Oktoberfest and München – Days 17, 18, 19 & 20

Daniel, Michael and I set off for Oktoberfest early Friday morning, arriving at our 7:10 train a little early (uncharacteristic for me). The ride up to Bavaria was pleasant and quick. We had clean seats and as much space as could be expected for our legs and great views of Central European farmland and some of the Alps.

Getting to Munich, we hopped into the first store we saw in search of Lederhosen. An elderly German woman grabbed me around the hips and barked “52” at me and taught me the complex fashion of buttoning Lederhosen around oneself. I looked great in the fitting room, but the price tag clashed with my wallet, so we left the store. We parted from each other as they went to their hotel and I went to meet Jorge and Stacey (and Andrei) at our AirBNB. I wouldn’t see them again until Monday morning, funnily enough.

I warmed up the German glands again and shot through the city on the U-Bahn to Schwabing, where our apartment was. When I’d reached it, I had to duck into a cell phone store and log into one of their phones to contact Jorge and Stacey through Facebook, but we found each other. It was a great reunion, and we hung out for a little while in the low-ceilinged attic apartment, catching up (and in my case meeting Andrei). But daylight was burning and we hopped our way down to the Theresienwiese to get into the festival.

Oktoberfest was different than I’d expected. But that’s partly because I’d had no expectations – I knew there was beer and the Lederhosen involved, but that was about the extent.

The whole Fest, poorly photographed

It’s really a massive carnival, in the most American sense of a town fair. There are Ferris Wheels and rollercoasters and peanut vendors, and it just so happens that they coinhabit the grounds with these obelisks of brewing, the tents.

Inside a tent

There were maybe a dozen tents in all, each maybe 40 or 50 feet tall and a football field in length. Their size couldn’t contain the Bayerisch fervor, and so the party spilled onto the decks and gardens around the tents. Both inside and out were stuffed with people, especially on the all-important tables, where one could order food and drink. Getting space at one of those was like getting a good TV on sale at a department store on Black Friday – if you came at 4pm, there were none left.

After spending Friday and Saturday at the Festival, Stacey, Jorge and I saw the Marienplatz on Sunday. After Stacey left in the afternoon, we hiked up to the top of Alter Peter

From the top of Alter Peter

and explored the Fußgangerzone, walking from the Marienplatz to the Frauenkirche, past the Residenz and finally to the Englischer Garten. Munich is a wonderfully old place, and being on the old Residenz grounds, imagining what it must’ve been like to be a Kurfürst or an Imperator or a Dux Bayern, strolling the gardens and the plazas – you could really spend a while there.

At Oktoberfest the day before a girl had told me not to bother visiting the Englischer Garten. She was for sure wrong. It’s like a Millennium Park or Boston Common on steroids, slicing out a whole quarter of the city center along the river. Where the river is allowed to flow into the park proper, there exists a bottleneck, and somehow this bottleneck turned into a bit of a rapid. Even more strangely, a bunch of people got the good idea to surf it. I’ll include the video – it’s really crazy to see surfboards and wetsuits in the middle of a southern German city park, but there it was (I tried to include the video, not sure what happened).

In the Englischer Garten

We got the idea in our heads to go clear across the city to see the Nymphenburg Palace at around 5 or 6. We plodded through the wide meadows of the Garten and descended to the Bahn, taking it to a sleepy area called Moobach. It was dusk when we got out, and I started to feel that we hadn’t planned it out all the way. But we both figured nothing really bad would happen, and so we mapped the way and started walking. The sleepier side streets became big avenues, with signs to Stuttgart and Wien pointing above our heads, but we just stuck to the sidewalks and were fine. After maybe a half-hour’s walk, we reached the darkened grounds. With the lights on our phones, we could make out swans and ducks living their strange nighttime lives, battling for land and water rights or preening their tufts. Other groups of people chatted on the bridges in the big garden facing the palace, and so did we for a while. Afterwards, we returned by way of public transport to the Marienplatz, ate, and said goodbye at the Hauptbahnhof. I sat cramped in a six-seater cabin while a still-drunk Austrian man ran the corridor up and down and poked his head in a few times. I slept badly and missed my Latin class this morning because of the train’s lateness, but recovered and finished the rest of the day normally.

Two Weeks – Day 16

I’ve now been in Budapest for two weeks. They’ve felt like lifetimes, full of walking and seeing and learning and meeting, and have been some of the most exciting times of my life. This week has slowed my previous pace of urban exploration to more of a routine, class to lunch to class to home. But the city abides, and to be resident in it still pleases me.

Like an earlier post, I wanted to write on a few different topics about Budapestian life.

