April 22nd; Budapest, Hungary

The wake up call arrived as expected, but I was still deeply asleep and stumbled around for the first half an hour or so while getting ready for breakfast. Partly, I was mulling over in my mind the greetings from the "National Crime Prevention Center Ministry of the Interior" that I had found while searching for TV listings the previous night. That curious missive had listed no fewer than 11 suggestions to avoid being robbed or cheated in Hungary. That many warnings had to make me wonder if there was a local crime problem or something. However, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the refreshingly honest advice on exchanging money that started out, "Make sure always to change foreign currency to Hungarian forget legally;" As it turned out I was not approached by black market money changers in Budapest as I had been in Prague, which was a relief. In Hungary, however, I was once surrounded by a pack of street vendors; it was amazing how quickly a group of about five women appeared out of nowhere and closed in on me with their wheedling voices, shaking their shawls or whatever while doing so. I kept an eye out for the "cutpurses" mentioned repeatedly by the National Crime Prevention Center, but never actually saw one. Still, I was spooked enough by all those warnings that we checked the laptop and all our spare cash in the hotel safe before we headed off for breakfast.

During breakfast at the hotel we chatted with Tamara, our guide-in-training on this trip and she clarified what the life of a tour guide was really like, which turned out to be a lot less glamorous and a lot more work than we had thought. After breakfast we all hopped into a local bus for a sightseeing tour of Budapest with a local guide who explained the history of Hungary while describing each of the significant sights. Over the centuries Hungary has repeatedly been a battlefield and the native Magyars have endured occupations from the Turks, the Austrians, the Germans, and the Russians. When the Austrian occupation finally resolved into a dual Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary experienced something of a golden age, but the other occupations have apparently left a rather bitter taste in their mouth. Right beside the Parliament building, for example, is a memorial with an eternal flame dedicated to the people killed in the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

Our first stop was Hero's Square where the statues of many of the Big Men of the past were arranged in a semicircular colonnade. The focal point in the center was a tower dedicated to the independence of the Magyar people. The memorial was built in 1896 and had statues of heroes who had fought for independence against the Turks and the Austrians. Monika, however, was particularly interested in the statue of one King, a particularly learned man, who had early on decided that witches did not really exist and put a stop to the persecution of witches in Hungary. They were certainly one step ahead of America in that respect, where Cotton Mather among others gleefully executed all the young women he could literally get his hands on.

Just across a shallow canal/lake from Hero's Square is one of the most fanciful "castles" I have ever seen. The castle really had no functional purpose; it was built as a museum cum showcase for all the different architectural styles in vogue for castles in the late 1800s. The result is a brawl of architectural styles that are somehow pasted together in one building, resulting in jarring transitions from one part of it to another. We didn't have time to actually go into the museum, but the outside was certainly intriguing.

After carrying us across the Danube River to Buda, our bus laboriously climbed castle hill to Buda Castle. I had expected a walls-and-moats type of castle, but Buda Castle was built in the 1800s long after castles had ceased to have any real military significance. As a result its walls are decorative vantage points rather than any serious type of fortification. In fact, there is a little town on the top of the hill complete with tourist shops and the church of St. Mathias.

We certainly enjoyed the view from the top, however, especially since we once again had a bright, sunny morning with a clear blue sky. The city of Buda was laid out at our feet and we had a panoramic view of Pest across the river and the five main bridges connecting the two cities. On our way back to the bus we stopped off in a store offering exquisite little porcelain dolls with intricately embroidered dresses in the Hungarian folk style. Monika not only picked up "Marika", a doll with a blue and white embroidered dress, but also a thimble and a pair of beautifully decorated egg cups. The eggcups are fancy enough that I doubt we will ever actually eat soft-boiled eggs in them, but they will be nice to look at.

