Traveling east: Buda, Pest, and beyond

Bratislava, 17 January 2016

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Our time in Bratislava is getting short and there is so much of Central Europe that we have not seen. So after giving and grading my second-edition final exam, we headed east on Wednesday to Budapest for a couple of days, followed by a sweep north to Slovakia's second-largest city Košice, and a trip back across the entire breadth of the country along the Tatra mountain range.

Here is a map to show the route, though you might need to download and enlarge it to see all the names.

Budapest "hotel"

We often stay at Best Western hotels because they strike the right combination (for us) of price and consistent quality, and because they are locally owned and operated, they do not look like cookie-cutter American hotels. But the Best Western in Budapest is closed for renovations during January, so I went to booking.com in search of an affordable place in a good location. The Balance Green Door 7 Hotel had a high rating, the location was excellent, and the price for a "luxury double room" was less than $50 per night. But the old adage about "too good to be true" definitely applied here.

After booking the non-refundable, non-cancelable reservation, I got an email from a woman named Bridget asking when we planned to arrive and saying "we don't have a permanent 24 hour reception service, only upon arrivals." Ominous. We told her that we planned to arrive about 11:00, though we realized that we might not be able to check in until 14:00. She replied that "my colleague will wait for you at 11 o'clock at the hotel."

The drive to Budapest (two hours) was an uneventful trip through the flat Danube valley, stopping only at the border for a Hungarian motorway vignette. The Hungarian highway police were everywhere, watching cars at every roundabout. Looking for Syrian migrants? Serial killers? Us? They didn't stop us, so I guess we weren't on their wanted list.

We found the address without a problem and arrived at exactly 11:01. There was indeed a green door at #7 on Hunyadi János utca. (Interestingly, Hungarians use the surname first, followed by the given name ... like the Chinese. In fact, Hungarian is completely unrelated to any other language in this part of Europe. It is closely related only to Finnish and Estonian, and of course that close relationship is of no use whatsoever to the 99.9% of the world's population that does not speak Finnish or Estonian.)

Hunyadi János 7

There was no sign or any other indication that the building was anything other than a rather run-down apartment block and no one around who looked like a "colleague." But there was a lot of construction going on with workers going in and out. We pushed the unlatched door open to find seven concrete steps leading down into a dingy, unlighted cellar hall, with a semi-circular spiral staircase leading up the other side. We went up two floors looking for any sign of a hotel. Nothing.

Looking down the stairs from the outside door

We tried calling the phone number listed on the booking, but never found the right prefix sequence to reach a Hungarian cell phone from a roaming Slovak cell phone. One of the construction workers spoke a little English, so we showed him our hotel confirmation. He looked around and verified that we were indeed at the right address. Then he went and got his phone and called the number. While he was talking, a young man arrived who was Bridget's "colleague."

We had intended to leave our luggage in the hotel, but it was now clear that there was no hotel. We asked about parking, which booking.com described as 18 euros per day for public parking. He told us to just park on the street, and that we could get three-hour tickets for about 4 euros each from a vending machine for parking from 8am to 8pm. So we would have to come back every three hours to "feed the meter"? We told him that this was totally unsatisfactory and that we were going to cancel the reservation and find a real hotel. He said "Wait, I will talk to my friend in the parking police. What is your license?" As it turned out we paid 36 euros on our bill (in forint equivalent, more about that later) and did not get a parking ticket.

We asked to see the room. He could not show us our room because it was not available yet, but would show us the one next door.

So we went up to the green door with him, which was still unlatched. For some strange reason, instead of just pushing it open he pulled it shut, then extracted a wad of keys from his pocket and tried all of them ... to no avail. So he pulled out another wad of keys ... no luck. Finally, on about the fifth wad of keys, one of them turned the lock and we went back in, down the dismal staircase, and up the spiral stairs to the first floor.

