Szentendre és Vác

On Saturday we took our first excursion outside Budapest. It's hard to believe we've lived here for a month and have never left the city - a startling reminder to get our noses out of the music stands. My first look outside gave me only a little hope for good weather. It looked very much like a normal overcast day in Budapest. I packed my French Woods backpack (which is unfortunately unraveling in parts) with a sandwich, notebook, guidebooks and some food from Margaret's gift from Heaven. Then Jack and I headed to the HÉV station (commuter rail) in Batthyány tér, which has trains every 20 minutes that terminate in Szentendre, our final destination.

The ride there was pretty uneventful. I was hoping for some good views of the Danube as we traveled north, but got mostly plain scenery and housing and graffiti (there's quite a lot of that). We did pass through a village a few stops from Szentendre which reminded me greatly of La Louvière, where Margaret lived in Belgium. During the ride I looked through my Lonely Planet guidebook on Hungary and found some points of interest to visit while there. Szentendre is an old city rich in art. It was home to Celts and then Romans, who built a fort on top of the hill in the town, which now does not exist. Serbian Orthodox Christians settled here around the 14th century, and built many orthodox churches in the area that still exist today.

Unfortunately, all the churches we found were locked for some reason, but the outsides were still something to look at. We just had a great time exploring the place, walking around most of the time we were there. The sun gradually burnt off the heavy morning fog and haze that had me worried earlier, and around noon we were left with spectacularly good weather. One of the best views we had was at the top of Castle Hill where St. John's sits. There is a large square there and we had lunch, partially provided by Margaret, on a bench there.

When we had circled the town and gotten well oriented, we went to the Vajda Múzeum, where we thought we would see works by Vajda János, a famous Hungarian painter. As it happened, Vajda was only the name of the museum, and the works inside where those of some contemporary artists. There was one painting that I recognized as a pun on Hungarian words. It was a surreal biblical painting, with Adam and Eve and a serpent and a tree and sky and such, but the center of the painting was not an apple... but a tomato. "Why a tomato," you ask? The word tomato is paradicsom in Hungarian. Paradise is paradicsomi. Funny, huh?
After that, we went underground into the Nemzeti wine cellar for a tasty experience. Paying 1500 forints (about $6) each, we got a tour of the cellar and our guide introduced us to the tastes of five different Hungarian wines, with each lots of information on each, from ingredients to history to processes in their creation to characteristics of their tastes. Really fun.

Around 2pm, we'd felt like we'd exhausted our time walking around Szentendre. It's a cute town, and if you wanna spend a lot of money, that's a good place to go. Jack suddenly suggested we go to another town for the rest of the day. That's a very un-Jack-like thing to say, so I took it as fate that we do it. The bus station was right next to the HÉV stop, so we trotted over (sprinting across a highway) and hopped on a bus to Vác, which left thirty seconds later. We weren't sure on how long it would take or how to get home, but those paths presented themselves along the way. The bus ride cost us 600 forints without our student discount (we forgot to mention that we were diákok). The ride over was very nice, with some good views of the hills. A bridge took us to Szentendre Island, which is as flat as Kansas. The final bus stop was actually on the island, and we took a ferry to Vác. I met a nice cat at the ferry station. I named it Húbá, after my favorite comic, Calvin and Hobbes, which in Hungarian is Kásmér és Húbá. It was a very quiet day, a great change from the hustle of Budapest. I really enjoyed the ten minutes just sitting on the ferry before it crossed. Totally still.

Vác was a pleasure, and I complimented Jack many times on his spontaneity. We found the train station first, to make sure of the last ride to Budapest. It left at 11pm, so we had plenty of time to explore. I caught up on churches, visiting the Dominican, the Piarist and the great Vác Cathedral, which wasn't very pretty on the outside. After annoying the locals, we took a walk by the Danube and met many friendly dogs. One big dog, named Mira, jumped on and kissed an old woman shortly after meeting us. Her face was priceless, a mixture of surprise, pleasure and disgust. I wish I'd taken a photo, but I think I'll remember for a long time.

We also found a great boardwalk through a marsh, but there wasn't much life around except for a few birds. The sun cut through the trees as we were leaving. Walked up the river a bit and saw swans. I kept thinking, "Hey, I'm in Hungary. Wow!"

My guidebook recommended Haláskert as a good place to eat dinner, and we'd spent so little that day that we decided it was alright to eat at the restaurant by the river. The place was empty the entire time we were there, which surprised me because of how fancy it was. Maybe people are usually driven away by the horrible music we endured. Much of the time we listened to American 80's and horrible Hungarian covers of American 80's. I'm not saying they're horrible because they're different - they're horrible because they sound really, really bad. I could have done a better job singing from a dictionary to GarageBand.

But back to the meal - 5 stars! We started with some forralt bort (hot wine) because the temperature dropped very quickly once the sun had gone down, and we were beginning to go numb. Forralt bort is the european, or at least Hungarian, equivalent of hot apple cider. I had a trout with dill sauce and pillow-type things (no idea what they were) which sort of released hot flavor when I bit into them. The fish was wonderfully cooked, spiced with paprika and red peppers pieces. We even topped it all off with dessert. "Szép Heléná" was the dessert that launched a thousand wight-loss programs. Vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, real cream and slices of pear and coconut on top. Ooooooooooooo...

My meal, including tip, cost less than $15. I felt like a criminal leaving the place.

Thus ended our fantastic adventure of the day... after, of course, some confusion at the station, because we didn't speak Hungarian very well. We got to Budapest at around 9, time enough to go to the café and upload all the photos that I hope you all have seen (check the sidebar).

Today - just practicing, studying, tea and typing. Sabine Meyer, a world-class clarinetist, plays at the Academy at 7:30 tonight. I get to watch for free, and I'm getting there an hour early to make sure of a good seat.