Living half an hour outside budapest, not entirely horrible.
Woke up obscenely early (for a saturday) in order to meet up with some couchsurfers who’d arranged a personal tour of the Zoltan Kodaly Museum. One couchsurfer’s mother had attended the school as a child; another went to primary school with the curator. The curator, in gorgeous English, showed us around the prior residence of this composer / conductor, a home so bursting with life that one rather expected the man to emerge from the leather-bound library at any moment and offer up a cup of tea.
Down the street we popped into a modern art gallery (check out artists : Bodor Lilua, Garami Richard, Nemeth Marcell), then onto the metro for a trip past Pest tourist central to a lovely fresh pasta restaurant I likely wouldn’t have found without the insider guidance of cs locals. I really can’t stress enough, even if you’re not the sort to have random people on your couch, the value of showing off your city to those who can’t possibly know it alone in the week or day they might have (and of course the same when you’re the traveller!). Not only did I get a great culture tour this morning, but I came away with piles of Budapest tips and Hungarian insight, word of the Nostalgia Exhibit (communist propaganda and the like) and the day they close a circuit of roads for rollerskating, and likely a teacher of Hungarian cooking (amusingly enough, an Austrian).
As the group split up for the afternoon, Thom and I decided to take advantage of the gorgous sun that had broken through to stroll down the riverside then along the island in the middle of the danube, eating cotton candy and laughing just a bit at the piles of people on bicycles build for two, or four. We cooled off with a beer at a lovely blue plastic table facing Buda, then split at the bridge where I headed for the train. Forty minutes later, eleven hours since departure, I arrived home smiling and exhausted in that I-just-had-a-fantastic-travel sort of way.
A little something I probably shouldn’t publicize : I inadvertantly paid for a grand total of none of my public transportation today. My HEV station doesn’t have a ticket office, so I have to buy on the train. This morning on the way in no conductor appeared. Hmm. On the first metro trip I bought a couple tickets as the car rolled in – the conductor literally handed my change through the door just before it closed. What I’d forgotten was that the punch machines are in fact not on the train but in the station, and as he hadn’t punched one at purchase I ended up with two ready to use tickets (well, provided there wasn’t a checker at the other end, which there wasn’t). On the way home I bought a ticket at the office (a steal at 430, considering a single ride no transfer ticket for the city is an outrageous 230) and watched others to see if/where to punch it. No one did, so I hung onto it, figuring there’d be a conductor. Yeah, there wasn’t one.