He found the keys to the next three doors more easily, and we were shown one of three rooms opening from a hallway that might have been as large as 3 feet by 8 feet ... maybe. The room we saw looked tiny but clean, so we decided that we would give the next-door room a try and agreed to meet him again at the appointed check-in time of 14:00.

When we were ready to check in, he again showed us up to the first floor and opened room number 2.

We have been in some very tiny hotel rooms on this trip, but this one was microscopic. The door opened out into the hall because there was no room for it to open in. Immediately inside the door was a short, curved hallway ... curving around the circular bed. A traditional rectangular bed would not have left enough room for the door and the tiny WC.

Looking out to the door, bed on the left, WC on the right, "closet" in between

Circular bed

We take a lot of things for granted in a hotel room, but most of them were missing here. No chair, no desk or table, no closet or wardrobe (just the set of hooks between the bed and hall). The wall opposite the door had two large windows (with cheap roller shades that didn't quite reach the bottom of the pane and then would not go back up after we pulled them down). Between the windows was a plastic shower stall, which ended up housing our suitcase because there was nowhere else large enough to open it.

Looking past the shower stall toward the bed side of room

Now I guess that a circular bed could seem kind of cool, but this one was just large enough for one Parker-sized body to stretch across its diameter. There were two Parker-sized humans planning to occupy the bed. Having eaten at a restaurant on Piazza Euclide in Rome to refresh my geometry, I was quite confident that two diameters of the same circle must intersect at the center, which seemed quite uncomfortable. We ended up choosing adjacent chords just long enough to accommodate all but our feet, which hung out the bottom.

And this circle was not a soft, cushy circle, it was a very hard circle. It reminded us of camping, like when the air mattress springs a leak and goes flat during the night leaving you on the hard floor of the tent.

I could go on for a lot longer about this "hotel" room, but you get the idea. The booking receipt says that they take Visa, but they wanted cash... The check-out consisted of leaving the keys on the window sill, but with the inner and outer doors unlocked because you cannot lock them without the keys... What looks too good to be true probably is...

Sights of Budapest

While waiting for the check-in at the hotel, we went to a little stand on the Clark Ádám Square down the street from the "hotel," named for British engineer Adam Clark, who designed the magnificent Chain Bridge that crosses the Danube right in front of it.

Chain Bridge from Adam Clark Square

We found two things we needed in the square: food and an ATM to get some Hungarian forint. The food choice was quite successful. Langos is a deep-fried, crusty bread with a topping on it. We chose cheese and cheese with sour cream as our toppings and enjoyed our lunch a lot.

The little food stand also had an ATM and we really needed forint, so I ventured over and stuck in my debit card. The forint is one of those currencies that almost require scientific notation to express the exchange rate. The current exchange rate is a little less than 300 forint to the dollar, or a little more than 300 to the euro. I wanted to get just enough forint to get us through the day, with the intention of getting more later. But my arithmetic failed me and I withdrew 200,000 forint thinking it was $65. It was actually $650. Despite spending as much cash as we could, we ended up leaving Hungary with lots of forint, which we will have to exchange for euros at some point.

Knowing nothing much about Budapest, we had decided that a guided bus tour would be a good way to get introduced to the main sights. We could then go back to the ones we wanted to see. So off we went on a Big Bus Tour around the streets of Budapest, jumping off the bus halfway through to get back to the room and get the key at 2:00. (We could get back on the bus anytime within 24 hours, so we did the rest of the tour the next day.)

Our room was on the Buda (west) side of the Danube, in the narrow strip of land between the river and the high rock crowned by Buda Castle, the Matthias Church (really the Church of Our Lady, but known locally as the Matthias Church because King Matthias Corvinus was married there ... twice), and the Fishermen's Bastion. After getting the room key, we headed up our steep street, then up 195 steps to get to the top of the rock.

Looking down the last 40 of the 195 steps from our street to the top of the rock

We arrived at the Fishermen's Bastion, an old section of city walls that affords wonderful views of Pest on the other side of the Danube and, in particular, the magnificent Parliament building. (We ended up here several times, so I'll mix the pictures from various times of the day and night.)

