Budapest!

Budapest!

Well, the Maastricht 2008 program is over, and it went out without much fire. The last week we spent in our apartment-house rarely doing anything more exciting than flipping from Firefox to Word, from the New York Times to summaries of interviews. Ugh! Thank goodness I’m gone.

Though as I gave my last look at Maastricht’s last square as dusk was ending and there was a slight haze, I did feel a tinge of sentimentality for the town. I may never come back there, but if I ever end up an extremely wealthy middle aged with nothing much to do but live in a sedate little town, Maastricht will be on the top of my list of towns.

A lot can be learned about countries from their train systems, and Saturday I learned a lot about quite a few countries I haven’t visited really yet. Here’s the highlights. German ICE’s, the acronym pronounced differently in each I visited, are the cleanest, sleekest, most modern looking trains in Europe. They’re by no means the fastest, but if I had to guess which were the fastest just by looking, they’d be on the top. Not only are they great looking, each train car has a panel blinking all sorts of information to you. Where are you? Where do you want to go? Is the water closet open? And a bunch of other miscellaneous pieces of information for those who speak German. The ICE I took started in Cologne and ended in Vienna. 10 hours and never a minute off its schedule.

The Austrian trains were quite different. They hadn’t aged well. Instead of the modern airplane layout of seats, the Austrian train I took had the antiquated compartments which made you talk to your neighbors. The train ride from Vienna (pronunciation: WEE-en) to Budapest was short, but my compartmentmates were college students from Vienna traveling to (where?) to study the gypsies. They were sociology students with a very good grasp of English. One boy in particular was especially interested in the preconceptions each continent has of each other. I told him the stereotypes of Europeans, he told me the stereotypes of Americans (imagine some snooty college student’s opinion of people in rural Mississippi add a lot of sex and that’s the Austrian impression of Americans). But back to the train. In western Europe, you don’t smoke cigarettes on trains. It’s one of the few places that are complete no-no’s. While in the West, I was always told of laws outlawing indoor smoking, but I really didn’t see too much evidence of it, especially in the Netherlands. But in the Austrian trains, that law was ignored. So I trundled down the train tracks drinking Austrian beer smoking cigarettes with these sociologist kids. Cherry on top, their teachers were there. Different expectations for students for different cultures.

But, I’m in Budapest! Budapest! The capital of the Habsburg empire. One of the most important cities in Europe sometime some centuries ago. It looks it. The hostel I’m staying in with a troupe of Swedish dancers (Swedish Ballet Dancers!) is on the top floor of what once must have been a grand set of apartments, but now all that’s left is the shell of grimy marble floors and tall ceilings and a beautiful central courtyard. I’ve got pictures, but no reliable internet.

Also reminiscent of Budapest’s past, Evan Rowe and I today spent four hours at the central baths. Oh it was nice, and I’ve got a souvenir of a chest sunburn to remember the place. The outside pools surrounded by the 19th century buildings in the afternoon sun were gorgeous. And it seemed every enormously pot-bellied old man and old sagging woman showed up for a Monday dip. My favorite sight was the chess games in the warm outside wading pool. Imagine that as your Monday morning, chess in the pool. But the best set of pools was the sauna followed by the frigid bath. Evan and I did the duo quite a few times. At the most I could stay in the sauna ten minutes. None of the older people stayed in much longer.

Oh dear, I must be going. Coffee shop, then an the Taming of the Shrew at the Budapest Opera house? Only 800 Forints!