I took a taxi - hopefully my last one this trip - and got to Keleti Station at about noon, for a 1:35 train to Belgrade. Wending my way to the international ticket office, I went to the end of several maderately-long lines. That is, they would be moderately long in the U.S. But in Hungary, things are different.
See, even though they had computers, and printers, and all kinds of technology, they were still writing out every ticket by hand and using old-fashioned carbon paper. So one person in line could take 3 to 20 minutes. Then, of course, half of the counters are closed for lunch. But, at 1:07, I was at the ticket counter and got a ticket for the 1:35 train to Belgrade - I was on my way! Except the 1:35 train was actually a 1:15 train. And the ticket agent couldn't tell me which platform it was leaving from, and the video screens didn't have a platform number.
After much sweaty chaos (though only minimal panic - chaos is half the fun), running from platform to platform, I finally discovered that the reason the platform was blank on all the signs was that the train was 20 minutes late from Vienna. So, after a lunch of bagel chips and seltzer (which I had thought was still water), I got on, and, hopefully, I am now speeding towards the former Yugoslavia.
Along the way, I pass half-browned cornstalks and fields of sunflowers, most of which are pouting and dull after having lost their seeds and brilliance. As I pass into Serbia, hills and ditches and creeks have begun to gently nudge the landscape from the predominant flatness of Southern Hungary.
In Northern Serbia, a man gets on with his wife. His arms have blue tattoos which portray intersecting shields and instruments of war and industry, some kind of coat of arms, it seems. They look Soviet, both in their style and their crudeness, but the man strikes me as a gentle man, with a close-cropped dark grey beard and mustache and horn-rimmed glasses. He has hives, or boils, or lumps of some kind on the underside of his forearms, and I wonder whether he would be thus disfigured if he had access to doctors and medicine.
When the conductor comes by collecting tickets, the man and his wife seem sheepish, and the conductor scolds them and fills out official-looking slips of paper.
In front of me, an Irish couple - it is their passports, not their accents, that give them away - is studying Serbo-Croatian from a phrasebook, noting that the "square W" is "sh" and the "backwards N" is an "ee".
***
So what of Budapest?
It seemed almost tarnished after five weeks in jewel-encrusted Prague. Certainly it is gritty, with many facades crumbling, their plaster ornamentation sloughed off to reveal ordinary brick or cinder block beneath.
The Danube is mightier than the Vltava, its width more forcefully cleaving the city. While we were there, there was an airshow - a single plane repeatedly doing loops and spins and then flying underneath the Chain Bridge - and a Formula 1 publicity event (there was a big race coming up) that involved F-1 cars speeding across the Chain Bridge and driving around Roosevelt Sq. Out hotel was right by the Chain Bridge and normally it was easy to get over to Buda. But on that day when the bridge was closed, it turned out to be quite an ordeal to walk down to the Elizabeth Bridge and then back up to the castle on the other side, while an equivalent detour in Prague would have been juse a few blocks.
A stunt plane plumetting towards the Danube, in front of the Buda Castle.
A view of the Chain Bridge from the Elizabeth Bridge, crossing the Danube.
Budapest is more real though. It is dirty, and dilapidated, but it is less infected with foreigners. In the trendy, expensive restaurants in Liszt Sq., for example, it seems just as likely to hear Hungarian emanating from the next table as English, or French, or German.
***
A little before Novi Sad, I think, I once again see mountains on the horizon, grey masses that are hard to distinguish against the overcast sky.
For weeks, there has been news of numerous forest fires in southern Europe. At one point, news of evacuations in Croatia made me consider diverting my trip up north. But just before I left Prague, it seemed that the news had died down, except for some fires in Greece and Italy, so I decided to go ahead.
But now I see a small blaze burning in a patch of forest on a riverbank.
An omen, I wonder?
No comments:
Post a Comment