• Music and the city: About a week ago, a few of us were in West End, Pest’s expansive and dutiful imitation of American shopping malls, checking out clothes in H&M. All of a sudden, while browsing some oxford shirts, I heard familiar tones of electronica + female voice start up. The next few minutes were a blissful frenzy of consumerism – I strutted through the store to the fast pace of Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” and loved every single second unashamedly. I wasn’t surprised to find that places like clubs and bars curate and play popular American music, but I didn’t expect the same in calmer areas. A coffee shop I’ve begun to haunt, the thoroughly Starbucksian Costa Coffee, for example, was banging out some classic songs while I was reading – everything from Smash Mouth to The Girl from Ipanema. Their playlists keep me coming back, even though I have to pay 1300 forints for a latte and a muffin. Actually, in all the stores and restaurants I’ve been in, the only thing I haven’t heard is Hungarian music. Burrita, my Chipotle-away-from-Chipotle, plays authentic mariachi. Cafe Bouchon, a French cuisine on my block, plays a rainy smooth jazz. Even the festival on Andrassy last week featured belting German opera being performed outside, but Hungarian music has been absent. I’m totally unaware as to whether there even is a Hungarian music scene, but the DMX revival tour poster I saw on a post on Nagymezo suggests that pop music is in great part an American importation.
• Hungarians and their dogs: I saw a dog walking down the street next to its owner holding its own leash. Later, when an owner stopped to talk to a friend, the dog halted in step right next to the guy. I’ve seen dogs wandering parks freely, amicably sniffing each other and taking in the sights, and dogs sleeping happily on street corners while their owners attend shop. Unrelatedly, I’ve found something I don’t really get about speaking to Hungarians. The most common Hungarian greeting, “szia,” works like “aloha” or “ciao,” in that it’s greeting and farewell at the same time. I am not sure whether that property extends to the other greetings, like “jo napot,” which is “good day”. So when I say to a Hungarian cashier “jo napot” as I leave a store, they usually reply with “hello”. Which is weird, and suggests one of two things. First, that I am messing up this basic phrase and they in turn reply with what they think I mean, a greeting. Or second and more interesting (but probably less likely), that they think “hello” works like “szia,” as greeting and farewell. I start Hungarian in two weeks, so I’ll update with my findings then.

To the Country – Days 12, 13, 14 & 15

On Saturday came our first trip outside of the city. Our program had scheduled a cruise up the Danube to our destination, which was long and relaxing. We pulled into the village, Szentendre, and began to walk around its old city.

Riverside Szentendre

Here I’ll point out that I was wrong about something: in the course of the day, I kept saying how great this old city was and how much better it was than a small American town, which would be stuffed with strip malls and department stores, unpedestrian and deurbanized. I do have this big cultural bias for Europe, romanticizing it and thinking of it as everywhere a place of clean and well-run urbanities. When we left the old town after a few hours’ walking and went to the train station on the outskirts, I saw what actually looked a lot like an American small town – four lane streets and big intersections with strip malls and other shops off of those streets. A bit of a rude awakening.

The town was hilly and cobblestoned, with a labyrinthine plan for the streets. The riverside lay a block in front of the main square, where touristy shops offering etches of the Budapest Parliament and old furs and knit garments lay open. Szentendre has retained its massive old world charm, being as it was founded in the 800s and since modernity being used as a tourist destination. From the square, we hiked up its hills to a church from which we could see the whole town and the Danube stretching away.

Inside the church I got another awakening, this time not very rude at all. When I took art history and learned about all the masters’ works made for churches, like altarpieces and whatnot, I never really pictured them as sitting in churches and being used. But the few old churches I went to in Szentendre changed that idea: the places were stuffed with old artwork, wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

View from the top of Szentendre

 

After a few hours of seeing churches and museums (and eating the world’s best lángos), we took a bus even farther out into the country. Our destination was this massive open air ethnographic museum known as Skanzen. It was set up as a collection of typical villages from around the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its heyday. It covered acres and acres of Hungarian hillside and made for a really enjoyable walk. We tasted home-cooked bread, saw a blacksmith hammer out some nails, and even jumped on the old walls of a Roman villa. It was like a historical theme park, and so right up my alley.

Skanzen

We in fact had so much fun at Skanzen that we missed the bus back into town, and set off on foot for the place. None of us were really sure how far it’d be, but we didn’t have much else to do than wait. It turned into a little journey through what I’m guessing is typical Hungarian countryside and rural community. Exhausted, we plopped down on the first bus we saw and rode it back to Budapest.

Reentering civilization

Sunday was brief in content, but I went to Mass at St. Stephen’s Basilica, which I’ve mentioned before and walk by everyday. I am by no means a dutiful Catholic (my last visit to a church may have been two/three years ago), but this church was really something. The service was (unfortunately/expectedly) in Hungarian, so I didn’t have much to do but sit and marvel at the gilded paintings of holy figures, or the 20-foot tall statue of Szent Istvan himself at the front, or the stained glass crown spilling sunbeams into the interior. When it ended I spent the rest of the day at home and preparing for school the next day.

This week was the first week of class proper, and really exciting because of it. At 9 am Monday I went to a Latin class, then a class on medieval/early modern political thought and lastly to a class on environmental history of the Middle Ages. The next day I had real analysis (brutal, wherein I was grilled as I sat down on what exactly the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem said) and then today I will shortly go to a class on the Byzantine Empire in the tenth century (need to finish a reading). I have felt really academically enabled here by the range and diversity of courses and, as a consequence of being so excited, have been an excellent student this first week. I’ve done all the readings and participated in discussions and in general felt even more enthusiastic than I do at Penn about learning. Hopefully my good tidings stay for the whole semester, but even after this first week, I feel like a much stronger student. The ordeal of real analysis (there are only four others for my professor to pick on in the class) and the heavy preparation needed for the small classes here are way different than the academic environment back home, and in the course of adapting to that, I expect to grow a lot.

Anyway my attention is slowly turning to this weekend’s events. I’m visiting Munich with a lot of other people, which should be great. I hear there’s a big festival somewhere in the city; hopefully I get to check it out.

