at least he gave us access to the cool places. Eventually we just started ignoring him entirely and just took the time to take cool pictures (which he would have left no time for, because he sucked).

We spent our last day in Rome wandering through the ruins of the Roman Forum, and of “Palatine Hill”.  Palatine hill was much prettier.  It’s a beautiful landscape of ancient buildings covered with growth of new wild flowers and some planned gardens.   It also has some pretty great views of the Colosseum next door. In the end, it was just a lovely quiet day, and was a great way to spend our last day in Italy.

We are now in Udaipur (an impromptu post)

 

We are now in Udaipur, India.  This started as a Facebook post, but I guess it grew a bit.  So, I know this post is a bit out of order, and I won’t forget to go back and talk about Italy, Istanbul or Mumbai, but a somewhat significant change happened, so I wanted to write about it. 

We ended up, at the last minute, skipping our planned stop in Aurangabad to see the really awesome Ellora and Ajanta caves (which are really ancient churches carved into the stone). This was not entirely by choice.

We had actually already bought train tickets to Aurangabad. But when we looked into the options for getting from Aurangabad to Udaipur, our next planned stop, they were all TERRIBLE.  You see, apparently Aurangabad is on a bit of a side-track, and is virtually unconnected to the rest of the country.  When I originally planned this tip, we had another city in mind to follow that one, Jhansi, and there was no problem. But on further review and thoughts about what we wanted to see in this country, we skipped Jhansi, and added 3 new cities.  Unfortunately, the next new city in line, was not on the same side track. 

Pretty much ALL of the options for this segment involved going all the way back to Mumbai (a 7 hour trip, minimum), followed by a wicked layover, then a long, painful journey adding up eventually to about 26 hours worth of travel, with a big chunk of it in a crowded and cramped train, without A/C. Or, we could pay for plane tickets, at about $400, and only take 12 hours... including an unavoidable 10 hour layover in Mumbai. So, long story short, we agonized and spent all day trying to think of alternatives, but in the end, we decided that the caves had effectively become about a $500 side-trip. So, we skipped them.

That being said, at the last minute, there weren't even any trains available to Udaipur left, so we ended up booking a sleeper bus.  It cost $25 each, and took 16 hours, but at least it was air conditioned and had beds, and at least one power outlet to let us watch movies on the laptop... in the beginning.  That was the end of the nice part of the ride though.  The bad parts of the ride were that there was almost no head-room, unless we sat in very specific places, but then there was the bumping.  When I say bumping, I mean that, as our berths were in the back of the bus, we got the worst of EVERY LITTLE tiny bump in the road.   And when I say the worst, I mean that… well… picture the bus as a catapult, and us in the bucket.  Every time the front of the bus landed, we got tossed into the air like rag dolls.  I don’t want to exaggerate too much.  I mean, we weren’t hitting the ceiling or anything, but we were definitely bounced rudely, and frequently, up off our butts or backs, depending on how we were settled.  Aside from that, any time the bus turned, or accelerated or stopped quickly, we were tossed again.  And what’s more, Indian drivers LOVE their horns.  So all through the trip we were constantly annoyed by the screaming horn, which was customized to sound like some loud-singing slot machine in Las Vegas.

Long story short, this meant almost no sleeping for the whole 16 hour ride.  16… fucking… hours… of mostly-sleepless, nauseating, noisy, earth-quake-like torture.   Couple this with the fact that within a couple days of arriving in India, my stomach has NOT liked the food here (even though my mouth has liked several things), and I am not a happy camper.  At this point, even the smell of curry is making my stomach turn summersaults.   I will get past this, but right now, and for days, I’ve been feeling like ass.

As a city, Udaipur is gorgeous!  It’s got a small-town feel that is in sharp contrast with the insane,smelly chaos that was Mumbai.  There are beautiful palaces, small streets like in Europe, jasmine blooming fragrantly everywhere, and lots of birds singing.  Last night, at dinner, we even saw a flock of Indian Fruit Bats, which is a creature I find FASCINATING, and never expected to see in my life.  So… SCORE on the critter count (my version of a critter count is different than Pedro’s… mine are not on a plate).

As for our lodging here, we’re staying in a very cute little hotel here called the Hotel Kumbha Palace.  It’s small and simple, but clean, pretty, has a pretty garden in the courtyard, is cheap as hell (500 rupies per night = $9 = 4500 colones for the standard room), and even includes free wifi (which we were not expecting when we chose the place).  We had the option of an Air Conditioned room for 900 rupies, but it was out of the wifi range, and our standard room at least has a fan, and 3 windows, so it’s not too bad.  For us, WiFi wins out over A/C.  Now that we’re out of Mumbai, which is one of the most expensive cities in India, we don’t need to try so hard for couch surfing.  So, now we’re in the hotel stage.  Since it’s so pleasant at this hotel, and since we don’t have hosts to entertain (or be entertained by), and especially after that REALLY shitty trip to get here, we’ve been enjoying taking a lovely day off and just lounging around, doing absolutely nothing but relax and stay cool.

