OF HUNGARIAN DELIGHTS

We took whatever was available for a speedy escape from Chania before the autumn rains swept in and reminded us that summer was actually over. And the only place that was not fully booked was Budapest. We had never been to Budapest, a name that evokes images of sepia photos of Renaissance buildings, gracing the banks of the Danube in some art history book. We jumped in but not on a fully guided tour, thank goodness. We just wanted to take our time and get a whiff of the city and not be pushed about and shuttled to places and fed with information that our weary brains would resist.

We took a direct flight from Chania to Budapest and the local travel agency arranged for a guide to meet us at the airport. And there we were, met by this tall dishy looking young Greek whose family had settled in Hungary after the Greek Civil War. Like all Greeks, torn away from their homeland, he was extremely patriotic but very often sounded like a proud Hungarian. We thought he was going to just deposit us at our hotel but it turned out that he was going to give us a personal tour of the city. The first thing that hit me was how foreign sounding everything was. The place names were long with a strange pairing of consonants with some hidden ones sneaking in. Try and pronounce them and the hidden ones pop out and smirk at you in your face. The… s…I later discovered is an… sh... We went around saying Budapest and the locals uttered Budapesht right back at us.

Our first stop was the City Park, Városliget…the first two syallables uttered with a drunken swagger and the…sh… sibilant shunted in, between clenched teeth. I had thought that Greek was a difficult language of untold suffering but Hungarian, the second most difficult language in the world, the first being Mandarin, according to Mr Dishy Guide, was a whole new experience. It’s a Uralic language with this whole range of short, long and longer vowels and consonants. The long consonants repeat themselves and take you on a dizzy ride with their …ggs and zzs and tts. We were standing in front  of Vajdahunyad Castle, struggling with its name, where the…j… was not a… j… and neither was the…h…nor the …y… when Mr Dishy asked us if we had done any reading on the sights of the capital. We looked at him dumbly and shook our heads…He was used to tour groups that did their homework and knew more than the guide…We knew nothing… So the poor man squared his shoulders and started with the castle built in1896, and modelled on the Hunyad Castle in Romania. He smiled and said it was also named Dracula’s Castle…I imagine for obvious reasons…It looked foreboding and sinister like in the Hollywood movies…and better still… it baited in romantic tourists like me. The architecture, like most of the old buildings in Budapest was an eclectic mix of Romanesque semi-circular arches, Gothic pointed arches Renaissance rounded domes etc etc. Mr Dishy knew his stuff and actually expected us to have read up on all this confounding architectural landscape. It was with great relief when he got back to present day time and talked about the huge lake in the park for boating events in summer and when it freezes up in winter, it transforms into a pristine skating rink, white and gleaming in the winter sun, the oldest and biggest in Europe and hosts several sporting events; ice hockey, speed skating and he went on and on with a certain pride building up in his voice, stressing that athletics was part of the national diet of Hungary and was fed to them from infancy. We were impressed and then this Greek-Hungarian, standing there towering above us, with his Appollonian rippling muscles, flashed a brilliant smile and said…`You will never find an obese Hungarian.’ I believed him.

The next day we did another tour with Dishy and a Greek group to The Opera House and some little towns dotting the Danube. The highlight of that trip was when we crossed the Maria Valeria Bridge to Slovakia to pose for a photo, with the Danube behind reflecting in its blue waters, the rising majesty of the St Adalbert Cathedral in the background. On our way back we stopped at Visegrád, a castle town, housing the remains of the medieval summer palace of King Matthias Corvinus. They took us to an inn with a dark interior that could have dropped out of the 13th century and where we sat on heavy, roughly hewn wooden chairs and at a massive round table. The waiters were dressed in the garb of that era and served us bowls of viscous soup on a hot summer’s day and huge platters of chunky meat, venison and chicken and brought pitchers of splashing red wine. There were also robes and crowns of cardboard dipped in gold paint, hanging from wooden pegs and we were free to slip into them and dine like the kings and queens of the Árpád dynasty. One newly-wed couple did so. That evening back at the hotel, Yiannis and I walked to a pizzeria under a night sky ,dripping with summer humidity and sat outside and breathed in the fumes and listened to the bustle of the traffic and ordered a fiery hot Italian pizza, a vesuvio and calmed the fire on our tongues with a chilled bottle of prosecco.