Days on Zichy Jenó – Days 9, 10 & 11

Zero Week continued quietly. I went to classes and hung out at home for long periods of time, which has been a change from the rest of this week. It is unbelievable that I’ve only been in Europe for a week and a half, and more still that I haven’t begun classes yet. Still, it’s better than if everything were going by quickly.

Thursday I willed myself out of bed early to attend a talk the history dept. was hosting. An older German man, who made funny Engleutsch slips like writing “ist” for “is” in a slide and halfway saying dates in German, talked about how trust was used as a method towards peace in the Thirty Years’ War. I didn’t know anything about the period before, and had to do some aggressively discreet Wikiing during the talk to keep up, but I really vibed with – grokked, even – the thesis. In the end, he claimed that the negotiators established these “years of trust” in the empire, and decided to reset religious terrains to those years. Being able to talk about ending the war through an abstracted numerology let the negotiators avoid the pain of dealing with a couple brutal decades’ history and achieve a simpler end.

On Wednesday, we went over to the Buda side of town and hiked to St. Michael’s Church. Like Buda Castle, it stands atop one of the highest hills, and you can see all of Pest from there, as well as the Buda hinterland. I’ll spare you the usual “Budapest is the prettiest place I have ever been” schtick and move on to the Hospital in the Rock, which we toured later that day. It’s an underground hospital system used during the awful Siege of Budapest in late 1944 and during the 1956 revolution against the Communists. The guide was entertaining enough, but something about being underground with a set of bloody wax figures tickled me the wrong way. We left and took in more of the view and went back home.

The Buda hills

Friday morning I went to class, then the guys got some breakfast and we headed into Heroes’ Square and the city park. Unbeknownst to us, there was a grand fair starting today, and we wandered into the thick of it. There was very cool stuff: dozens and dozens of merchants’ stalls surrounded the stunning Vajdahunyad Castle, which lies on a big lake. There were swords and belts, cheeses and lángoses, weddings and musicians. I saw probably the funniest thing my own eyes have taken in in reality right in front of the castle gate: a man with a tall green elfin hat sitting in a teepee structure, holding the bottom half of a violin body and sawing a wooden spoon against it like a bow. He trilled (?) the tune to Yellow Submarine and looked happy as a clam. A true oddity.

St. Michael’s

 

Spending time at home relaxing has felt unnatural, uncanny. I’ve grown used to abroad being a high-tempo experience, but Thursday and for a lot of today I did nothing but sit around and read or watch TV with my roommates. Hopefully a bit more of that and this place will feel more homey.

First Days of Class – Days 7 & 8

Classes began this week, or kind of did. CEU has a slow roll-up period to the actual beginning of the term next week. The proper students, here for a year or two or for PhDs, have had a week before this of pre-session. Now, we have Zero Week, basically a syllabus week. I had nothing on Monday, but a couple of them today, for two of my history classes. I was really looking forward to these, given that the titles were so cool (“Governance and Improvement from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment” and “Nature, People, and Society in the Middle Ages”) but the professors presenting the material seemed like pretty normal history professors talking about pretty normal topics. I’m still stoked for the classes, especially since some of this stuff is hard to come by at Penn, but I’m not expecting groundbreaking instruction or anything like that. Just a semester happily spent taking a lot of what I love and not worrying about sectors or jobs, and with a free Friday to boot.

Later on Monday, a few of us went to the Central Market Hall.

The Central Market Hall on a busy Monday

I’ve now learned it’s to the south of where I live, and that my north-south alignment has been screwed up since I arrived in the city (maybe due to the heavy cloud cover before today). It’s easily described as Pest’s Reading Terminal Market, but writ larger – it’s got three floors and is in a building with ceilings vaunted way high. It was very touristy, but also not that entertaining. I broke the ATM trying to get some cash, then ate a goose leg and bought parmesan cheese. We smelled the fish markets downstairs and saw a woman cutting what had to have been a 60 lb. cucumber, then headed out and across the river for our first trip into Buda. We stayed only briefly at the first stop off the bridge before returning to school.

I registered for my classes, then went to a history department party. The party, being in Europe, had wine, and the mood was because of this sufficiently chatty and friendly (not that they wouldn’t have been without it, they’re great people, I learned). I met some of the other historians, who are all graduate students, since CEU is a graduate university (not sure if I covered that). One was a guy from Yale who did the work in New York thing post-grad, but ditched the fast corporate life for history books, which I really admired (and would someday be happy to do). Another was a professor emeritus, who saw my Penn sweater from across the room and ran over. He grabbed me by the shoulders and asked in this unmistakably old-person accent, “Is that thing for real?” I said yes and he told us that he had taught at Penn beginning some 40 years ago and came to CEU 19 years ago. We talked about Philly and Budapest and he recommended restaurants and the like – a great surprise, really. He even knew one of my professors. Afterwards, the program all went out to dinner in the Jewish Quarter, which we’d explored on the tour yesterday. We ate massively on the University’s bill (which, being Budapest, was not too high) and chatted for a long while. The group I’m in is full of great people, and we’ve really become fast friends, able to spend long dinners and sightseeing days together without conversational downtime. One of the great puzzles of the evening was the vegetable pictured below, so if anyone knows it, tell us!

The offending vegetable

Tuesday I had my classes, then went to Buda Castle. The castle is perched on one of the highest hills of the city, and pulling in on a bus, we noticed that the line for the funicular (pictured below) was very long.

