Budapest, Vienna

We're back from what will probably be our last intra-European trip, aside from our stay in Paris in August.  It was a fun week, but I'm pretty tired (looking at some backpackers in the airport this morning, all I could think was "oh god, how?")

Our first stop was Budapest to meet up with our friends Danny and Kim, who are living there more-or-less-legally this year (their residence permits are technically for Rome) and who had just learned that following their wedding back in California in September, they'll be off to Bangalore, India for a Fulbright fellowship.  We had a great time with them, although their apartment was a bit more, um, intimate than I was expecting!  When they first arrived in the city, they were renting a two-bedroom on the eastern Buda side, but at some point they actually invested in buying an apartment near the train station on the far eastern side of Pest. Real estate is dirt-cheap right now, apparently.  Anyway, when they offered to let us stay with them if we came to town, I confidently told Sean it was a two-bedroom deal, but it was more of an all-in-one situation. Danny and Kim were sweet enough to actually sleep on the air mattress and give us their bed, because of how hard it is for Sean to sleep, but it was still different than what I was anticipating.

Sean really, really, loved Budapest: the amount of green space, the eclectic mix of architectural styles, the way public transit actually functioned, etc. The traditional Hungarian food is delicious, if a bit heavy; the first night Sean's dish of stuffed cabbage was incredibly good, as was the goulash soup. The country is in the EU but not on the euro, so the currency situation was a bit bewildering. After so  many years of traveling only in the euro zone, the concept of paying 4,000 HUF (Hungarian Forint) for something, and having that be incredibly cheap, was really hard to wrap my mind around. The language is also a huge stumbling block; it's a non-Indo-European language, meaning it has no pretty much no relationship to anything we're familiar with, and it's famously difficult to learn. Most people can speak English, and most places tourists would go had English signage, but when we stopped by a outdoor beer-garden type of place in Danny and Kim's neighborhood, the sign and all its options were only in Hungarian and the staff knew no English, so we could only point to what we wanted and smile (which makes you feel like a really dumb child!).  Sean was so in love with the city that he suggested he'd actually be willing to live there, if we were able to get jobs there (itself totally a pipe dream!) but I think the language barrier would actually be a deal-breaker for me.

Vienna, in that sense, was much easier to deal with, because even if I can't speak German, I can at least make a small amount of sense in reading it. Vienna, fellow-capital of the Hapsburg empire, is like Budapest's grander, wealthier cousin.  Everything is elegant, everything is clean, beautiful, and practically dripping money.  I liked it--who wouldn't like it? everything works, unlike Italy! --but it was also a bit too much for my taste. My real purpose there was to see the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was an incredible knock-out, practically a temple to Renaissance and Baroque art (they have other stuff there too, of course, but at this point I'm pretty much full-up on antiquities).  You could teach an entire course just on the masterpieces they have there. We also tried one of the fancy coffee-houses, Demel, where Sean had a delicious piece of cake, and later, when I met up with one of Dr. Cooper's friends for coffee at Landtmann's, I experienced the delight that is elderflower water. Austrian food, which we tried the night of our anniversary, impressed me much less than Hungarian food, but we also had fantastic Indian and Greek food.

Like anyone who lives in Italy, we spent a lot of our time outside the country bashing all the things about it that don't work and being surprised at how well things work everywhere else...and yet I was happy to come home!

= dead

So Sean decided to join the boxing gym where Stefania, Joseph, and Mac all went last year; he reported it was super-intense but fun, so I went along today.  In words from Archer, "holy shitsnacks!" So much more intense than the standard gym I've been going to with all the middle-aged women, and a lot of fun, even if I can barely lift my arms now.  Boxing gloves are a good souvenir of Italy, though, right? :-)