Enter "the East"

Tiny houses with red roofs, only a single room large on subsistence plots, stately homes as you enter the outskirts of the upcoming industrial town, then industry and factories and smokestacks and tenements, the stately homes again, then the small shacks spotting the fields under the heavy and ominous sky as you break back into rolling fields of corn and green, green grass. This is what you see through the train window from Prague to Budapest. Rain sheets down sideways while snow falls lightly between the water, creating a blanket of illusion that looks strangely peaceful and terribly cold. The deciduous trees are all turning color, and the pines higher up on the hillside are covered in a very thin white layer and it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Life seems hard in these areas, not difficult to see in the closed faces of the people, or into the cold towns littered with graffiti. The largest (and seemingly hippest) place we passed through is called Brno in Slavakia, where a bunch of young people in fashionable clothes either entered or exited our train car. We sit warmly listening to Czech, Slovakian, or Hungarian, but mostly the people are silent.


And…into Budapest late at night (again), delivered into a gorgeous, arched train station with no ATM and closed information kiosk. Luckily, we had made our very first hotel reservation (other than London) in advance, and sailed to our bright, warm hotel amongst driving sleet. Despite the cool reception, we already loved the city. Our intuition was confirmed as we walked along the broad, Champs D’Elysse-like venues such as Andressy (similar to 5th Avenue of New York), which took us down to the banks of the mighty, roiling Danube. Along the way shops, hotels, churches, synagogues, bureaucratic affairs and opera houses all sit in enormous buildings with classical European architecture, the entire city hovering around the height of the sixth or seventh floor. The Hungarians certainly have a flair for design and hold nothing back in the intricate roof tiling, the layout of cobblestones beneath your feet, or in the majestic buildings that can be seen in all directions from nearly every intersection throughout the expansive downtown area.


One thing is for sure, having bucked Soviet power beginning with their revolution in 1956, the Hungarians are not quiet about their distaste for the communist state. All streets, squares, monuments and national galleries have re-acquired their pre-Soviet names, and the pride in the architecture (as contrasted to the industrial-utilitarian style of their northern enemy) has doubled. The city is beautiful and empty, invoking the feeling of Berlin’s wide an unpopulated thoroughfares with a design more akin to Paris. However, the move eastwards was not lost on us, and in the ancient Hungarian church we saw walls covered top to bottom in geometric patterns, more similar to Islamic artwork than repetitive Christian figures and martyrdoms. We crossed the Danube from “Buda” to “Pest” where we could look out over everything from the immense castle wall. We even made our way to one of the 7 “underground wonders of the world,” an intricate underground labyrinth under the fortress that supposedly could hold up to 10,000 people if needed. The quarters were tight, musty, and dark, but the natural underground caves which had been connected by people over millennia made us feel like we were walking backwards into pre-history.


We loved our three-day visit to Budapest, drinking amazing hot chocolate in the ornately gold-gilded New York Cafe, learning a bit about Hungarian folklore, and enjoying the last major European city on the cusp of Eastern Europe and (further) the Middle East. The prices are beginning to dive as English slowly wanes, and as we roll across Romania to Bucharest we’ve seen the landscape transform from impressive metropolis into small villages interspersed with industrial towns. Romania from the train window seems incredibly poor and isolated, yet the landscape looks almost identical to Californian wine country, with yellow hills and green canopies lolling in the distance (we even spotted some vineyards situated beneath the scattered snow pockets). Strange then to see a woman carrying sticks and wearing her traditional headscarf, or a man driving a horse cart through his cornfields. With infrastructure on par with India’s (large pipes running along the train tracks, rusted out compartments and factories probably from the Soviet days) while looking like California in fall, a strange sense of disorientation is setting in. Our train thumps through the pitch black past the place where Dracula supposedly lived, on towards the former home of inspiration for the legend: Vlad III the Impaler. With a long history of suffering and poverty (and some Dracula sprinkled in), Romania is a strange and barren land. Bucharest will be a quick stop before our 20 hour push to Istanbul.