The casual way up to Buda Castle

Us on top of the world

Being savvy Budapesters, we took the bus a little further into Kristinaváros and looked for another way up. It took a long way of stairclimbing, but we did find a semi-hidden elevator to ride up to the castle’s level (it took a 200 forint coin as troll toll). The castle’s courtyards and façade were stunning, but the view took the cake. The Carpathians rolling away, big houses terracing the Buda hills, the entire cityscape of Pest before us: it was a lot to take in. We took in more in the Hungarian National Gallery, checking out its exhibit on Dadaism and its permanent stuff. I ran into some painters there who I really liked, but hadn’t heard of in my art history class, and have included pics of their stuff for effect. The Gallery was really devoted to promoting Hungarian art and artists, and it worked on me – I bought a notebook with a print on the cover as we left (it actually had a Caravaggio on it so not Hungarian, but still, I’m supporting the arts).

A statue of the hunt at Buda Castle – very royal

Selfie with the Danube and Pest

After more class, we checked out a Hungarian national treasure, the Szechenyi baths. I got there a little later than the rest of the crew and at first didn’t see the beauty in the place – some of the paint was chipped, and the locker room was pretty, well, public locker roomy. But later in the night, being in the warm main pool as the lights turned on was awesome. There were classical statues everywhere and great marble columns and pools of different colors and temperatures and salinities – it was really something. We played chess with an old Budapester, who looked like Zeus, under a status of Leda and the swan. We sat in saunas and jumped in cold baths four or five times, presumably to the consternation of the locals, who sat and sweated while we geeked. One of the rooms felt like a place Augustus or Vespanian would’ve bathed in. We spent most of the evening there, and it was really rewarding, refreshing, and relaxing. A highlight.

I wanted to continue my dog stories by relating two stranger ones today. Walking to school this morning past the Basilica, I saw a little brown and black beauty of a puppy, seated on his hind legs some 12 feet from his owner, leashed. I didn’t know why they were stopping to sit, but the owner didn’t seem to care. Walking past, I wanted to reach down and nuzzle him, but the dog preempted me: he, sitting with a remarkably chill expression, rotated his neck just enough to regard me with his eyes. Then he turned his head back and kept on sitting. I was shocked. I had just been dismissed by a dog. A dog had considered me and found me uninteresting, preferring to go about his own business. It shook me for the rest of the day.

Later, after eating in a burrito shop that will be my Chipotle-away-from-Chipotle, I saw a big brown lab pacing the street while his owners sat at a nearby table. I looked at him and his greenglass eyes, and he looked back at me and seemed to smile. I reached down to touch his nose and he nuzzled my hand for a bit, then took it away, seemingly satisfied. He really perked my spirits after the encounter with the too-cool dog earlier, and I told his owners as I walked by, “He’s really cute.”

Some Thoughts on Budapest – Days 5 & 6

The past two days have been busy, full of me and my friends discovering this city for the jewel it really is. Saturday I got a big introduction to CEU, which lies just behind the staggeringly large St. Stephen’s Basilica.

The basilica

Stephen was Hungary’s first king, and an apostle to the nation; he looms large in the nation’s mythology. CEU feels like a university and it’s nice to be in the setting again. Later that night, we had some sushi and went out to one of Budapest’s ruin bars for the first time. This one, Instant, is 300 feet from my front door, and built into a big decaying building. The ruin bars grew out of the post-Communist entrepreneurship wave, and young artists and businessmen teamed up to use the city’s fin de siecle beauty to bring a charm to partying. The insides of these places are crazy – they look kind of like that Magic Garden in Philadelphia, strewn with weird statues, wallpapered by Russian sheet music, and cavernous in the interiors. We met a lot of cool people, from a generous New Zealander guy who offered us jobs and places to stay in his city to a group of roadtripping Germans who loved my Deutsch (“du sprichst besser Deutsch als einige Deutschen! Sie sprechen Scheißdeutsch!”).

Sunday we took a walking tour with this great woman, a Hungarian born into so-called Goulash Communism with an international upbringing. She was full of architectural and political histories of the buildings and squares, and it was a unique experience to travel the city with a local. By this tour my familiar world’s expanded to what’s called the Small Ring Road, which circumscribes Pest from the Danube basically up to my apartment. Even the roads have started to make sense, and I’ve started to prefer some squares more than others. What I’ve learned from the past four days is that everyone needs to visit Budapest. It’s sublimely beautiful in everything – architecture, planning, transportation, public space, food, culture, shopping – I’m halfway stunned by the view at every step.

I’ll write a bit more on some topics below:

• City planning as political power: Hungary’s leaders have used the city as a political space for a long time. Construction boomed in the late 1800’s, when the city had a big influx of capital due to the empire’s rich agricultural and mining industries. Both St. Stephen’s Basilica and the Parliament building were built about this time, and so much in concert that disputes arose about which would be higher. In recognition of Hungary’s dogged devotion to the separation of church and state, the buildings both reach 96 meters. The issue flared up more recently, when Budapest built a memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation. The German eagle swoops down on Hungary symbolized by the Archangel Gabriel, and implicit in this is the complete whitewashing of the guilt of Hungarians in the Nazi totalitarianism. It was pushed by the new majority party, Fidesz, who are pretty conservative. Similar battles were fought out in Szabadság Square, where both the American embassy and a memorial to the unknown soldiers of the USSR stand. Post-Soviet, the Hungarians kept the thing respectfully, but also put a statue of Ronald Reagan in the square, so the Americans flank the Soviets.
  

