Feeling A Bit Hungary

I arrived in Budapest midday. It took me a long time to find my hostel because in the directions hostelworld.com emails you before you arrive in the city, they only gave the address and the not-so-helpful landmarks of a cash exchange store and a restaurant, when they should have just said the door is through the sex shop door. Yes, to get into my hostel I had to walk into a door with a sign for a sex shop, surrounded by two windows full of kinky underwear designs I would never even want to see on models and phallic devices that scream - this guy is a perv if he buys this stuff. But luckily the store was just inside the little courtyard area when you walk in, we didn't actually have to walk through the actual shop.

Luckily when I was pacing back and forth down the street the address claimed to be on, I ran into a friend I had made at my hostel in Prague, who saw my confusion and could only laugh because the same had happened to him, and he led me through the sex shop door to the elevator up to the hostel. The hostel's name is Carpe Noctem Vitae, and the only reason I tell you that is because it kicked ass and if you ever travel to Budapest and are looking for a fun hostel to stay, go there. This was my first "party hostel", a type of hostel that caters more towards younger travelers that are looking for a social experience in their hostel, as they organize things nightly for the travelers such as pub crawls, multi-hostel parties, and other reasons to drink excessively.

My first night was "jäger train" night, where we went to another hostel for a social gathering with multiple hostels, with the climax of the night surrounding a huge table full of glasses half full with red bull with shots of jägermeister carefully balanced on top, then dropped into the glasses with the push of the shots at the end, knocking in the rest dominoes-style. Before the night began they took orders for how many drinks you wanted, and I was tricked into thinking if you did 10 you got a t-shirt and a lot of people do it, so I signed up. But, I was also not thinking about how little time I had to drink them, since the Patriots played that night and I was meeting the manager of the hostel downtown to watch the game in the only bar airing it in the city. Long story short, an hour after the "jäger train" left the station, I was wandering the streets of Budapest by myself, slightly lost and very much intoxicated, taking an hour to find the bar that turned out to be about three blocks away. But I found it, my team won, and hanging out with the manager was fun. Good first night in Budapest.

The next day I went caving. Yeah I know, caving in Budapest? That's what I thought, but damn it was cool. We were given full body jumpers along with helmets with flashlights just like miners wear. Wish I could have brought my camera down because I looked good. No but seriously, sadly I am left with no pictures of the trip, just a pair of mud-stained boots and some fond memories. During the caving I chose to be the caboose of the "cavers", which gave me plenty of chances to wander off on my own for small periods of time and occasionally wait until everyone had left a particular room, then I would turn off my light and experience complete darkness and silence. I know, I'm weird. That night I was too tired to make it out, you don't realize how many muscles you use that you don't normally when you're crawling around on all fours, sometimes squeezing through spaces so tight you become scarily close to developing late-onset and short-term claustrophobia (or at least I did). Slept well that night. Woke up sore. Am I getting old?

Toured the city the next day. Walked along the Danube river, snapping some pictures of the chain bridge for my mom (she has her students do a project on bridges for her geometry class, and this one is commonly used for its unique chain-like structure). The city of Budapest is surprisingly clean and modern, one of the coziest cities I've been to so far. I could have walked around for hours. Well, I did walk around for hours. I eventually made it to St. Stephen's Basilica, a Neoclassic styled church at the end of a large square (St. Stephen's Square - duh, I just looked it up). Built for and named after Hungary's first Christian King and eventual patron saint of the basilica, the inside of the church is massive and beautiful, and yet simple. The coolest part - in a back room that you wouldn't know about unless you're a dork like me and wikipedia'd the church on your phone when you were going in, there lies Hungarian Catholicism's holiest relic - St. Stephen's right hand. No seriously. Story has it that when they decided to make the King a saint they had to exhume the body. When they did so, they found his right hand to be almost entirely intact, even though it should have been well along its process of decomposing, like the rest of him. Instead, they decided it was a miracle and cut up the hand/arm into three pieces and sent it all over the country/nearby world for all to see. Eventually, the fist was kept in Budapest, where it is celebrated inside this little cabinet thing, where tourists pay the equivalence of a couple dollars into a little slot to have a light turn on over the blackened creepy little thing for two minutes to give you enough time to take a blurry picture and feel a little sick. What a way to honor the man. That night- pub crawl.

The following day I went to the Turkish baths along with a few friends from the hostel. These things get a lot of hype in Budapest and I guess I can see why, but maybe its just not my thing. The complex is huge, with a dozen or more pools, saunas, steam rooms, places to get a massage (which sadly were all booked), and locker rooms full of naked old men. We spent a good 4-5 hours there, soaking in the warm waters, especially the outdoor one with an interesting statue of a woman getting an odd amount of pleasure from a swan/goose thing stretching its neck up and biting a certain part of her chest. At one point another guy and I tried to see how long we could last in the hottest sauna there, marked to be 85-90 degrees Celsius. I lasted 5 minutes. Actually, maybe not even that. I couldn't breathe it was so hot. My hair felt like fire. Who enjoys that?? When I went to change after, I went to my locker to find my section completely empty. I left for thirty seconds to return my towel, and came back to 5 completely naked men surrounding my locker in a perfect semi-circle. Where did they come from and how did they get naked so fast? Look I have no problem with locker room nudity, but if you saw these hairy hungarian dudes scrubbing between their cheeks with tiny towels, you would have left the room and given them their privacy too.

Ok, that's enough. Went back to the hostel to get my things and head to the train station to catch my first of two longggg trains on the way back across Europe - where to? Amsterdam!


- Matt

Location:Budapest, Hungary