Tower of Fishermen's Bastion

Looking through the arches of the bastion to Parliament across the river

Parliament from Fishermen's Bastion at night

Moon rising over a tower of the bastion

There was a brief organ concert in the Matthias Church at 4:00, so we went in to listen. The organ and the organist Hock Bertalan (who has been playing the organ in this church since he was a teenager in the 1960s) were wonderful and although the concert lasted only 15 minutes, he then turned the volume down and continued to play/practice for another hour while we toured the church and listened.

The Matthias Church was converted back and forth from church to mosque to church as Budapest was conquered by the Ottomans and reconquered by the Hapsburgs. Both the interior and exterior are magnificent.

Matthias Church by day

Matthias Church by night

As we toured the upper galleries of the church, we met a young docent who, like most young Hungarians, spoke good English. But he had a good reason for speaking good English because he was born in an American state called New York, supposedly someplace in the east. We chatted with him for 15 minutes about music, Hungary, and America.

I often get hungry, but I'm not at all sure that I "get" Hungary. (Sorry...) His comments about Hungary and its history mirrored those we heard from tour guides and others during our brief stay. Hungarians tend to talk about their time being part of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Nazi, and Soviet Empires as "occupations" of Hungary by foreign powers. Yet they consider the ethnically-Slovak state of Slovakia as North Hungary and repeatedly complain about the Treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I, which stripped Hungary of Slovakia and most of its other outlying territories (all of which had large Hungarian minorities but had majorities of other peoples). This seems to me to be the same disturbing attitude that led to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s involving Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. With the current neo-Fascist Hungarian president I would worry a lot about what might happen were they not constrained by their membership of the E.U. and NATO.

After our tour of the church and bastion, we climbed down the other (west) side of the rock into the heart of Buda to find dinner. There was a very highly rated vegetarian restaurant not far from the bottom of the rock, so we headed straight there, only to find that they did not serve dinner---only lunch and afternoon pastries. We enjoyed tea there and then continued our restaurant search without the benefit of Internet guidance.

And we struck gold! Déryné Bisztro is a busy, 101-year-old restaurant on a busy street corner in front of St. Krisztina's Church. I had an excellent vegetarian lasagna (almost as good the one served at Suzanne's Kitchen) and she had the best trout that either of us has ever tasted. Our waiter was delightful. After looking at the wine list, I told him that I liked good, dry reds and asked him to bring me a glass of something local that I would like. He brought a cabernet franc that was excellent---both the first glass and the second.

Given his track record of pleasing me with the red, I asked him if he could bring me a tokaj that I might like after dinner, warning him that I really had not liked the tokaj I had tasted in the United States. He brought me a taste of a dry tokaj that was really excellent, so I ordered a full glass, which I thoroughly enjoyed. He explained to me that tokaj comes in six grades of sweetness, 1 through 6. I had drunk a 1. But then, unsolicited, he brought me a 3 just to taste ... and it was wonderful too. Yes, it was a little sweet, but it tasted very good. Strangely, the aroma smelled distinctly like dill pickles! And it even tasted a little like dill pickles. But it was delicious! Imagine a wine that tastes like dill pickles but is good! And then he brought me a 5, which was a little too sweet to drink except as dessert. It also had an aroma and taste of dill pickles, but it was still very good. Amazing! And then, again unsolicited, he brought us each a small glass of pálinka, the local liqueur that is a little like the slivovica we enjoy in Slovakia. Wow, great dinner find!

To get back to the room (I won't call it a hotel because it's not) we had two choices, either climb back up (and down) the giant Buda rock, or brave the narrow sidewalk through the two-lane tunnel going under it. We opted for choice number two.