  American imperialism in the Szabadsag

  This is not uncommon in Europe, or so it seems from my experience in Berlin. In a continent plagued with such contradicting histories of political liberalism and conservativism, the urban landscapes, wherein those polities really resided, have been overwritten like an old game save file. Berlin’s treatment of Hitler’s bunker’s location comes off as carefully careless, like a perfectly frumpily costumed actress. The location was excavated and blown up by the Soviets, then turned into a parking lot near some apartments with the new government. The parking lot is half paved, half gravel; a tree straggles out of some dirt here and there, but it is almost too unremarkable otherwise. It borders the Holocaust Museum and is paled even further in comparison. As a last insult, it’s a popular dog walking location for the apartment dwellers, culminating in the transformation of the Führer’s bunker into a half paved parking lot full of dog poop next to a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It’s a weird phenomenon through American eyes: we’ve never had a really extreme political movement take power, even stretching back to the British days. Our values endure in our oldest monuments and our newest alike, and if policymakers fight over city planning, it’s usually by means of economic philosophy (see: postwar Oakland and the industrial garden, Robert Moses and the privileging of parkways over public transport).

• Animal Farm: The dogs of Budapest are as independent as the people. They walk freely in the stores and streets and squares and are mostly standoffish. I haven’t seen one jump on a stranger or get too far away from its owner. Seeing them all does make me miss the dogs in my life, though (Otto, Mason). The bees also surprise me, but only in their existence. Colony collapse in America has kind of eliminated bees from my summer experience, whether in the city or the suburbs. But here, they come in flocks. I sat and ate a gelato in the Basilica’s square, and one came zooming around me. I kind of didn’t know what to do with him, so I just moved my mostly empty cup of ice cream over to the next table. Later, walking around a bunch of food stalls in the VIIth district, we saw a table selling long Air Heads Xtreme-resembling straws of candy, and went to buy one. But the bees, sensing our approach, rose from their nestled-in spots within the pile of candy and made a force field of vigorous flying to block us. They’re weird bugs, but I also try not to be scared of them – they’re important!

My WiFi Password is jenoisthesh*t – Day 4

The train was still rolling through rainy Eastern European meadowland when I woke at 8 am Friday morning. I woke up across from an older German man who had gotten on somewhere in the Czech Republic, who I hazily remembered as scolding me in the night for having my feet on the seat next to him. There was still an hour to Budapest, so I sat up and listened to an audiobook my phone had been playing all night.

Once I got off, I met up with a cab driver the program sent for me (my first time having someone pick me up with my name on the placard!) and we hopped in his car to go downtown. I wasn’t very happy with the place at first – the Keleti station’s paint was sagging in the rain and the buildings along the way were just as gray as those in the Sonnenallee in Berlin. At my apartment, my program coordinator, Monica, met with me and led me to my apartment. I live in a fourth-floor apartment looking into a quaint courtyard on Zichy Jeno street. The apartment raised my hopes – the ceilings vaunt themselves up high, and I got a great bedroom, with windows pointed into the courtyard. My roommates, Daniel and Michael from Penn, were waiting when I got there. We settled the rooming situation and I discovered the WiFi password.

A few more hours were spent in the quiet solidarity of roommates that must be always cultivated early in the relationship. We unpacked and chatted and then I went for a run as they relaxed in their room. I had had a cloud of anxiety hanging over me since the train – if you want to know the origin, the Argentinian woman across from me mentioned eating salad, and I thought of Panera Bread. The next intrusive thought was that I will not have Panera for 4 months and a wave of anxiety washed over my little self. But the run shook me out of it. I took Zichy down to Marko and down to the Danube, and ran into the prettiest sight I’ve ever seen. I wish I could be a Richard Ford or someone, just to describe it. In the background, the hills of green rolled around the river all about me. In the near background the hills of Buda and Óbuda supporting the broad halls of Buda Castle, along with the townhouses and rowhouses forming paths down to the water. To my left: the Budapest Parliament in Cliffs of Dover-like glory, and to my right: Danube as far down as you can see.

I returned to the apartment, extolling the beauty of the city to my slumbering roommates. A little while longer spent itself in quiescence, then we made dinner plans with Anthony, also from Penn. We left the apartment and went to the historic Andrassy street, eating burgers and getting tips on life in Budapest from Anthony, who’d been there a while longer. Going home, we stopped by the Oktagon, a main square in Budapest, and went home. We’d made plans to go out, but exhaustion wore on us, and we stayed in. Later that night, our last roommate, Philip, entered, and we showed him the ropes of our place and all went to sleep.

It was great to spend a quieter day for my first in Budapest. I spent like 9 hours asleep, reenergizing after my travel spree and enjoyed the luck of our great apartment. I read Down and Out more and neatly put my cords and chargers away and was happy.

The German Masquerade – Days 2 and 3

We woke up Wednesday morning to the sound of children’s screams rising off the neighboring soccer field. Michael was leaving for Budapest in the early afternoon, so we briefly packed and readied our stuff for leaving, then wandered out. We strolled down the Auguststraße, looking for a place to breakfast and admiring the older buildings. The Synagogue Mitte caught my eye, and Michael explained how it was saved from the Kristallnacht destructions by one inspired guard faking a document from Hitler. I visited an Apotheke to grab some toiletries and then we went to Café Bravo, a pretty place in a courtyard which for some reason was only serving breakfast all day. After a hearty plate of eggs, bacon, and mushrooms, we went back and rested a little longer in the apartment. I’m still struggling to deal with the time difference between here and home and stopped myself from trying to carry on conversations with my friends at what would’ve been 7 am for them.