Our last stop of the day was at a square in the central shopping area of Pest. Our guide finished his discussion of Hungarian history and obligingly gave each of us directions to the things we were most interested in, after which Monika and I wandered around the central area looking for a place to eat. Looking for some authentic Hungarian cuisine, we skipped over the McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway restaurants in favor of a small grille with a lot of chairs out on the pedestrian promenade right beside a city well of some kind. In fact, while we were eating a lunch of goulash and potatoes, I watched people pump water to wash their hands and face and even fill a water bottle, so it was clear that the local folks, at least, considered the water safe to drink. We continued to play it safe by drinking only beer (Monika), soda (me), or bottled water (both of us) when we were outside of Germany or Austria and we never had a problem.

Monika had, however, come down with a cold that was making its rounds among the people on the bus, and as a result she didn't feel terribly energetic. I was intrigued by the Museum of Ethnography across the street from the Parliament building, and she decided she had enough energy to walk roughly a mile down to the museum and back to catch our bus at the end of the day. We walked northward to the museum on the banks of the Danube River and although the water looked really cold, I saw at least two guys who had clearly been swimming or bathing in it. The riverside promenade gave us great views of Buda Castle and various churches across the river as well as a couple of the bridges connecting Buda and Pest.

Our guide's story about the first such bridge, Chain Bridge, was quite interesting. Before the cities were connected by any bridges, residents had a hard time crossing the Danube, particularly in the winter. A wealthy nobleman was once stranded over on the Buda side by inclement conditions and thereby prevented from attending his father's funeral across the river. He thereupon decided to devote a part of his personal fortune to constructing a bridge and hired an English and a Scottish engineer to design and construct the bridge. The result was Chain Bridge, which was a very pretty bridge with large suspension cables making graceful arcs above the surface of the river.

As we approached the Parliament building, we left the riverbank to curl around and reach the Museum of Ethnography. I was overjoyed to find that not only did the museum have a really good permanent display of Hungarian historical artifacts, but all the signs were in English as well as Hungarian. To top it all off, the museum had a special, temporary exhibit of folk music instruments from around the world that sounded like a lot of fun. We had a great time in the museum except when we were accosted by a rather strange old lady who started chatting us up in English and telling us things about the displays we looking at. She stuck with us like a burr on a blanket for a while, which made me distinctly nervous, but finally she gave up and wandered off after which we could continue our tour of the museum in peace.

The Hungarian culture and history part of the museum was a set of about 13-15 rooms, each focused on a different part of Hungary's cultural development from around the 17th to the 20th centuries. Although the exhibit rooms were focused on precise aspects of the daily life of country folk during that period, the displays were well organized, carefully labeled, and lucidly summarized on a bilingual tablet at the entrance of each room. One room was dedicated to the fancy folk costumes from different areas and decades, and those were just amazing to look at. Fortunately a TV film in one of the subsequent rooms actually showed the process of being dressed in those costumes, because otherwise we would probably not have imagined how difficult and tedious a process that was.

The fancy outfits for getting married were, of course, spectacularly embroidered with colorful patterns and flowers. Similarly, the "good" outfits of even rather humble folk like shepherds were remarkably intricate and beautiful. Everyday working clothes were, in contrast, quite plain and emphasized durability rather than fancy appearance, but that made sense when you think about it. I was curious to read about the age progression in the dress of the typical Hungarian woman, however. Apparently young women wore colorful costumes but then transitioned to wearing darker hued blues and purples in middle age and ultimately shifted to wearing all black in old age. In one of the video clips of a village religious procession, all the older women were dressed completely in black and the effect was rather funereal. That's from an outside viewpoint, of course, but I'm not sure just what to make of that age-based cultural shift in clothing color and how it fit in with other aspects of the culture. Was age really that important a part of Hungarian culture?