After all the tokaj, I felt an irresistible urge to bark loudly, and Suzanne practically had to keep me on a leash to keep me from running into the road! (This sentence will only make sense to those who have seen Dean Spanley. For the rest of you, it's available on Netflix and shouldn't be missed!) Going through the tunnel, we noticed what seemed like teeth on the mouth-shaped east entrance to the tunnel. It felt like emerging from a whale's belly!

Looking out of the tunnel to the Chain Bridge

When we got back to the room we looked online and found that Déryné Bisztro not only carries high recommendation for dinners, but is also one of the most highly rated breakfast spots. Without hesitation, we headed back through the tunnel the next morning (no leash required) and had an equally excellent breakfast. Their rendition of eggs benedict (my favorite in vegetarian versions) was really special, consisting of eggs and Hollandaise sauce as usual, but over crispy potato sticks rather than an English muffin and topped with greens and a couple of tiny onion rings. Suzanne had an equally good eggs Florentine. And our waitress for breakfast was as generous and wonderful as the waiter at dinner the night before: she brought us (unsolicited) a large meringue for "breakfast dessert." We had heard about the great food in Budapest and now we had experienced some of it, even without sampling the meaty goulash.

For our second day of sightseeing in Budapest we had picked out a set of interesting-looking museums. First, we headed out to Heroes' Square and the Millennium Monument on the Pest side of the river to visit the Museum of Fine Arts.

Heroes' Square with its Millennium Monument in the middle

Museum of Fine Arts

The Millennium Monument has nothing to do with the year 2000. It was erected in 1894 to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of the Magyar tribes settling in present-day Hungary. (The people we call Hungarians call themselves Magyars and their country Magyarország.)

Unfortunately, none of the guidebooks or the bus tour had told us that the Museum of Fine Arts is closed until 2018 for renovations. We discovered this the hard way after circumnavigating the building looking for an entrance. Oops.

So we proceeded back down the magnificent Andrássy Street, a wide avenue lined with mansions and beautiful buildings, to #60, a building with a frightening story to tell and that tells it very well. The large, gray building at Andrássy Street 60 was the headquarters of the secret police during the Nazi era (when, like Slovakia, Hungary had a puppet government subservient to Hitler) and then was taken over by the AVO, the Hungarian version of the Russian KGB. It is now open to the public as the House of Terror, with rooms configured in the ways that they were during the secret police days and extensive exhibits about the terrors, tortures, executions, and show trials that went on there. The basement cells and torture chambers are particularly sobering. Pictures were not allowed inside, but here is the exterior.

After the House of Terror it was back on the bus to finish the city tour that we had cut short the day before. The bus took us past the big indoor market (which would have been fun to visit if we had had another day).

Market building in Pest

We disembarked at the top of the rock on the Buda side, where there were two museums we wanted to visit: the Hungarian National Gallery in the Buda Castle and the Music History Museum.

Buda Castle dates from the early 1950s. Yes, I said 1950s. It was destroyed regularly by invading armies over the centuries, most recently by the Red Army during the siege of Budapest in 1944-45. It was then reconstructed by the Soviets along themes from its earlier incarnations, but the current castle cannot really be considered a historic building in the sense of other castles of Central Europe. (Much like the Bratislava Castle, another Soviet "restoration," which doesn't even look old.)

Sculpture outside the Hungarian National Gallery

Buda Castle now houses the Hungarian National Library, the Budapest Historical Museum, and the Hungarian National Gallery. We opted to visit the last of these, which proved to be a massive collection of portraits of long-dead Hungarian soldiers, kings, nobles, and families of kings and nobles. There was a lot of pleasant art, but the political overtones were ever-present.

With about 45 minutes left before having to convey cash to Bridget's "colleague" at our room, we hurried over to the nearby Music History Museum at 3:45. But when we arrived it was locked in anticipation of closing at 4:00. So, in our continuing comedy of missed opportunities in Budapest, we missed out on two of the four museums that we wanted to visit on the day.
And dinner followed the same plan: we found a place online that looked great, and then discovered we could not eat there. This time it was a pizza place on top of the rock, but when we arrived it was a completely different pizza place that did not look very appetizing. We found a restaurant nearby and ate food. That's all I will say about our second dinner in Budapest.