Michael had let me share his AirBNB for a night, which was great, but he was leaving and I’d be homeless. I shopped around before deciding on a hostel he recommended, the Great Hostel Berlin. It lays on Templehofer Ufer, and should’ve been a quick U-Bahn trip away from the other apartment. We went to the subway and said goodbye to each other, since he was heading for the airport, and I took off in the direction of the hostel. I found the train much more agreeable this time around – in the daylight, a little clearer of mind, I could figure out what earlier seemed a byzantine system of rails, and made it to a station close enough.

I made my first German attempt of the day asking a guy at a café which way my street was. My accent betrayed me so he answered in English at first, but I began doing a strange thing I’d do again in the day. I faked not knowing English to just use German, and he repeated his advice in that language, which I took with a thanks. But just five minutes or so later, the rain came down heavily, and I was forced into a cab, though not before a big van could cartoonishly splash water from the gutter all over my legs.

I told the cabbie where to take me, but made a fatal error: I forgot to ask if he took credit card. Looking back, I didn’t really have much choice, given the downpour, but to take his cab, but we got into a bit of a spat when we arrived at the hostel. He berated me for a little while in German, a scary thing indeed, but I recovered and in the end had to go to an ATM to grab cash before getting to the hostel. Word of advice: don’t get caught without cash in Berlin.

I checked in and was told my room wasn’t ready, so I could go explore the city and return. I chatted with an Australian father and son touring the city, who told me a bit about what to do and asked me all the ins and outs of American sports salaries. Navigating out and onto the U-Bahn again, I made my way to the middle of the city and saw a sign for the Museuminsel, and decided to check out the stuff there. It was a good decision. I’d been starved by Berlin’s grays – rows and streets full of the stuff, building after building another Brutalist monument. But the Museuminsel was different. Hues of pink, oxidized copper, and gargantuan gilted wreaths covered every building. I stood at the corner opposite the Altes Museum and the Berliner Dom and marveled at the sight. It was the Old World I was looking for, and I was happy to see it.

Altes Museum

I checked out the Altes Museum, which was nice, but rather unremarkable for someone who wasn’t super into looking at broken classical busts. Here my German began to falter: I asked a guard whether it was okay to keep my jacket on and he barked a reply full of consonants back to me. I shook my head in agreement and ran off.

The Berliner Dom, on the other hand, was a treat. It’s a colossal monument to German Protestantism, with quotes along its turrets reaffirming the love of God and statues of Calvin and Luther everywhere. I paid a student’s rate (a very cool thing about the attractions here) and entered the main cathedral. Like the outside, it was wildly colorful, with inset slabs of porphyry and marble and baroque spins of concrete and wood everywhere. The tour continued up the winding staircases, which eventually led outside on top of the biggest dome. You could see all of Berlin from up there, and I took a while strolling around it. From the top, I went next to the basement, which the building calls the Crypt of the Hohenzollerns, who were Germany’s only proper royal family. Starting in the 1420s as one of the innumerable princely families vying for control in the HRE, they seized power in much of the north of Germany and established Berlin as their capital. They would later be the same family to establish Prussia, and then through the Wars of German Unification the ones to declare the Second Reich. The Crypt contained many of their bodies, from the stillborn princesses to one of the Kaisers. It was a holy place, dimly lit and smelling of dust, and a really unexpectedly interesting diversion.

I continued my sightseeing through the Alexanderplatz, gawking at the Fernsehturm and the Mariankirche. But the day was already winding down and as I grew sluggish from the activities, so too waned my linguistic abilities.

Marienkirche am Alexanderplatz

At my nadir, I was trying to buy a European power adapter in Germany’s electronic megastore, Saturn. I lamely asked the clerk if I could pay with card and did so, but then she ramped things up, apparently asking me if I wanted a bag. The lines were choked and the fluorescent tubes were burning and I could only stammer in a weird Germanic schwa sound. She repeated it in English and I gave up and said yeah and walked out. I explored the Galeria Kaufhof silently, only going in to check if they had what I had just bought for cheaper. I came out with nothing in hand.

At that point my hunger overrode my Sprachschämen and I walked into what looked like a traditional German restaurant, identifiable by its advertising of beer with every plate of sausages and potatoes. The woman manning the restaurant was friendly and I went for German again, and this time got it off with no problems! I paid for my meal, grabbed a “small” (her words, it was pretty normal sized) beer, and happily ate the stuff. I went to the hostel afterwards reinvigorated.

My traditional German food – sausage and potatoes and beer

Later that night, I signed up to go on a pub tour with the hostel, and in doing so met a lot of cool people. Gaggles of Australians, Canadians, and British filled the room, chatting about previous and future destinations and their excitement to see Berlin’s famed nightlife. I hopped between conversations, buzzing in the crowd and getting to know people. I found a girl and guy from Dartmouth who were also studying abroad and we hung out the entire night with some British people. The pub tour fell off after one or two cramped and noisy places, so we retired to a Kebab restaurant and talked until late in the night.