One rather sad exhibit was on infant mortality in the "Bad Old Days". Baby coffins and burial things were displayed, but the accompanying text explained that the mortality rate was so high in those days that an infant dying was not really considered a tragedy. Nowadays, of course, the exact opposite is true, certainly in Hungary where the average couple is only having two children at most, and indeed in any country or culture that I am aware of. The baby clothes elsewhere on display were, however, very cute and it was interesting to see the 19th century carved wood versions of high chairs, cribs, toys, and so forth. Solid wood toys may be heavy and not very colorful, but they certainly seemed to be more durable than the modern versions made from plastic.

The child's transition to the world of adolescence and adulthood was also covered by some "teen ager" exhibits. I was surprised to read about the young bachelor and young maiden groups that were formed from the unmarried teenagers in each village. These groups seemed to have been formally organized with their own flags, banners and such like. It reminded me of the same sex adolescent groups found in other mammalian species, and I wondered just how this all functioned in rural Hungarian society. Probably nothing short of reading a full ethnography could really answer some of the questions the museum exhibits left me with, but there was no museum store and I didn't run across anything like that while we were in Budapest.

On the top floor of the museum, the special exhibit of musical instruments was a result, in part, of Bartok's early collection of folk music using an Edison phonograph with wax cylinders. Bartok also wrote about the role of folk music vis-a-vis classical music, and some of his remarks that were given in the rooms of the special exhibit were quite pithy. I especially liked the one to the effect that if you didn't have any talent it didn't really make any difference whether you would be performing folk music or classical music, the result would be poor in any case. We both got the feeling after reading the English translation of these quotes that Bartok didn't like to sugar coat things After Bartok's time the Museum of Ethnography had continued collecting folk music and instruments from different cultures, and the result was that each of the five basic different types of musical instruments were illustrated with instruments from all over the world. All the labels were in both Hungarian and English and specified both the name of the instrument and the culture of origin. The basic classes of folk instruments had the technical names of membranophones, chordophones, aerophones, idiophones, and electronic/computer instruments.

In the section on the aerophones (blown instruments) I was extremely excited to find a fujara, the long tubular wooden instrument we had seen a couple of nights back in Prague. I'm pretty certain it was the same instrument because this thing also had a blowpipe leading to the top and exactly three holes near the bottom of the instrument just like the one we had heard played in Prague. It was also satisfying to see that my hypothesis about the relationship of the fujara to the Australian didgeridoo based on the similar tonal quality was at least plausible because in that exhibit both instruments were classified in the same group and were displayed in cases right next to each other. You could see the resemblance and given that they were both essentially long wooden tubes with a natural series of notes and overtones, the tonal similarity was only to be expected.

We had pretty well finished both the Hungarian folk exhibits and the special musical exhibit in about two hours, and by then it was time to head back to catch our bus back to our hotel for the evening. As we ambled along we repeatedly stood and gaped at the architecturally unique buildings we ran across. Our progress was further interrupted by a huge parade of bicyclists apparently celebrating Earth Day by cruising the streets of Pest in the thousands. They came in such a constant stream that when our group crossed the street to reach the bus, a couple of us almost got run over by bikes. But all ended well and we piled into the bus for the short drive back to the hotel, where Monika and I had a light snack.

Monika was by then completely out of gas and retired about 7 p.m. for the night, so I was left alone with the choice of either bringing the journal up to date or calling an escort agency to see if I could find an escort for touring the town that evening. Well, I found 4 different ads for escort agencies in the Hotelprogram, but they all advertised that their escorts were "beautiful, charming, and discreet". Well, "beautiful" and "charming" sounded OK, but rather irrelevant to what I had in mind. But why would I need "discreet"? In fact, quite to the contrary I would have preferred a talkative type or even a chatterbox to explain the history and significance of various city sites. I thought about it a bit and decided I really needed a different set of criteria for an escort on a walking tour. I wanted to see a lot of different sites and I know that I tend to walk rather fast when I'm on the go, so I decided I needed something more like "knowledgeable, talkative, and energetic". I checked but I couldn't find any ads for that kind of escort so I gave up and worked on the journal for the rest of the evening.