After our mixed experience, we were ready to get out of town on Friday morning, which we did after a quick breakfast.

Košice

The guys in the big Bratislava building down the hill from our apartment are in charge of weather forecasts for Slovakia. Sometimes they get it right but often they are totally wrong. I suspect that the weather here simply has a higher error-term variance than in Portland, where "rain tomorrow" pretty much works from November to May and "sunny tomorrow" is most likely correct in the summer and early fall. We have learned our lesson: watch the forecasts but don't really trust them.

When we left Bratislava, there were suggestions of snow and very cold weather for this week, so our plan was to monitor the forecast and come directly home from Budapest if the weather north and east was bad. On Thursday evening the forecast was for cold temperatures but no precipitation, so we decide to forge on and to drive the three hours north and east to Slovakia's second-largest city, Košice (KO-sheet-seh). After our lodging arrangements (again, I won't call it a hotel) in Budapest, we were delighted to find a reasonably priced room available at the Hilton Doubletree right on the main square in Košice. A little luxury was definitely in order, or at least a rectangular bed and a room with the shower stall in the bathroom instead of next to the bed.

The first half of the drive to Košice is nice motorway as far as Miskolc, then we turned onto Highway 3 (or E71 in the European road system) heading north toward the Slovak border. Several inches of snow lined the sides of the roads, but the roadway had been cleared and salted so there were no real problems with traction.

About halfway from Miskolc to Košice, between the villages of Novajidrány and Garadna, traffic suddenly stopped. We were behind a long line of big trucks stretching as far as we could see and we knew we would be there a while when the truck drivers started getting out of their rigs and standing around talking to one another. What to do? We didn't want to spend the day sitting in the car when we could be seeing Košice.

Zooming in on the GPS map suggested that there was a little road (no doubt the old highway) going through the two villages that might get us around the jam-up. So we turned around and headed back to the turn-off for Novajidrány on the west side of the highway. It proved to be a charming little village with lots of people out shoveling snow off their sidewalks and driveways. On the north side of Novajidrány the road went under the main highway---full of stopped trucks---and emerged on the east side into the village of Garadna, which was equally charming.

As we proceeded north through Garadna there were dozens of men heading up the sidewalk carrying shovels and interesting rakes/brooms made of cane reeds. We figured out later that they must have been heading for the highway to clean up the problem, whatever it was. On the north side of Garadna we arrived at a roundabout. Looking over at the highway, all the stopped trucks were now heading south, so we inferred (correctly) that we must have successfully bypassed the blockage. We drove back over to the highway and headed north on a road totally deserted of traffic (at least in our direction).

Before long we were back in Slovakia. We didn't realize how many Slovak words we knew until we went to Hungary where we knew none! Coming back into the country almost, kinda-sorta felt like coming home in a strange and remote way.

The Doubletree Hotel was everything we craved after our two days of camping in Budapest: staff that spoke perfect English, big comfortable lobby, elevators, nice restaurant, and a beautiful room on the 11th floor. Here are some of the views out the 11th floor windows (both from our room and from the window near the elevator at the end of the hall):

Košice has plenty of panaláky too

View from our room, with shopping center below

Looking north toward St. Elisabeth Cathedral

Bratislava advertises itself as a "Little Big City," which must make Košice a "Littler Big City" since it is about half the size (~250,000 population). But it still has a bit of a city "feel," with trams, traffic, and a lovely central city square.

When we stopped in a souvenir shop on the square, Suzanne asked the clerk (who spoke excellent English), "If we only had time to see one thing in this city, what should we see?" The clerk immediately gestured across the street and said "the cathedral." As it turned out, she was wrong, but only because I'm an economist, not a pious Catholic. The cathedral interior was lovely, if not quite as ornamented as some we have visited. No pictures allowed, so you'll have to take our word for it, or better yet, visit for yourself!