Hopefully, my belly will settle down soon and I can start to enjoy life again.  Jime is a trooper, and is almost untouched with her belly (or is at least handling it better), and she’s been super sweet taking care of me.  We haven’t seen much of this city yet, other than the lake and the palaces, so I will write more about this place later, when it comes up again in my regularly-scheduled blogging order.

For now though, I guess the moral of this story is, if you ever find yourself in India, Udaipur is a MUST-SEE city, but dear lord… do NOT get here by bus!  And if you DO have to get here by bus, for the love of all that is holy, ride in the front!

Cheers,

Alex

Hungary & Italy (1 of 2)–“Mostly Hungary”

 

So, after that incredibly long last post, I gave y’all a break to recover.  And yes, we’re going to pretend that I did that for YOUR benefit, and not because I just didn’t get around to writing again until now. The off-shoot of that, of course, is that now I have a lot more to cover in our trip so far.  So, maybe this won’t be quite the most insightful post I’ve ever written, but… but holy CRAP we’ve done a lot since then!

So, we spent a total of 11 days in Budapest and 12 in Italy.  Budapest was lovely.  We had a great time, and felt like the pace was pretty well perfect.  Italy though… honestly, I think we rushed it too much.  When I planned it originally, I thought hey… 12 days in one country, that’s about the same as the others.  But then I went ahead and sub-divided that down into 3 or 4 days in each of 3 main cities, with side trips built in from that.  What that turned into was *rush rush rush* to see everything.  That kinda sucked. 

Now we realize that for us, a different city might as well be a different country.  If we have to learn new maps and new transportation, it’s effectively a completely different place, and nevermind if it uses the same money and language.

That being said, the Italy part of the trip represented our first real intro into heavy train travel, and that was GREAT for me.  I love trains.   And Italy has some GREAT trains, including some high speed ones, which we got to ride for our inter-city transfers.  HOT!  Ask me again after India and China, but for now, I still really love trains.  My friend Jonathan Leiss will know more about where I’m coming from here, having lived on a train for a year.

Alright, let’s go ahead and wrap up Hungary, and then I’ll get to the rest of Italy.

So, in Budapest, we stayed with 4 different hosts over the course of our days.  Despite all that moving around, Hungary still felt relaxed and well-paced.  Our 3nd hosts, Janos and Rejka, we only had for a whole one night.  But we really enjoyed them!   They made us really delicious Hungarian pancakes.  Hungarian pancakes, for those who have never had them, are basically Crepes.  In fact, I can’t think of a single difference.  The texture, ingredients, preparation method and toppings are identical.  I think the only difference is that when you make Hungarian pancakes, you’re more likely, though not guaranteed, to be near the Danube.

Our final host was Vilma, who in addition to being an English teacher for a living, is apparently also a:  local radio talk show star, daughter of a former national Opera director, host for an annual teenage role playing  week based in the Lord of the Rings.  She also lived in the UK for a while, so her English accent is more British than Hungarian.  But in any case, we enjoyed her a lot!  She was incredibly generous… even to the point of having US stay in HER bed, while SHE surfed her own couch! Aside from that, she also took us to one of those Ruin Pubs I’d been hearing about before we got to town.  The one we went to, Szimpla Kert, was not only the first Ruin Pub, but was recently voted the #3 coolest bar in the world by Lonely Planet.  Alas, it was so dark when we went that none of my photos came out, so if you want to see pictures, you’ll have to use the interwebz (you can start by clicking the link above).

For reference on how cool Ruin Pubs are, the #1 best bar in the world is ALSO a Ruin Pub (a ship on the Danube called A38).  The best part about Szimpla Kert?  It just happens to be Vilma’s local pub, right around the corner from her flat.  I must say… this bar earned it’s reputation!  This was absolutely one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been to.  It’s several floors of eclectic, artistic decoration and old historic vibe, with a balance of light and dark, loud and quiet, open and intimate spaces.  Also, beer is cheap in Hungary, so that helped too.  To give it my best general description, I’d say it represents the “real” version of what places like The Kennedy School try to capture.  And that’s big talk for me.  The Kennedy School is one of my favorite places in the world (and I can say that now, having visited a bit more of it).