Brandenburger Tor on a cloudy day

The next morning I learned that the people I was sharing the room with, a group of Australian girls, were planning to go on this walking tour of Berlin I had heard about from everyone. I had a proper German breakfast (cold meats, fruits, waffles and jams, coffee) and hopped on the Bahn (a system I was becoming intimate with) down to the Brandenburg Gate. The tour was well-hyped. Our guide, George, was an American ex-pat well-versed in the history of Berlin, from the earliest days as a Slavic fishing camp to the many crises of the Cold War. He talked and walked a mile a minute, but kept everyone’s attention well enough and showed us a lot of good stuff.¹

I wrapped up my sightseeing by wandering into a few more squares, and ended up back on Friedrichstraße. I saw Dussmann, Berlin’s famous independent KulturKaufhaus, and went in with a mission to live up to this blog’s namesake. I got the title for this blog from a George Orwell book, Down and Out in Paris and London. Only by the time I set this up, I hadn’t actually read it. In the interest of not being a poser, I tried to read it before I got to Europe and wrote the first proper post, but the library near my house only had an abridged copy, and though I bought a copy when we stopped at Penn briefly on the way to JFK, I left it in the car. So I put my brave German face on again, asked a clerk where the English bookstore was, proceeded to go up the wrong set of stairs, and bought the thing (this time I knew what the word for bag was, I killed that transaction). It’s a highly recommended book, and surprisingly funny to boot. The characters Orwell experiences while being a young poor man living in a Paris slum are caricatures of national and ethnic identities, and as such, very funny. Boris, the Russian army captain turned lame waiter, is a good example, as is Fureux, the Communist by day, French patriot by night who cries when he sings La Marseillaise.²

Colorful apartments on the Lunestraße

At Mustafa’s

The last sights were taken in Berlin’s big park, the Großer Tiergarten. I began at the Reichstag and took a bus past the Siegessäule, then walked over to the Castle Bellevue (the first two were exciting, the third not so much). Since I was done sightseeing, I set a course for the hostel, but got lost. I ended up walking down a street called Lunestraße, empty of people and full of mechanic shops, to the Hauptbahnhof. On Kyle’s recommendation, I went for my last Berliner sight and ate at Mustafa’s, after waiting in line for 45 minutes.

The train to Budapest left at 6:30 and I hopped on a bus with my luggage towards the Hauptbahnhof about 5:40. That bus trip clued me into something I hadn’t seen in Berlin by foot – its sheer breadth. I was taken aback as the bus rolled through expanses of buildings, squares and gardens I had never even seen on the map. It’s a breathtaking place, and I miss it already, if only because it’s the first city in Europe wherein I felt I could have some degree of agency. The supreme English speaking abilities of the entire population notwithstanding, I was able to get an impression of belonging there, of feeling kind of at home. Language is a brutal thing when it’s exclusionary. But by learning even to read the street signs, you are brought into another culture so much more deeply. It was a great feeling, to hear German being spoken to me and to be speak it back, and hopefully at some point I’ll be able to do so in Hungary.

Anyway, the train ride was the last adventure of this 48-hour period. It was an old train, with mauve patches of carpet on the ceiling and legroom of about two feet per seat. It was also a veritable United Nations meeting – in the space of 14 hours, I spoke to Argentinians, Brazilians, Germans, Serbians, Czechs, and Russians. The two sitting across from me were the South Americans, and we talked late into the night about everything. Five hours we spent chatting, others, jealous of our fun times, gravitating in towards us. A gigantic Russian, Vladimir (also coincidentally a Siberian-raised ex-Russian army officer) sat next to me and we parleyed on American politics for an hour (the Russians see Hillary in 2016). It was a real weird time to tell the truth, but also very much in the spirit of being abroad. They all got off at Prague, still 9 hours away to Budapest, and so I slept in my uncomfortable chair the rest of the way, Eastern European raindrops soothing my senses into silence.

1. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was an especially interesting site. It’s exemplary community art, as it lies in one of Berlin’s most well-trafficked areas and immediately catches your eye. More than 2000 irregularly shaped and sized grey stone blocks fill a square, and the ground dips and dives to form a kind of parabolic surface, so that in the middle of the monument, you’re lower than at the edges. What George acutely pointed out was the lack of information given for the place – no signs, no guards, only the smallest signs for emergency exit around. It gives you the chance to make your own meaning, and to me, it connoted pure horror. As you walk along the curve down to the bottom, the blocks rise higher above your head and they extend past you in all directions. Claustrophobia raises the hairs on your neck, and despair takes over. Your saving grace is the sky, visible through every alleyway and straight above you, but looking towards it also means you look up to the blocks, now towering at three times your size. When we’d all crossed to the other side of the square, through the alleys, George called it brilliant, and I had to agree.

2. For an extra helping of my two-penny literary break-down, I think Orwell is using a technique Dostoevsky used in The Gambler, writing characters entirely determined by their ethnicity, or creating ethnopsychologies. I refer you to the prof who taught the Dostoevsky class I for some reason dropped after a month – one of the best classes I’ve taken at Penn no doubt.

 

From Silver Spring to Berlin – Day 1

Monday morning I got up a little more groggily than usual, but shook it off and prepared for a long drive. In my stunning wisdom, I booked a flight out of JFK, and my parents made me drive the way up. It took about 6 hours to get there, attributable to poor GPS guidance and bad traffic in Brooklyn, but by 7pm, I was through security and check-in, and had to spend some three hours waiting for my flight. It wasn’t a bad time – I met a couple of Swedish students, who presciently warned me about the extortive dining prices in Stockholm, and a pre-collegiate girl beginning her gap year, who gave me the copy of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty she had just finished (she was due to be traveling light for nine months, and I guess you cut whatever weight you can).

