Chapter 8: Hungarian Is Not An Easy Language

We’re in Budapest now, and on our fourth language of the trip. French and Italian weren’t bad, German was tougher, Hungarian is a whole new level. In the other countries, we could eyeball a sign or menu and hazard a rough guess of what it was trying to say. If you stir English together with our high-school Spanish and French, there were usually enough familiar words or cognates to determine whether, say, a closed door leads to the toilet or the elevator.

Same thing with the grocery store. So far, Rachel and I have purchased a box of potatoes au gratin which we thought were frozen scallops, and a bag of what we assumed were fish fillets but which turned out to be six whole frozen fish. Google Translate doesn’t really work well on Hungarian, and we don’t want to be those people bumbling through the grocery store peering at every item through our phone screens. So, we make do. And we eat a lot of potatoes au gratin. And we clean a lot of fish.

I thought about titling this post “Vienna vs. Budapest: Cage Match”, but that wouldn’t be quite fair. It would be like if Zooey Deschanel fought Furiosa from “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

Vienna is all about cafés and evening balls and opera houses and museums and outdoor gardens and parasols (ok, I’m exaggerating on the parasols). Budapest is modern, grittier. Budapest is about ruin bars and night clubs and hostels and bachelor parties and shouts in the street. (And museums, too, sure.)

Look, I like cafés, but it gets old having happy hour at tiny outdoor tables sitting next to old men sipping espresso and discussing their vegetable gardens. Sometimes I want to go to a real bar and watch drunk British guys try to hit on boisterous young women wearing “Bridesmaids” tiaras. Sometimes I just want to eat street tacos from a dubious vendor and watch a shirtless man yell at a pigeon. But maybe that’s just me.

Let’s start at the beginning. We arrived in Vienna on a rainy Saturday two weeks ago, and had a nice Austrian meal, including bone marrow spread onto buttery toasted bread which we agreed was maybe the best thing we’d eaten in Europe so far.

Vienna is, in fact, a lovely city. After Florence and Rome and Venice, we certainly did not want to see the inside of a museum anytime soon, so we contented ourselves with strolling beside the Danube and sipping espresso at one of the hundreds of cafes dotting the streets. And after so much bread and cheese and salami, it was amazing reintroducing ourselves to wiener schnitzel (from Vienna, which is Wien in German) and warm potato salad.

Vienna is home to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, an imposing Gothic structure and the 9th-tallest church in the world.

It’s also my favorite type of cathedral (free), so we toured the inside.

The “Viennese Coffee House Culture” is actually listed as a UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage”, so we took the opportunity to avail ourselves of some al fresco small cakes and cappuccinos.

And, well, that was basically our time in Vienna. It’s a clean, friendly city that would be a great place to raise children or leave your wallet on a park bench at 2 a.m., but we found it a bit boring to be honest.

Budapest, on the other hand…

Most international travel days are bad. They’re long, frustrating amalgamations of scheduling mishaps, language blunders, and crowded, smelly spaces. But for some reason, our train ride from Vienna to Budapest (boo-da-pesht – the “s” in Hungarian makes an “sh” sound and they never let you forget it!) was like a day at the spa. We misread our train tickets and accidentally sat in a luxurious private enclosure with no fellow travelers; the compassionate ticket attendant said we could stay and brought us cookies and a small bottle of champagne with two plastic flutes.

We arrived into the Buda side (the two original towns, Buda and Pest, are separated by the Danube) and taxied over the river to our AirBnb. The Budapest Parliament is the most famous, gorgeous building in the city, and upon arrival we discovered that it was right outside our balcony window.

We went to have a drink at a quiet outdoor locals bar, ate some amazing – and amazingly cheap – street pizza, then made our way back to the splendor of the Parliament Building at night.

Those spots of light are birds circling above the building, which is so large that it gives off warm rising air currents in the evening after its stone is heated in the sun all day. The birds like to coast on the updrafts.

It was an altogether presciently favorable day to a city which we instantly took a liking to.

Ruin bars are a tradition in Budapest that make use of the crumbling, dilapidated buildings in the historic Jewish Quarter that were abandoned following World War II and the deportation of 10,000 Jews. A few decades ago, hipsters (Seth, I see you rolling your eyes) moved into those spaces and opened up “ruin bars” with mismatched furniture, eclectic lighting, and cheap cocktails. (If this was America, they’d be selling 16-ounce cans of PBR, and all the bartenders would have flannel shirts and handlebar mustaches.)

On Sunday we visited Szimpla Kert, the most famous ruin bar in the city, then came home and booked another week in Budapest. Sadly we would have to move apartments, from the quiet streets of the government square down to the party section near the Jewish Quarter. Oh darn.

If you will indulge me with one other picture, this is the Budapest Parliament Building as seen from across the Danube:

Beautiful. I just wish the closest bridge to get back to the right side of the river wasn’t temporarily closed. Man that was a long walk.

P.S. Rachel peeked over my shoulder while I was writing this and thought that the Zooey Deschanel/Furiosa image above was me illustrating what my wife looked like at the beginning of our European journey versus what she looks like now. I just want to be completely clear and say that, while admittedly hilarious, this was not my intention and is not at all true!

(It’s like 10% true.)