One other awesome thing we did in Budapest was visit one of the famous Turkish baths.  The one we went to was probably the most famous one, and it’s the one everybody told us we couldn’t miss.  That was the Szechenyi Baths (right next to the zoo with the Lemurs, as it happens).

Basically, these baths are a collection of large and small pools, some of which are heated by natural thermal waters from the ground below.  Some of which are cold.  Very… very cold.  But I’ll get to that in a minute.  The main pools at Szechenyi are two LAVISH, and gigantic outdoor swimming pools, surrounded by historic buildings and fancy statuary.  The outdoor pools are a little warm… about 36-38C, but the scenery is spectacular!  The buildings are gorgeous, the lighting at night is beautiful and there are fountains and statues all over the place.  Also, admission after 7pm is half price.  And half price is a bit like bacon… it makes everything better.

(I cannot explain why some of the elegant statues apparently encourage elegant animal sex, but my friend Scott in San Diego will appreciate this picture.  As far as we can tell, this appears to be a statue of a naked lady getting frisky with a goose.  She’s stroking the long, supple shaft of his goosey neck while the goose nuzzles her breast.  Somebody hired one kinky sculptor!)

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Inside one of the buildings they have some saunas and some smaller pools.  The insides, of course, are equally decorated, and equally beautiful and… historic… looking.  Some of the smaller pools have mineral waters (i.e. more sulphur and other stuff).  And some are hot and some are cold.  They all have a more intimate feel though, so we spent most of our evening in here. 

The hottest pool we could find was 40C.  You know what, compared to the 37C pool outside, which felt lukewarm (for ref: 37C = 98.6F) because it was exactly body temp, 40C doesn’t sound that hot.  What’s 2 degrees?  I’ll tell you what 2 degrees is… it’s the difference between warm and hot.  Jime pointed out that this was the only pool which was ABOVE your body temperature.  That’s the definition of hot, apparently.  But beyond that, it’s also the definition of “Aaaahhhhhh…. niiiiice.”

Next to that hot pool, as it happens, is a cold pool.  The cold pool is exactly half the temp of the hot pool.  So, 20C.  20C (68F) is a perfect air temperature.  In the water though… it’s ball-shrinking cold.  That’s about 2 degrees warmer than the North Sea (well, on a warm day)!  The trick here is to do a hot-cold cycle.   Cycling from hot to cold and back makes BOTH pools feel better.  It also improves your circulation and is VERY invigorating.  It’s also, of course, prone to making your partner believe you are an insane person.  But nevermind this.  I loved every minute of it!

To wrap up our Hungary visit, we took a couple little side trips.  For the first trip, we went to a little town about an hour away called “Szentendre”.   We went there because people told us that this was a pretty area with a lot of local craft stores that we might enjoy.  Also, near this town, was something they call an “Ethnographic Museum” called Skanzen.  Szentendre itself had some neat stuff in it, and it was indeed pretty.  But it also felt like it had been a bit overly touristified.  We went into a few shops and had a really interesting lunch, and finished out the day with a dirt cheap but delicious ice cream.  But overall, it wasn’t our favorite place. 

(One really cool thing they DID have though, was a touch and braille map for the visually impaired.  Sweet!  Of course, it was made from metal, so running your fingers on it on a hot day could be a bit unpleasant.  Still, very neat thought.)

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(Lunch was “Langos”, a sort of fried dough, either stuffed or covered with some sort of topping.  Jime got a sweet one, with Apricot jam.  I got a savory one stuffed with “sausage” (aka “hot dog”), and covered in sour cream and cheese.  The place we got these had a reputation as one of the best makers of Langos in the country.  We liked them.  :) )

Very close to this town, though, we had heard, was this Ethnographic Museum, Skanzen.  What is that?  Well, apparently they collected dozens of old historic houses from all over the country (which would otherwise perhaps have been destroyed or ignored to death), and from different times in their past, move them to this one area, restore them to like-new condition, fill them with historically-accurate home furnishings, and then whammo… a quasi-living museum!  They even made a few complete little towns!  

We were originally going to pop over here after seeing the main Szentendre town, but once we heard about the scale of the museum, we ended up coming back the next day and making a whole day out of it.   Some of the homes even had working samples of basic tools used, and some had videos of what happened either around that home, or in that exact home.  In fact, each home had a bit of history about what happened in that specific building.

So, we spent out last day in Hungary leisurely wandering through history, house-by-house.  It was really an incredible and unique experience.  What an amazing place!  My dad, who is a huge history buff, would LOOOVE this place!  I dare say, if he ever makes a trip across the pond, he should make Budapest a top priority, and make this side trip an absolute must-see. 

It was a fantastic end to our Budapest visit, and I think it will make a great end to this blog entry as well.

Cheers,

Alex & Jime

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.