43 Hours in Budapest
Day 1
1pm: We cross a bridge over the Danube into the heart of Budapest during the penultimate scene of The Revenant, which is playing at an impossibly high volume over the TV on the bus. It’s hot. We smell like bus. Leonardo DiCaprio is grunting, as an elegiac score of violins swell in the background. The buildings are old and weary and beautiful. I try to make some sort of sense of this juxtaposition but all I can come up with is that I still fucking hate The Revenant.
2:10pm: After disembarking the bus in Hero Square, my five companions and I take an Uber to The Hive Party Hostel, where we’ve booked a room. It’s surprisingly nice, for a place with “party” in the name.
2:44pm: The streets, as we walk in search of lunch, are narrower here than in Prague (where I’d left from), in a provincial New Orleans sort of way. There’s a palpable sense of bohemianism, even with all the Americans around. The people are dressed better — maybe Brooklyn-lite — and I notice a healthy mix of posh dive bars, kosher Jewish restaurants and gluten-free bakeries.
3pm: We stop to eat at Bors Sandwich Shop. Apparently, a chef with a fine dining background opened it up because he just wanted to make really awesome sandwiches. Yeah. That old story. Anyway, the sandwiches here are top-notch — “elevated street food” — and most notably, they come in the form of a rectangular prism-shaped panini, hollowed out and filled up with ingredients like roasted bacon and a chewy, mangalica sausage. It’s all tightly enclosed, so there’s no spillage or overflow when you take a bite. You heard it here first: this is the future of sandwiches, just like Dippin’ Dots was the future of ice cream, minus the part where nobody eats Dippin’ Dots anymore.
3:45pm: Budapest’s Pride parade is going on, and we walk around for an hour or so in a failed attempt to locate it. At several different points, we come across gates guarded by police, who keep telling us we have to walk to the next checkpoint to go beyond and join the parade. This happens a few times before one of us soberly realizes that maybe the police aren’t here for the same reason as they are during, say, Chicago’s Pride parade. By which I mean: perhaps they were trying to keep us out on purpose.
5pm: We finally decide to call it quits and return to the hostel for a nap, because we were up all night the night previous, and it’s 90 degrees, and we’re sort of bummed out about the whole Pride parade and lack thereof thing.
8:50pm: The party hostel is rocking, but I’m still pretty groggy. I walk up to the shaggy-haired bartender downstairs and ask for an iced coffee. He looks at me like I’m a crazy person and asks if I’m serious, so I switch my order to a beer. Screw this guy.
10:15pm: Thank you FourSquare, you wonderful restaurant-finding app you, for delivering us to Mazel Tov — an open-air courtyard between two tall buildings, canopied under a patchwork of twinkly lights and ivy. I order a Pimms No. 1 and maybe the best schwarma plate I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating (and I’ve had a schwarma plate or two). The pita bread is dense, the chicken well-spiced and not overly sliced, and the tahini sauce is different than any I’ve ever tried, not too garlicky and pale green in color.
12am: The six of us sit on our bags in our hostel and drink bourbon for an hour, as six guys staying in a party hostel do.
1:25am: Instant is a ruin pub on a main drag in Budapest. It reminds me of a house party you’d see taking place in an abandoned warehouse-y building or exposed brick loft during the first third of an indie coming-of-age rom-com, where an out-of-place normal guy somehow draws the sidelong glance of a bubbly-unique ingénue with tightly-cropped hair, little-to-no sexual inhibitions and a proclivity towards using the word “dude” in a way that’s frustratingly neither ironic or unironic. It’s hip and funky and chaotic and loud, labyrinthine, too, in that you never quite feel like you’ve seen it all. There’s a vague owl motif, as well as a general animals-and-naked-women theme. The first floor has a disco ball and sculptures of bunnies hanging from the ceiling. The basement smells like a fraternity basement and casts an eerie grayish light. One upstairs side room is plastered with sheet music, which seems like something someone would do had they gone mad during the baroque period. Everyone looks like they’ve either just graduated high school or are out for their friend’s bachelorette party. Nevertheless, I kind of love the place.
.
5am or god know’s when: Predawn, gray-white sky. We walk home in a trance, only interrupted by a slice of pizza topped with a mystery meat that looked like chicken but tasted like sausage.