From then on we decided to take it on our own. Public transport is free for senior citizens over 65 and we never felt more entitled and pleased to be oldies. Once we had committed the visual images of the place names to our memory without having to pronounce them, the Underground…we kept only to the yellow line…and the tram were pretty easy to hop on and off after we had done it a couple of times. Yiannis had set his sights on the New York Café in the city centre on Erzsébet Korút, said to be the most beautiful café in the world, where over a hundred years ago, artists and poets pooled and talked about their art and sold their masterpieces and gained commissions. They told us at the hotel that it was best to make a reservation or we would have to stand in a very long queue that would snake around for a couple of metres. We shook our heads…not sure about making a reservation and no way we were going to stand in a line with a lot of other tourists. We got to the busy boulevard and there was a queue and fortunately not too long, so we stood in line. We were all tourists, many very young and a little older and others in their 50’s and ageless, men in steely grey hair in pony tails and faded black t-shirts and slim jeans and tattoos draped around the arm and women in dyed blonde hair in shortish black dresses, arms and legs bronzed, oiled and well-toned. Then there were the ones like us who had taken a free ride on the underground and tram and got there.

While we were waiting under the blazing afternoon sun in a queue that inched forward, a spat broke out between a man of our age and a younger woman. This well-endowed woman sauntered forward on the side and tried to wedge herself in and craned her neck trying to get a peep of the interior of the building.

Man: Excuse me! Excuse me! (shouting loudly and hoarsely) There is a line here! (waving his arms)

Woman: Ahh!( half-turning around and waving her hand dismissively and craning her neck even more) I only want to see.

Man: Yes! Yes! We also want to see!

Everyone else glared at her and she mumbled and swaggered back.

Finally when we got in and sat at a marble table for two on plush red velvet chairs and surrounded by the opulence of Italian Renaissance, gilded arches on marble columns and mouldings of intricate designs in gilt and massive mirrors in gilded frames and chandeliers of gold and Venetian crystal and cherubs and frescoes and the whole works. It was difficult for us to concentrate on the menu, surrounded by all that splendour and noise and music by a live gypsy band in one of the adjacent halls and waiters swishing past with platters of food and several tiered dessert stands with colourful little cakes decorated with berries and summer fruit and others dripping with chocolate. Finally we managed to tear our eyes away from all those distractions, tuck into our beef goulash and chicken paprika with cucumber salad and sour cream and glasses of sparkling white and after an hour tumbled on to the street to take the tram back and sink into a long afternoon siesta.

The next day in the evening it was nice and cool and we stood at the waterfront in a queue that developed into an unruly rabble that pushed and nudged us onto the cruise boat. They were all scrambling for the seats on the top deck. We stayed at the bottom with the older people and families with bawling babies and screaming toddlers. Once we put on our headsets, the noise was muffled and the boat glided out under a starry sky on the Danube that split the city into Buda on the west and Pest on the east. Buda Castle stood resplendent and majestic, bathed with lights and perched on woody hills outlined in the dark. We drifted under the many bridges; Chain Bridge, Margaret Bridge, Liberty Bridge, Elizabeth Bridge, eight of them, lit up, like glittering tiaras spanning the river. Pest on the flat eastern bank was dressed with historical buildings. Yiannis drew my attention to the Hungarian Parliament with its Gothic spires blazing with lights…`Look at the dome!’ he cried out. Wow! The Renaissance dome like a golden orb and spire piercing the darkness had these golden flecks around them…`They’re seagulls,’ he said. I had never seen seagulls flying at night, let alone ones that seemed cut out of gold tissue swirling about in a gentle breeze.

On our last day in Budapest, we decided to go on a wine tour to the Etyek-Buda wine region, 30 minutes outside the city. We rumbled on a mini bus in wine country with a young Italian couple, an American woman and our young Hungarian guide. We would be visiting two small local wineries. The first was owned by a couple in their 40’s, who led us down to their very cool cellar, much to our relief as it was sizzling hot outside, and served us finger foods and offered us blankets to drape around our shoulders. We tasted the whites and rosé(s) and reds and nibbled on more finger food and squares of cheese and nodded in polite approval and didn’t buy any of their wine. The next stop was in hilly country. The vineyard had a spacious veranda with a large table all laid out for us. We were met by a shaggy dog that bounced about in sheer delight. Once again the wines were brought out and midway we were served with Hungarian pancakes wrapped around meat with red sauce. It was delicious. The wine got to our heads on that very hot and windy day and we started chatting and the shaggy dog sat under the table and licked our knees and calves and ankles and cooled us down. The Italian couple talked about their pets and showed us photos, the American woman, toned and fit, told us about her hike up Mt Kilimanjaro and the guide remarked that summers were getting hotter in Hungary that was not equipped for such temperatures. The winemaker stood behind pouring more wine into our glasses and going into a monologue about the vintage. Nobody was listening and everybody was having a good time. We left without buying any wine.

The next morning we flew back to Chania. It had been raining in our absence.

So that’s all for now. Hope you had a good summer.

Cheers.