Budapest Exposed

Hoohah! What an awesome day so far in Müchen (a.k.a. Munich). Already, I hit the Hoffbrauhaus for lunch (and waited over an hour just to get served by my pissed-off waiter who had some grudge against me. Very odd. Maybe I sat down at the wrong table. Maybe he hates tourists...especially Americans who come in wearing their Sierra Nevada Brewery T-shirt. Don´t know. The Hoffbrau is a nutty place with chaos all around. I don´t know how they keep anything straight), wandered around the city, checked out the broken Glockenspiel (are the people on it supposed to move around and dance to chimes or something???), climbed up the St. Peter tower to see the city from high above, watched Germans surfboarding on the canal (I kid you not...they´ve got a pressurized stream of water pouring out from under a bridge, and it´s a surfboarding park now), and then ended up eating and drinking at the giant beer garden called Englischer Garten (that´s how Germans pronounce "English Garden" when they start getting wasted. I swiped the huge 1 Liter beer stein I put a deposit on, as those snooty Arizona girls from back in Prague had told me they had done (maybe they weren´t total idiots after all). Makes a nice souvenir.) My my...Munich is really shaping out to be everything I expected it to be.

But then there´s Budapest, which didn´t do hardly anything for me. I don´t know...maybe some external factors were influencing my opinion of this place...maybe I was just getting tired of seeing the same types of stuff over and over. But as a whole, Budapest didn´t seem to have a lot of the high cultural attactions that I´ve seen in the other cities I´ve visited. I felt like Budapest was still trying to pull itself up by its bootstraps after years of being suppressed by the Communists. Sure, Budapest has some churches to check out, but they´re nothing spectacular as compared to other cities. For example, I tried checking out the Jewish synagogue in town, but they were charging way too much for nothing (way to go, Judiasm, for perpetuating your demeaning stereotype), so I went to the Catholic Church instead (which was free...hooray!) and saw the severed hand of their saint. It was about 1,000 years old and clenched up in a fist like it didn´t want to let go of its control. It was a little disturbing, but I guess these Hungarians cling onto any holy relic they can get their "hands" on! Ha! Oh, I´m just killing myself here! There´s a whole entire history about how this "hand" has changed hands over the millenium. It even ended up in the USA while WWII was going on.

Other than the severed hand, everything else in Budapest tended to revolve around war, or terror, or their past association with communism. Oh, wait now...there was a silly musical fountain that would dance to opera music. That was pleasant. Everything else...not so pleasant. Their warfare museum was interesting in the fact that I got to see the losing side´s interpretation of WWII (Hungary sided with the Nazis. Bad mistake.). Although the signage was horribly translated in English (which I´ve also noticed in all the other countries I´ve visited. Europe needs an official English copy editor to proofread all their stuff), I could still get the gist of what they were saying, and it came across to me that they were rewriting history. They put themselves as innocent victims to Hitler and Germany and just HAD to go along with them with all the mass genocides... and it was their God-given right to reclaim the lands taken away from them at the end of WWI. So, my B.S. meter was going off the charts. Further on in the museum, they had some swastikas and uniforms displayed that rather shocked me. I figured they would have removed all that stuff completely. I guess not.

Another thing that´s shocking is how there´s a wax museum at the top of the Citadel on the Buda side of the city has Nazi soldiers putting prisoners-of-war in horrible situations. They title the attraction "1944." Once again, I find it horribly wrong that a country is continuing to display inappropriate stuff like this. I mean, this ain´t "Hogan´s Heroes" we´re talking about here with that crazy, lovable Colonel Klink. If this was America, Jewish groups, Holocaust victims, and even Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Push Colition would be out protesting this thing. Here in Hungary, it´s all good fun. Oh, here kids...put on these funny Nazi hats down at the gift store and let´s take your picture. Oy vey!

One attraction that I checked out, that I´m glad they did keep, was called Statue Park. It´s located about 5 kilometers south of the city, way far away from everything, and contains all the old statues that used to be around during the days of communism. Once communism starting falling in the early 90´s, anything even connected with communism was quickly removed and destroyed. Luckily, Budapest saw the need to preserve some of this stuff to show future generations what communism was like. The park contains about 40 statues, some of which are Lenin with his business suit on, holding out his hand as if to say "Welcome to my repressive kindgom. Can I show you around?" But most are done in that bland propagandist style where "the worker" is made up into a giant superhero. All the people have blockish features to them, and their muscles are just bulging out all over like they´re Barry Bonds on steroids. They´re a real trip to look at. I would have hated to be one of the artists making those at the time, because they were limited on what they could do. "Oh, so you want me to make ANOTHER non-descript big worker waving a flag? And put the communist star somewhere in there? Boy, like I haven´t done THAT before!" The funniest part about Statue Park is when you leave it. At the exit, they´re selling T-shirts, most of them with tie-ins to South Park and McDonald´s (I´m sure Lenin is just rolling in his glass viewing box). There´s also one of those boxy crappy cars (Der Trabis???) that everyone in Communismland would have to drive just sitting there as you leave. Yes, communism is dead. But I´m glad someone perserved some of these old relics so I can appreciate what I have in my country.

Our "hostel takeover" in Budapest was also pretty bad. The first hostel we stayed at was called "Amazing Hostel." The only thing amazing about it was that it wasn´t shut down and condemned by a safety official. It was inside an old apartment building that looked like a Russian tank had tried to blow it up from the outside. It was completely empty and falling apart except for 3 rooms way in the back that had been renovated. Just walking to my room everyday was putting my life on the line. One false step, and I would have fallen over the 3-story railing and plummeted to my death. The rooms were crammed with beds, giving you no room to even move around or pack your stuff. Eric had a classic Chicago "porch disaster" in his bed when the wooden frame broke. Luckily, he was on the bottom of the bunk bed and only fell a foot. I put on my structural engineer hat to access the damage to see if I was in danger of falling, but I appeared OK. Then the next morning, Eric fell again in his bed. Poor guy. Then his locker door fell on top of his head. Yes sir...welcome to Fawlty Towers.

The other hostel, Island Hostel, was located on (surpise!) an island in the middle of the Danube River. It was a dump as well...looked like it used to be a summer beach home at one time, then had fallen into disrepair and was eventually turned into a hostel. The smell of mildew just hovered in my room. However, the hostel´s one redeeming feature was that it was located on the river. Beautiful view at night. Just gorgeous. Oh well. I guess you gotta take what you can get when you´re cheap.