Bascomb's Regrets

Back home in foggreydrizzlecold July that is San Francisco. I was so smart the last two summers to return much later–I had forgotten how depressing this month can be. Like Alaskans who head for the lower 48 in February to alleviate their cabin fever, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that most San Franciscans take July off. But what a surprise to find a message from the Animal Control Center waiting for me: they found Dipsea through the chip in her shoulder, and she was eager to return home after 9 months abroad. And I thought I was the traveler! We’re one big happy family again.

(I adopted Dipsea 19 months ago. After about 10 months in my care she decided to try her luck elsewhere, so–at 5am one morning she took flight out of my 3-story window. I later got a cryptic call in response to my ‘lost cat’ posters from a young woman named Trinidad, asking how I had come up with the name ‘Dipsea’. I suspect that Dipsea was renamed briefly during her stay with Trinidad, somewhere in Outer Mission where she was found last week. She’s a slippery cat to hang on to, isn’t she?)

The bus system in Budapest requires and runs on magic. It contains magic, certainly. I was sitting on the bus listening to each of the stops being called out in a mechanical voice. “Nadyazolosh ootsa”…”Bartok Bela oot”…”Attla oot”… Then I sneezed. And I swear, the next stop was called out in the same monotone, Elmer Fudd-meets-Vincent Price tone, “Gooood Bwesss Yoooow”, which was certainly not the name of the next stop.

I encountered another bit of magic the next day: while I was waiting for the 59, the 57 pulled up about 50 yards away. The door opened, and out jumped a mangy black-and-white collie-ish mutt with some kind of parcel in its mouth. The dog trotted towards me, then past me, down the path, without looking back. Nobody else got off the bus.

Magic is also required on the part of riders. I was given what I thought were very simple directions to go to a cemetery on the outskirts of town: “Take the M1 to Moskva ter, change to the 200 and take it to the end.” So getting on the M1 was not difficult. But Moskva ter is a large place where three streets form a triangle, each street at a different pitch and altitude, and off of each of those streets are additional streets and alleys from which buses depart (usually, it seems, just as you realize that the departing bus is the one you should be on). Then there’s the place where the bus stops at a stop you don’t recognize on your map and everybody gets off the bus. Half of the people get on an unmarked bus, and half the people get onto a bus that is marked, but in a system not consistent with other markings you have seen on buses (like, it uses roman numerals and letters instead of Arabic numerals). This is where you use magic to get on the right bus. This bus ends at a terminal for a ski lift which takes you up the side of a mountain (a detail that your host didn’t mention). There you follow a railroad bed for about 4 miles according to your map until you reach an abrupt end to the high plateau and must pick your way down a steep trail (to be fair, I was warned by a man that the trail was steep–but he didn’t offer an alternative). Nearly three hours after leaving the hostel, I am at the cemetery gates. I was looking for the mausoleum by Imre Makovecz, which I did look at but didn’t know at the time that I had found it.

Since I didn’t realize what I was looking at, I didn’t take a picture. But I did take a picture of a gravesite that appealed to me, before wandering off to have some kick-ass Budapesti pizza for lunch.

A swimming pool, in rich blue ceramic, indoors, with portals and underwater windows so that people can watch you swim from the corridors underneath.

But then, the rest of the place was lame (baths tepid, wet sauna, ‘wave pool’) compared to the Szechenyi Fordo, where the locals hang out, and which I recommend without reservation.

From the time we left Salzburg, until we were safely back in Munich, I spent most of my time being licked by animals. Apparently I am saltier than average. Here are some of the friends we made.

The customs form at the airport had a box you could check that said, ‘I visited a farm/pasture or otherwise had contact with livestock.’ I had to write, “And HOW.” By the way, cows have very rough tongues. Horses have velvety tongues. Also, horses don’t sniff crotches like dogs do: they smell your breath.

The first thing I do when evaluating a restaurant is to look at the plates and faces of the other diners. Plates empty, faces happy is good. Plates with attractive-looking food being eaten attentively by diners is also good. If you’re in Austria, the menu should be in German and the music should be American. In fact, if the menu is in English and the music is in German, get out before the waiter sees you.

If you are really lucky you’ll end up at a restaurant that also provides a yodeling tractor driver, as we almost did.

And of course other food options abound in the Austrian meadows. Some are better for you than others.

Okay, one of the great things about interaction between cultures is that both cultures get to marvel at how stupid people are from the other culture. Here is an example: at the airport this afternoon to book a ticket to Cologne, for what seemed like the tenth time, I’m waiting while two or more people share the use of a computer to do their job. In this case one person had been trained to operate the keyboard and look at the monitor while the other person was skilled in the rules of ticket issue and operated the printer and copier. They are constantly looking at each other for confirmation of each step, and studiously avoiding eye contact with the growing line of customers. My attention keeps wandering to the large group of US soldiers milling about in khakis. I can’t get over how polite and laid-back they look. I’m totally proud of them–they look big and confident and nice, and I want to talk to them, but I don’t. And the kind Dutch customer in front of me is helping our travel agent work her way through lessons 6-13 in the Royal Magyar Technical Academy’s Right-Clicking for Windows workbook supplement. By the time it’s my turn, I can’t remember where I want to fly to.
Another example of how stupid people from other cultures can be. So this morning, knowing that I will likely pay cash for my plane ticket, I stuffed some some hundred-euro notes in my wallet for the occasion. Now these notes are nice and crisp and green–worth over 130 bucks each, they’re folding money. Just like those Monopoly 20’s. And then, the 200 forint notes–beautiful green color and, again, a lot like those Monopoly 20’s. You see where this is going. So when I’m buying my 180-Forint metro ticket, about a dollar’s worth of transportation, and the woman is frantically motioning for me to put my wallet away, I play scenarios of what might be going on in her head.

