(Being part the second of my adventures in Budapest. With photo links! These open new browser windows.)
Flying in over the coast of the Netherlands at dawn is something everyone ought to do at least once. Preferably with a window seat so, y'know, you can gaze upon the flattest country I've ever seen outside of Kansas. The dawn makes everything rose and gold, and even if you've hardly slept over the preceding nine hours, there's just something refreshing about it.
Due to some curfew or other, the plane couldn't land right away, so we circled back out over the water and did the approach all over again. Pretty, though by then I was ready to be on the ground.
The Amsterdam airport is like a shopping mall with a few wings of gates attached. I badly wanted some coffee but couldn't find an ATM (then again, in my sleep-deprived state I couldn't have found my own feet without assistance). I was lucky enough to find the transfer desk, one of many where people changing planes in Amsterdam can check in for their connections. It was here that I discovered that, contrary to what the desk agent in Seattle had told me, I was already checked through to Budapest and should have a boarding pass for my flight on Malev. I didn't. The agent sighed and gave me one, and off I went to the gate.
Hungarians seem to treat no-smoking regulations as a guideline rather than a rule, and in fact the placement of ashtrays throughout the gate area seemed to suggest that no one would upbraid them for smoking. As, in fact, no one did. I was personally too tired to care, and curled up in a corner with my copy of Dan Simmon's Hyperion and a middling curiosity as to whether the Malev flight, as my cousin claimed, would be late.
It was. It was so late that its gate was changed, something I didn't cotton to until I looked up and realized that I was surrounded by people speaking with Irish accents, and whoa, that's an AerLingus plane outside. Whoops. Somehow, in my grim determination to ignore the constant repetition of "Mind your step" from the nearby moving walkway, I had blotted out all rote announcements.
Fortunately, three young Hungarians of about college age had the same trouble, and I overheard the desk rep give them the new gate number, only a short distance away. I followed them just in time to get in a very long line to board my plane. Malev doesn't bother boarding by row numbers; for a plane the size of a 737, at least, this makes no appreciable difference in boarding time. We did, however, take off about 45 minutes late.
The ride was bumpy, I was on the aisle and so couldn't look out the window, and the guy sitting next to me wanted to have a deep and meaningful discussion on how our bouncy ascent through the clouds to the sunny stratosphere was just like the journey through life to the company of God. I politely refrained from voicing my own rather different belief, not desiring to start a theological debate in the middle of a flight. I understand that his is a faith with a witnessing mandate. I just happen to think that God is the clouds as well as the sun.
He didn't press the point, and in any case found a more receptive audience in the seat on his other side. I returned to reading Hyperion, which in any case contained a more articulate and thought-provoking theological argument. It was all too much for my addled state, and I fell asleep, only to be awakened by the bump of the plane on the runway at Ferihegy.
Dealing in a language you only dimly understand is a lot like dealing with unfamiliar technology: everything takes three times as long and you're not really sure you did it right. This governed my passage through Hungarian customs (actually quite brief because the agent spoke little English), usage of an ATM, purchasing a phone card (telefon kartya) at the post office, buying a bottle of water, and determining that my cousin Elizabeth (sister of the bride) was in fact arriving at a different terminal.
It also governed our ride to the city proper in a hailed taxi, which you are never, ever, ever supposed to do in Budapest--they overcharge you and take you the scenic route. We were too tired to care. Besides, the scenic route was pretty.
Budapest spans the Danube River, called the Duna in Hungary. It is crossed by a multitude of bridges (nine, if memory serves), each with a unique character and history. (The view in the photo is from the Buda side, which is hilly and affords lovely photographic vantages. The Pest side is flatter. That multi-towered thing with the dome to the left is the Parliament building.)
Our lodgings were on the Pest side. In Budapest you can rent apartments for the short term; my cousin had thoughtfully arranged for me to room with her, so the only task was to actually find the address. Once we did, we were confronted with a rather dimly-lit alley that in turn led to an equally dimly-lit foyer advertising shoes. This led to a narrow courtyard where the entrance to our apartment was, in fact, located next to a shoe store.
The apartment in question clearly began life as something else. Onto its two rooms had been added a pair of lofts, each with its own bathroom (good) and accessed by stairs that are more accurately described as ladders (my description of these as built-in field-sobriety tests got a laugh). Back when I was in college, I spent a summer in Northampton living in a studio that had once been a bedroom in a single-family home, since repurposed as apartments. The bathroom had once been a closet.
The apartment in Budapest went this one better, by fitting an entire kitchen into an equivalent space. (The door on the right led to one of the lofts.) I chose to view all of this as cozy rather than cramped, especially since it was very, very quiet. The practice of fronting apartments onto inner courtyards, rather than onto the street, makes an incredible amount of sense and is a model I wish were more commonly emulated in the U.S. (Granted, this is mostly a feature of older buildings and is not universal even then, but I still like it.)
Elizabeth, like me, had flown in from the western U.S. We absorbed all of this in a haze, then Eleanor sent us to bed for a couple of hours. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings and the fact that it was by now nearly dawn in our respective home states, we crawled into matching twin beds and crashed out.
(Next: concerts in churches and mass-transit follies.)