October 6, 2015

 

 

Budapest Explored (Sort of)

So Mrs. Lincoln, outside of that how did you like the show?  Details to follow.

We meet our host/owner Andrus (Ahndrush) this morning at breakfast.  He’s a very personable fellow who has spent time in Canada so speaks perfect English.  There is a nice cold buffet with an option for omelets and fried eggs—John has an omelet and Mary has fried eggs.  We visit with a Canadian woman who is leaving today on a river cruise.  The river levels are apparently down so she is going to be bused to somewhere downriver which would seem to take away a bit of the romance.  Well, she’s alone anyway.

We spend some time with Andrus after breakfast and he expands on Roland’s directions from last night.  He wants us to spend today on foot exploring the areas closest to us and leave the bus for the next two days.  Fine with us.

As we stroll past the Hungarian History museum we choose to spend time instead walking the neighborhood rather than look at dinosaurs from central Europe.  We pass the Jewish synagogue, the second largest in the world which is closed today as the October Jewish high holidays are wrapping up.  Wandering the old Jewish quarter behind the synagogue is interesting but a little subdued today.  Hungary was a co-conspirator to some degree with the Nazis during WWII as a long-time partner with Austria.  There were certainly Hungarian heroes who are honored at the synagogue for saving the target groups (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals) but the official line was harsh.

As we move further into the heart of the city we decide this will be a good time to pick up our train tickets to Zagreb for Friday travel.  We dance around a bit before finding the central ticket office and moving to an international window.  This is where it started to go very wrong.  “No trains,” she said. Beg your pardon?  “No trains.  Border closed.”  But we need to get to Zagreb on Friday.  “No trains!!!  Border closed!!!!” OK then.  A fellow walks past and says he’d rent a car if he was us.  One option.

It’s lunch time so we go to a recommended restaurant (Menza) a few blocks up the street to get on the internet and start weighing our options.  John and Mary share a burger with fries and a bowl of real Hungarian goulash.  We wouldn’t skip lunch details would we?  After an hour of false starts, a draining battery and weak connections we think we had better get back to our laptop and work in earnest.

We make a detour to the American Embassy to see if they have folks with their finger on the pulse of the border situation.  The Hungarian guy manning the gate says it’s all news to him and after a phone call gives us a couple websites which prove to be worthless.  Where are the marines when we need them?  The walk back to our B&B takes us along the Danube which is a nice lining to our cloud.

The car rental option offers a vehicle for Friday for $38 and when adding taxes and fees comes to $500.  They don’t want their cars going to Croatia.  The main bus line doesn’t run on Friday but an option is a Saturday departure.  A second bus line has a 6:00 AM bus on Friday but it is full.  We can fly for about $450 and twelve hours through either Paris or Belgrade. Finally we find a private tour bus operator who is enterprisingly offering one way travel between Budapest and Zagreb for 90 euros a head if they can put together a group.  We email them but don’t hear anything back before the end of the day.  We’ll get some help from Andrus in the morning—maybe he has a buddy with a car who wants to make a few forints on Friday.

The perky Janus is on the desk tonight and he recommends a restaurant in the Jewish quarter but we decide to stay close at ”Ifcafe”, a little jazz club/café about 6 blocks away.  It is still reasonably warm (mid 60’s?) and there is outdoor seating available.  They have a little tapas menu and we start with a trio of smoked cheese, very lean prosciutto and black olive tapenade. Mary goes back to the goulash soup and John gets the zucchini pie with ewe’s cheese, marinated feta cheese and grilled red paprika all washed down with some local beers.  The jazz group kicks in at 8:00.  We listen for a while and people watch from our sidewalk perch.  There’s a place called Paris, Texas across the street that is doing a nice business.  This is a new street for us so we take the opportunity to explore on our way back to our beds.

Things go wrong when you travel and on a scale of 1-10 this is about a 4 so not a big deal.  We’ll feel better when we find a resolution and have a new plan.  Off to bed.

What did we learn today?  Without internet access, solutions to problems would be much harder to find.