October 8, 2015

 

 

 

Hungarian Rain Comin’ Down

After a run of mildly acceptable weather we are back to another soaker today.  Our breakfast next door is fine with an awning between the doors.  Roland (our original desk person) is back from his days off and is sharing his desire to go to New York to hang out at the Blue Note and listen to Jazz.  It’s good to have a plan.  We both have omelets this morning with the usual complement of cold stuff.  The tour bus company has confirmed that they will pick us up tomorrow morning between 9:00 and 9:30 so that worry is one step closer to being gone (but not until the bus actually shows up).

Hungary is a big city but is certainly walkable for the key parts.  We have another day to go on the Hop-on Hop-off bus but it is really just as easy for us to walk to our immediate destinations.  First up is the Jewish synagogue that was closed yesterday.  The ticket office has just opened and there is a line-up of umbrellas and we consider our options deciding that we will have tickets and be in the synagogue before we could get anywhere else.

Like everything else in this part of the world the building has a long and dramatic history.  It was a compromise design with a couple church architects trying to figure out what a synagogue would look like while reading bible passages about the original temple in Jerusalem.  The result is a sort of mixture that would never be acceptable to the orthodox but for the less severe branches of the faith it is OK.  The huge pipe organ was one unique feature since orthodox Jews would never allow the work of playing an organ to be done on the Sabbath.  John is required to wear a little paper yarmulke which refuses to stay on his flat head so it eventually gets interwoven with his jacket hood.  You can never find a bobby pin when you need it.

In the garden outside are graves and memorials to the Jews murdered during the German occupation of WWII.  In the U.S. the generation older than us certainly have memories of that war but for us it is movies and stories.  Throughout Europe there are still the lasting effects of multiple wars and there is certainly a presence of it wherever we travel.  It is definitely because we are seeking out some of the history, but you don’t have to look very far.  There are also memorials to those who helped saved Jewish lives during the war, with much of the financing coming from Hungarians worldwide (including Tony Curtis).  We view other exhibits in the community center and museum reflecting the lives and history of this particular Jewish community.  Very interesting.

Still raining.  It is after 1:00 and we huddle under umbrellas to the main square for lunch.  We still think we should be outside but now we need an awning and a heater.  The Gerbeaud Hotel on the square has all of the above and the menu looks good.  John has a stewed beef in a red wine sauce and a noodle cake and both are very reminiscent of his birthday dinner last night.  Can’t have too much of a good thing.  Mary has the creamed pea soup also very good.  Beers have become our go-to drink at lunch—must have started in Germany.

Our next indoor activity is the tour of the Opera House.  We get there at 2:20 to buy tickets for the 3:00 tour and mini-concert.  To kill time we walk down Andrassy peeking in fancy shop windows and Mary finds a cheap umbrella to replace her even cheaper (free) umbrella that is on its last legs.

There is a huge tour crowd when we get back.  We are separated by little sheepdog tour guides, first by language and then we English speakers into four more manageable smaller groups.  Our young lady guide is fine and there is a pretty tight procedure to moving about ten groups of folks around the building.  The opera was built by the head Austrian as in Austro-Hungarian Empire Franz Josef.  It was designed by the same fellow who did the Vienna Opera (that we have also visited) and is basically the same.  The only requirement by the emperor was that it had to be smaller than the one in Vienna.  Picky.  Apparently FJ only visited once but his wife Cici was more of a fan and came more often, although she was relegated to a lesser box when she was on her own.

With so many people coming and going (about 30 people in our group) it got a little claustrophobic after a while.  The mini-concert took place on the grand staircase with a diva performing 2 arias for all of the now-combined tour groups.  Yes she was very good.  Yes we were happy when she finished.  Again, we were cattle herded through the 4:00 tour people and out a single door into the cold damp air that never felt better.  We are reminded why we don’t like big tours.

We opt to take one of the big pedestrian/entertainment/retail streets (Vaci) back “home.”  In spite of the rain there are swarms of folks doing the retail stroll down the avenue.  It’s a very cosmopolitan feel. One more beer at “Fatah” for people watching under a market umbrella.

Wandering through the rain with multiple tours mixed in seems more draining than just going for our usual walk-about.  We don’t ask for dinner advice tonight deciding that we will walk down the street and into a place that serves food.  Low energy, low stress evening. We eliminate a couple possibilities before picking “Pampas,” an Argentine steak place.  No kraut, no sausages.  We get a nice Hungarian red wine, John has the “Gaucho Steak” with chimichurri and excellent potato cakes, while Mary has a very good chicken breast with 4 kinds of cheese and garlic mashed potatoes.  Ok, this turned out to be a little bigger deal than we had intended, but the service is good, the food is great and we’re still in Hungary, not Argentina, so it’s all reasonably priced.

Our only slight piece of stress still on our plate is wondering if our bus guy will really show up in the morning.  We can’t do anything about it now, turn out the light.

What did we learn today? Once in a while we should look at fancy historic buildings, but we shouldn’t make a habit of it.