5:15am: Back at the hostel, there are six people dancing in pairs in the downstairs bar area to Smash Mouth. To someone who is no longer partying, the hostel seems to be pleading with you, arms outstretched, whining, “Oh, come on guys.”
Day 2
12:02pm: Stirred awake by what I imagine is a cocaine-fuelled lunchtime sing-along outside in the hostel’s courtyard bar. Ugh.
1:30pm: We pass a creole/Cajun/soul food restaurant, and, in some hungover bout of warped logic, the six of us unanimously decide that this is a great idea for lunch.
2pm: It is not a great idea for lunch.
2:30pm: We spend the bulk of the day at the more-than-century-old Széchenyi baths (the largest medicinal bath in Europe). It is a large outdoor pool situation, except the pools are really more like hot tubs, and the Neo-Baroque structures surrounding it are giant and pretty damn awe-inspiring. I feel as if I’m being unnecessarily pampered. We do several cycles of sauna to ice bath, sauna and ice bath, before walking through and pausing in a series of rooms with pools of varying degrees and medicinal purposes. One of them makes your whole body tingle. Two old olive-skinned men play chess in the largest pool the entirety of the time we’re there. I make a mental note to be them someday.
8pm: After dinner, we head to the river for a sunset sightseeing cruise. It is not an open-air boat, and it’s hot, and the sound of the audio guide has a rhythm and lullaby-ish timbre that, along with the ebb and flow of the water, makes me want to fall asleep. Eventually, we head to the back of the boat and watch the clouds thicken with a burnt orange color from an otherwise invisible sun, and the river water become milky with a slightly darker shade, and the buildings on either side of the river — fantastically grand, especially the Hungarian National Gallery and the parliament building — fade into the black of the night sky. Which makes this otherwise over-priced and touristy activity exponentially more worth it.
9:30pm: A few of us get in a cab, whose volatile driver oscillates between fits of anger — primarily because we told him we couldn’t stop for him to buy cigarettes — and excitement about us potentially partying. I’m not not scared of him. He’s physically imposing, sort of like James Gandolfini, but less smiley. He speaks no English, except for the word “pussy,” which he shouts periodically with the same flourish as a cartoonish Italian chef does about local ingredients for a pizza, as he passes me cards for various hookers (and one random one for a nice-looking café). Instead of taking us to our destination, he takes us to a street where he apparently likes to drink and party. When we tell him he’s got the wrong place, he looks at us strange, a little dejected. “No pussy?” He asks wistfully. I placate him, saying, no, beer first, then pussy. He cheers up and takes us to where we want to go.
10pm: As if we weren’t touristy enough, we hire a beer trolly to squire us around City Park (one of the oldest public parks in the world). I ask myself whether this counts as sightseeing and answer with a reluctant “yes?”
12am: We head to another ruin pub, called Szimpla Kert. This one’s even funkier than the last. The first floor is like walking through an open-air marketplace, which opens up to a spacious, multi-faceted courtyard under some giant flags. (If you haven’t noticed, courtyard bars — really more like large alleyways between buildings — are a thing here.) One room has a bunch of old computers with screen-saver-y images you can control with an Xbox controller. You can take a spiral staircase up to the second floor bar, which contains a bookshelf-lined cocktail bar. My friends sit in a bathtub next to a fish tank filled with handwritten wishes from previous guests. We take a shot of absinthe, because it feels like a thing to do.
2:45pm: We’re corralled into a strip tease joint on one of the side streets we’re walking down for a reason I can no longer remember. There is nobody here, except for a few bored strippers lounging lethargically on a few black leather couches. One girl in a black cocktail dress gets up onto a podium and starts to dance. The effort seems forced, and sad. I’m sad.
2:46am: We step back outside. Everyone agrees that that was weird.
3am: One of us finds a loaf of bread on the curb. The street is narrow and empty and lined on both sides with cars, its buildings colorless and crumbling. There is just enough light to see. We start playing pick-up football with the loaf of bread, until eventually it lands on a car, whose owner comes out and open-hand slaps my friend in the ear and kicks him in the ass, like he’s a mischievous child. It’s officially July 4th.
8:05am: The train leaves the station for Belgrade. We all manage to be on it.