The main street and square of Košice are charming. They include not only St. Elisabeth's, but the much smaller St. Michael's Chapel next door, the old city hall, the eastern outpost of the Slovak National Theater, and the "Plague Column." After ruinous outbreaks of the plague, it was common for cities to erect large columns topped by the Virgin Mary, I guess to thank God for only killing half the population. We have seen a number of such memorials.

St. Elisabeth's from the ground, with St. Michael's Chapel at right

St. Elisabeth's from side street

State Theater of Košice

Plague Column

At the very north end of the Hlavná Ulica (Main Street) is the Východoslovenské Múzeum (East Slovak Museum). Our luck here was much better than in Budapest---the museum was actually open.

East Slovak Museum

We entered and faced some choices about tickets because there were several different exhibits available. We chose the Košice history exhibit and the "Golden Treasure of Košice." But first Suzanne needed to get up-close and personal with the life-sized flute-player statue in the lobby. (I didn't get to get up-close and personal with the nude woman statue on the other side of the stairs.)

We then went into the basement to see what the Golden Treasure of Košice was all about. Wow! It is an amazing story and an even more amazing display.

In 1682, the then-Hapsburg town of Košice was occupied by an anti-Hapsburg rebellion led by Hungarian Tököly Imre and backed by the Ottoman Empire. Someone---perhaps a wealthy individual, the state, or the church---buried an amazing treasure consisting of three gold medallions, a large gold chain, and 2,920 gold coins from all over Europe.

The treasure lay buried for 253 years until August 1935, when a construction worker, in the process of digging the foundation for a new building on the square, came across a curious copper container, which of course housed this amazing treasure.

A recreation of the discovery of the copper container containing the treasure

In 1957 the treasure returned to Košice, where they now display it---every single piece---in a large vault in the East Slovak Museum.

Looking down into the vault. Even short people like me have to duck their heads!

Inside the vault, the walls are lined with massive displays of coins; the larger medallions and the chain are in special cases in the middle of the room.

The cathedral was very nice, but for an economist there is only one "must-see" sight in Košice and it is in the basement of the East Slovak Museum!

We returned happy to the hotel and, having seen nothing on the streets more promising, sat down for dinner in their restaurant. There was some kind of very fancy ball going on in the hotel, so the entire time we sat in the restaurant (in our jeans, spelled džinz in Slovak) there were people arriving in the foyer in tuxedos and fancy dresses having their pictures taken before they went upstairs to the ballroom. Being underdressed did not ruin my tuna or Suzanne's ravioli, and the Slovak cabernet and Hungarian tokaj were good as well.

Heading home

One of the reasons for going to Košice was to drive back across mountainous northern Slovakia. We had never been near the High Tatras but had been told by many people of their beauty, so they were on our must-visit list.

A few miles west of Košice is one of the largest castle ruins in Slovakia: Spiš (pronounced Speesh) Castle. Our guidebook said that it is closed in the winter and we did not really have a lot of time to visit anyway, but we did stop to admire its impressive hulk from the side of the highway.

As we moved further west, the skies began to clear and we had a nice, mostly sunny day to drive home. About the only clouds were those hiding the peaks of the High Tatras! We could tell that the mountains were large and beautiful, but I guess we will have to return here one day to get the unobstructed view.

As we got closer to Bratislava, the clouds returned and the road passed the ruins of Beckov Castle, high on a rock above the town of Beckov (BETS-kov).

So that was our week's adventure. Some good and some really not-so-good.

Every time we come back here from a trip, our Bratislava apartment feels more and more like home. We have enjoyed our time here and learned a lot. As we approach the end of our stay, we have both been reflecting back on the good things and the less-good things we have experienced. I am preparing a couple of posts in which I will share my retrospective thoughts about living and working in Bratislava, and about returning to Portland next month, so watch the blog in the next couple of weeks.

Until then, dovidenia.