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.