The flight itself began as a disappointment, if my Swedish friends were to be believed. Norwegian Airlines had just rolled out a fleet of luxury planes called Dreamliners, and apparently we were all booked on one, but were boned at the last minute into taking a charter flight. By my account, however, the flight was pleasant. There were no outlets or WiFi, but I sat next to a nice married couple, LA-based software engineers, who halfway interviewed me with their questions on why study abroad and why Budapest. We shared a fun moment at about midnight, when the dinner came through. The presence of food on these long flights is an engineering marvel. Stewards and stewardesses served us plates of chicken, rice and salad, taking drink orders and enlivening the delay-weary crowd. I ordered a small and chalky red wine to go with my food and began to relax, talking more liberally about what I liked (programming – I knew my audience) and what I was doing in Europe. A final course brought coconut cookies and tea to lull us off to sleep in the skies above Greenland.

I woke not too long thereafter, just before the plane had begun to fly over Scandinavia, and stayed up reading for a while. My book wasn’t great, but the views of Sweden and Norway I got from my diurnal dedication were spectacular. There was no suburban sprawl, a strange sight to my American eyes. Miles, acres, hectares of pristine forest and tilled farms filled the landscape until a city rose up out of nowhere, and then the rural returned. I didn’t get to fly in Sweden at night, but those expansive webs of sodium-yellow lights that are fixed in the image of American nighttime flying would have been simply nonexistent in the Swedish domain. It was the first sign that I was in a society that really ordered itself differently.

The city of Stockholm itself was superb. I hopped off the plane a little haggard and dirty, but with a hop in my step, excited to enter the city proper. My layover was about 8 hours long, giving me about half a day to see the sights. I took the speedy Arlanda Express into the middle of the city and walked about 20 minutes to Finney’s apartment. Drottningattan, his street, was hilly, pedestrian, and choked with shops. The buildings were full of color and baroque façades, with iron railed balconies and little cafe tables at most corners. It was prime Old World Europe, and a surreal sight for me.

By this point, probably owing to the lack of outlets, I was incommunicado with the rest of the world, making my way through Stockholm based on an address I had written down and the impeccable English ability of all the residents. I arrived at Finney’s building confident as could be, but was quickly stymied, as I hadn’t written down his exact room number. What followed was a uncomfortable spate of sitting on one of those little cafe tables on a corner and mustering up the courage to ask a passing Swede to use their phone to get in contact with him. Asking one guy, he offered me his phone but expected me to make a call. I sheepishly admitted I didn’t actually have a number to call and spun away. Eventually (it wasn’t honestly a very long time), I managed to write Finney a Facebook message and he came out and got me. I set my stuff down and took a blissful shower, then we got ready and went out to meet Josh at their school. We settled on going to get some drinks on a waterfront bar. The walk was also hilly and beginning to be painful, as in another stroke of wisdom, I had chosen to wear new, non-broken-in shoes on my first big walking day (I’m sitting as I write this nursing blisters and cuts in my feet from them).

Gustav IV Adolf’s monument in Gamla stan, the Swedish inscription

The bar was picturesque: a loosely moored platform rocking on Stockholm’s Baltic front, views to the palatial old cathedrals one way and the rock outcrops of the Old City island the other. We took a Fika, I with a nice chai tea and big slice of brownie, and whiled away an hour in the beautiful scene. For our last event, we took the Stockholm metro (itself a beauty, with stations whose walls and ceilings still expose the bedrock they were carved out of) to the Old City, Gamla stan, and hiked up cobblestone hill after cobblestone hill seeing the royal palaces and old churches. My feet were killing me by this point and I was a bit more glad than I should’ve been when we went back to Finney’s apartment and I headed to the airport. In the terminal, the exhaustion I had been pushing off through anticipation finally washed over me, and I slept like a baby on the 90-minute flight to Berlin.

A view from a hill in Gamla stan

I came to Berlin with my game face on, knowing I had trained a year for what I was about to do: speak German. For those of you who put up with my endless half-sentences, muttered below audible levels and mostly to myself, thank you, because I killed it with the Deutsch my first night. I was asking directions, exchanging money, talking to cabbies and waiters with the utmost ease and confidence. The scary and difficult time I had on the S-Bahn notwithstanding (the Ostkreuz station is not the nicest place to be at 11, especially with a 50-lb bag), Berlin felt effortless, and I’m pumped to see it in the daylight. The S-Bahn adventure ended up stretching my commute in from the airport to about two hours, so that when I finally met Michael, a guy going to Budapest with me, at the AirBNB he offered to share with me for the night, I was actually exhausted. Still, we briefly rallied and I went and got some classic German shawarma and an Augustiner Bräu at the supermarket. We walked the streets of Mitte, where my day’s adventure ends, sipping beer (when I asked a Berliner if it was okay to drink on the streets, he yelled, “Of course! This is Berlin!” and toasted me with his own bottle) and talking about our travels and hopes for Budapest.

Today’s introduction to Europe left me really star-struck. It’s really what I’ve always thought it to be: clean, urban, pedestrian, happy, picturesque, polite, and diverse. Though the travel is tiring, I still can’t believe I’m allowed to be doing this – it’s surreal still. By Josh and Finney’s accounts, that feeling will go away in two weeks, but I will savor this novelty while it lasts. Even seeing them in Stockholm, established and happy residents of a major European city, made me all the more excited about my own move in Friday. I’ve still got two days left in the German capital, but then it’s an overnight train to Hungary, where the fun will really start.