Originally posted on Friday, July 4, 2014
After all the travelling, I was completely out of cycle, and next thing I know its 6am and I was still wide awake. So, bereft of rest, I took photos.
After finally passing out and waking up mid afternoon (How Harker of me!) we went for a walk around the city.
The city of Budapest is such a strange comingling. It is filled with corner markets and cafes which line roads far too small to accomodate more than a single lane of cars. Larger roads splice through, allowing greater traffic, but the bulk of the city runs along these smaller streets which Americans would likely think of as little more than alleys.After returning from our sojourn, the hostel’s manager, Hawaii, and four patrons gathered for the Ruins pub crawl, which we happily joined. Two young women, on holiday from their UK university, and two young men, visiting from Israel, and an Argentinian man who actually lived in apartment below who tagged along.
The Ruins are a series of communist era structures, long in disrepair since the crumbling of the soviets. They have been abandoned since the 1980s, and recently were reopened as a series of bars, making new use of the old spaces. Each of the four were visited in turn. The primary shape was that of a large open courtyard, the first with a series of trees forming the rooftop canopy. This allowed for casual tobacco smoking while drinking. Large roving gangs of young British men were to be seen everywhere, dressed each alike in their stag party manner, overstimulated by the World Cup. Apparently Budapest is to English boys what Tijuana is to American ones, close enough to visit, just far enough away to not get in trouble back home. One group, shouting excitedly for a Brazilian goal, put one of their members into a sort of time-out; he had to stand on a table, his face to the wall, and drink alone. His crime was unclear, but the group enforced it with such alacrity and enthusiasm one would think he was a uniformed German officer and they the invading Russian forces in Berlin.The remaining pubs held similar overall shapes insofar as having an open courtyard allowing for smoking, although instead of trees they had banners, flags, wires, and signs forming the roof. The third one went so far as to have Hookahs on each of the tables, the shisha’s acrid sweet smell filling the building. The fourth used one of the spare side rooms as a dance club, which was primarily occupied by men, enjoying the dulcet tones of two rather large, swarthy looking Hungarian rappers. They flowed nicely, but lyrically was unintelligible to me, being entirely in Hungarian.By this point, our group had split. The ladies having followed another group, but abandoning it to return to the hostel. The two young men, chasing after women, werent heard from again. Argentina and Hawaii however stayed with Heather and myself, but Hawaii saw a friend and soon we grew tired of trying to shout over the pub din to one another, so we departed. We walked with Argentina back to the hostel, but with so much beer in us we decided to keep walking and get some pizza to go with it (a grand plan, now I get why the pizza is sooo good and popular here, its the perfect absorbent for the cheap local brews). By the time we returned, it was 3am. By the time we realized the lights werent working, had skyped my wife, and began this blog, it was 4am. It is now creeping towards 5:30am, the sun is nearly fully risen, and I still need sleep.