Budapest impressions in first two weeks
Stranger in a strange land
Noel Runyan
Issue date: 9/10/08 Section: Life & Style
I've been here for almost two weeks now, and the shock wore off long ago. When I woke up the morning of my first day, I didn't feel like getting out of bed. "What's it gonna be then, eh?" I am something of a philosopher, a cut-rate Hamlet. And in my moment of introspection, I realized just how far I had come.
One day I was floating complacently on a yellow sea of banality, and the next day I ran aground upon something brand new and weirdly exciting. Everything here is a novelty to me - my first subway, my first bus, my first train - all of these little things, though insignificant on their own, make up the whole of a new world. The Romans created mosaics from little bits of painted stone. You have to stand back some distance to make any sense of the thing. But it's the little pebbles that make the picture what it is. My little bits of stone are the commonplace things. The small things I left behind are what made Fayetteville a reality to me, and the small things I found here are what make Budapest a real place. A place with character, like a person whose face you gradually come to recognize over the course of time. So what have I gotten myself into now?
I've traded squirrels for pigeons and cars for buses and trains. This is nothing. It shouldn't be all that different. I didn't go to Africa or Asia, after all. A man tried to speak to me in Hungarian as I was standing at a bus stop. Good! I must have succeeded in my desperate attempts to not look like a tourist. But then I have to tell them "nem beselyk magdryl" and then game is up.
Life here is a seesaw. Two steps forward and three steps back, like when I was recently walking through the metro and saw a man playing some sort of stringed instrument laying on top of a bench, like a steel guitar. Only this was not Hank Williams I heard. For the 10 seconds it took to pass him, I lost all sense of place. I went down the steps to walk to the other side of the street, and I thought I was in Istanbul. Whatever instrument this man was playing was decidedly Eastern, and I adored it. I keep looking for him every night as I return back home, but he hasn't returned. I haven't seen a musician down there in two days. These underground passages are magical places. I've been trying to keep a list of what I've seen down there, but so far it's only a partial one.
One day I was floating complacently on a yellow sea of banality, and the next day I ran aground upon something brand new and weirdly exciting. Everything here is a novelty to me - my first subway, my first bus, my first train - all of these little things, though insignificant on their own, make up the whole of a new world. The Romans created mosaics from little bits of painted stone. You have to stand back some distance to make any sense of the thing. But it's the little pebbles that make the picture what it is. My little bits of stone are the commonplace things. The small things I left behind are what made Fayetteville a reality to me, and the small things I found here are what make Budapest a real place. A place with character, like a person whose face you gradually come to recognize over the course of time. So what have I gotten myself into now?
I've traded squirrels for pigeons and cars for buses and trains. This is nothing. It shouldn't be all that different. I didn't go to Africa or Asia, after all. A man tried to speak to me in Hungarian as I was standing at a bus stop. Good! I must have succeeded in my desperate attempts to not look like a tourist. But then I have to tell them "nem beselyk magdryl" and then game is up.
Life here is a seesaw. Two steps forward and three steps back, like when I was recently walking through the metro and saw a man playing some sort of stringed instrument laying on top of a bench, like a steel guitar. Only this was not Hank Williams I heard. For the 10 seconds it took to pass him, I lost all sense of place. I went down the steps to walk to the other side of the street, and I thought I was in Istanbul. Whatever instrument this man was playing was decidedly Eastern, and I adored it. I keep looking for him every night as I return back home, but he hasn't returned. I haven't seen a musician down there in two days. These underground passages are magical places. I've been trying to keep a list of what I've seen down there, but so far it's only a partial one.
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Budapest Agent
posted 9/10/08 @ 2:33 AM CST
This is the typical reaction after a couple of days or weeks. It feels like a completly different world. Basically after now 3 1/2 years that I am here sometimes it still feels like that, but it feels good. (Continued…)
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