• ‘Americans have such good wax museums that they are accustomed to pay a month’s rent for the privilege to travel to see one’
• ‘I do NOT want blood on my ticket window. Put that away before that one-eyed guy sees it.’
• ‘Why do I bother with night school when people like this SMILING IDIOT keep shoveling hundreds of dollars at a time at me through my ticket window?’

I am starting a petition to mandate pre-EU currencies use white, pink and yellow paper, while azure, parchment and gamboge colors are reserved for the relatively high-post euro notes.

Oops–this is going to be a longish, serious post, because it could be subtitled: ‘Thank god for Budapest riot police’ or ‘Gay rights lacking in a former Eastern block capital’ or just ‘Some weird shit happened today’.

So I’m watching this violinist in the metro station. I’ve tipped him once, and I’m about to thank him for playing, when the metro police come up to him (group of three) and they start to have an animated conversation, one of the police looking at his watch and gesturing for the guy to move along. I’m about to become a citizen journalist and capture the police brutality on my cellphone, when I hear this extraordinarily loud techno music coming from the street level. Guys with press credentials are flying through the station, video cameras running. The gypsy violinist is suddenly gone, and the metro police too, so I pop upstairs to see what’s going on.

Men in pink hula skirts, women in tuxedoes with hair slicked back, rainbow flags and umbrellas: of course it’s a pride rally. All my experience with Pride marches is that they’re good clean fun. I join in. The music is pumping and people are moving along at a very enthusiastic pace not only on the street where the main parade is, but also along the sidewalks outside the cordons. Wow–lots of energy. The fact that the police are wearing full riot gear, and the fact that there are as many of them as there are marchers, doesn’t really register on me except in an ‘isn’t that interesting’ sort of way.

Then the first bottle breaks, about fifteen feet to my left. I looked up at one of the two floats, to a guy who was dancing wildly and whose arm motions suggested the trajectory of a glass object. I thought to myself, these Budapesti gays are rowdy. Then I watch as a guy flinches when an egg hits him on the side of the head. I notice that the guys marching so intently on the sidewalk are on the other side of a cordon of riot police. They are almost all wearing black shirts, many with shaved heads; many, stereotypically, in boots. The occasional regional or national flag. There were a lot of them. So I don’t know why I continued marching down the street, so close to these hooligans. Maybe I was just becoming accustomed to hearing people talk about me in a language I didn’t understand (although chants of ‘Auschwitz’ are pretty universally understood). By the time the march reached a stall, I had a thin film of spit and beer and egg on my right side (fortunately no glass), and was wondering what would happen when we all got where we were going.

As it turned out, the march organizers were clever, and corraled the whole queer and gay-friendly lot of us into a really cool riverfront bar/lounge/club. The shouting of the counter-demonstrators rang in my ears–it was just like dogs barking; there didn’t seem to be a human component. I enjoyed a beer, and flirted harmlessly in solidarity, and then the eeriness set in. There was no way out. Everybody was settling in for the evening. Through the ordinary exits you could see the blackshirts hanging out with video cameras and occasionally shouting over at us. We were in a tidy gay ghetto.

Now, I wouldn’t have minded staying longer, if I had had the option to leave. Going back a second time to a small corner exit, I pleaded my case to get back to the Disney Budapest. The guy let me out, motioning to the riot police still on duty all around us. Once through their cordon, I walked around the corner to see why they were still around. Hundreds of loitering skinheads. I did a quick auto-inventory: short haircut since Zagreb, my shorts are sort of … khaki. My sandals are black. And my shirt, although almost sheer, with reverse-color stitching and purchased at a clubbing shop in the Castro, is…black. So I just lower my head and smell the brain tissue burning as the punks try to figure out what to do with me. I register on gadar in the Castro at about 50 feet, and then become invisible again at 20. These guys were oblivious.

The thing that sticks with me though (apart from making it back to my hostel alive) is the guy in the red, egg-stained t-shirt, who came through the crowd during the march, amidst all the loud music, confronting the faces of the marchers in which he saw a mixture of fear and defiance.  ‘Okay people,’ he said in English, ‘–at least try to smile.’

Okay, so I remembered halfway through the meal that it was likely I would want to remember it. It was that good. But it started oddly. I came upon a swarm of teenagers riding bobsleds down a summer bobsled course, and then saw a monster restaurant with no cars in the parking lot. A little poking around revealed some waiters out back, smoking. I was a little embarrassed to be snooping around, so I asked whether they were open. I was led to a banquet hall for 600, and asked to choose from the battalion of empty straight-backed King Arthur chairs. After ordering a beer, I started to notice the rather loud, arpeggiated Vangelis-oriented instrumental covers of such greats as ‘The Water is Wide’ and ‘Ain’t no Sunshine’. Then as I caught myself singing along to what was apparently the karaoke track of George Michael’s ‘Teacher’ I started to wonder what My Meal would taste like.

It was fantastic. The Pilsini soup: mushroom and beef based, with some cream (?) and lemon. It was the closest you’re likely to come to Thai food in the middle of a Lancelot re-enactment fest. And great. Then the main course came, and the duck was fine, but the accompanying cabbage, potatoes and assorted fresh garnish made me think there was a garden nearby. And so, again, the best two-fifty I spent was this crazy soup.