Hungary

My first trip to Hungary was in 2015. This was my first solo trip in over a decade, and I was very excited and grateful for the opportunity.  The trip began in Prague for 4 days, then Bratislava, Slovakia for 2 days, and then to Budapest. I think that the layout of my trip really set me up to fall in love with Budapest. 

Cooking class

Since Budapest was my last stop on the trip, by the time I got there, I hadn’t really spoken to anyone or had a real life conversation in a week. I don’t generally enjoy doing tours, so I never had a tour guide or other tourists to chat with, which is good.  I really prefer wandering around, getting lost, eating whatever cool street food is around. I think a lot. I write a lot. But this trip, I hadn’t really had anyone to talk to. 

One of the things I really wanted to do in Hungary was take a cooking class.  Again, I could not have planned it better. I had spent a week eating all of the amazing Czech and Slovakian foods, all of which are delicious and heavy and often full of cream and cheese. But they aren’t full of spices. They’re much more subtly flavored. 

I arrived in Budapest from Bratislava by train. I arrived at 2 in the afternoon on a Thursday. The next day, Friday, was a national holiday and many things, including my cooking class I wanted to take, were closed. It was also not offered on the weekend. So the only time I could schedule it was for 4 p.m., 2 hours after I arrive in Budapest. I barely had time to drop off my bags at the hotel before heading off into a new adventure. 

I will also add that this particular cooking class was designed to be an experience where you meet real Hungarian people and experience their culture. So you meet at the teacher’s apartment, spend a couple of hours cooking with her, and then her family comes over and they all eat with you and you can talk to them about Budapest and Hungarian life.

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So, 2 hours after arriving in Budapest, I get into a stranger’s car, as the teacher’s husband was the driver this day, and dash off to a stranger’s apartment.  Joe is certain he will never hear from me again. But here I am, having not talked to anyone in a week, full to the brim of delicious, but ultimately not overly flavorful foods, and this family of Hungarian people welcomes me into their home.  We cook together. We put paprika in everything. And we talk for what felt like hours. I could not have asked for a better welcome to Hungary. 

It was the end of summer season, so we were lucky to have some sour cherries available for a sour cherry soup. It was amazing and delicious and just so different from anything else I’ve ever had. Then we made chicken paprikash with nokedli. It was delicious and spicy in a new an interesting way and yet still creamy and hearty. And then we made palacsinta for dessert. These are Hungarian crepes, filled with fruits and/or ricotta cheese.  We drank palinka, a fruit brandy. We ate special sausages from the local farmer’s market. And she sent me away with a little gift basket of homemade jams that her mother makes in the countryside.

23 October Ceremonies

The next day was the national holiday. This particular holiday is October 23, and it honors the Hungarians who participated in the uprising against the Soviet Union after WWII. They were mostly young, idealistic people who fought back, who believed that, if they could get the word out to the rest of the world, if they could tell everyone about the oppression they were experiencing and that they wanted to be free of it, that the world would listen. The world did not listen. The rest of Europe and the US, no one came to the rescue. After 3 days of occupying government buildings, releasing political prisoners, holding off the Soviet army, the tanks arrived. They made an example of Budapest, of what happens when you oppose the Soviet Union. The bloodshed was nothing short of a massacre. The Hungarians weren’t soldiers and weren’t armed with military weapons. They were easily overpowered and most of them paid with their lives. 

So this holiday is a commemoration of these people, of the fight for freedom and independence. A reminder of what was lost. There are Hungarian flags everywhere with the Soviet symbols cut from the middle. There are people still who were alive during this time, old men weeping as they listen to the speeches and remember it all. It is a somber day with speeches and music from the military band. There are performances from the national dance group. It is all somber and respectful and proud.

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After a lifetime of the bombast and ‘We’re #1’ that comes with the American version of patriotism, it was definitely touching to see a humble, reverent version. For all intents and purposes, this was a failed uprising. After 3 days, thousands of people were killed or imprisoned, including the Prime Minister. Hungary would not be an independent state again until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s. But there was still pride in having tried. A feeling that the losses were somehow justified…pride that their people were so dedicated to freedom that they were willing to die for it. We have no celebrations of our losses, so it is such a stark difference to see.  It is sad now to see Hungary struggling with the EU, with immigration and nationalism. I can understand, from their perspective, after 4 decades of being forced to work in factories, of being forbidden from practicing your own culture or dancing or religion. They’ve only had those freedoms back for 3 decades. It’s still new. And it must be terrifying to think of losing it again, not through oppression, but through dilution and loss of identity. 

After all of these processions, there is folk dancing in the town square. The dance group breaks up and starts pulling in people from the audience. There’s a guy with a broom and girls in shawls and one of the girls comes up to me and takes my hand and pulls me into the circle. She has tiny, icy cold hands (it is the end of October), and then I’m there. More and more people come into the group until we’re probably 100 or 200 people in a giant circle, snaking around, following the cues of the guy with the broom.

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Parliament Building

I’ll take a moment here to talk about the Hungarian Parliament Building. It is amazing.  It is huge and beautiful and it looks like it’s made out of very delicate frosting and I just want to eat it up. It has very pointy spires all along the roof, apparently there are 365 of them. And they are just stunning to look at.  I don’t know what more to say here other than that I don’t generally say like ‘oh yeah, that’s a super cool building’ unless it’s *really* cool. I’m not really an ‘architecture’ person. 

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Spa

After a week of walking the cobblestone streets of Eastern Europe, I spent an afternoon relaxing at the spa. In Budapest, lounging around in hot water is a popular activity. But here, they take it to the next level. The spa that I went to is called Szechenyi.  There is a giant building, like the size of a city block. It’s just huge. And in the middle is a courtyard of large swimming-pool sized hot tubs. They each have a different temperature on them, ranging from cool to steaming. The square building is just hall after hall of massage rooms, followed by indoor hot tubs, smaller in size than the ones in the courtyard, but still larger than most home swimming pools. Then there are steam rooms and dry saunas. It’s like a relaxation theme park. 

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I start out by renting myself a changing room/locker. I change into my swimsuit and head out into the park. Again, it’s pretty chilly outside, so the hot water in the courtyard is just covered in a layer of steamy fog. There are hundreds of people here. You are given a towel and slippers and have to keep up with them throughout the day. There are hooks everywhere and even radiators in the halls where people have their towels laid out to dry. I spent some time trying to relax and wind down, before having a massage. It was a lovely, calm way to spend the afternoon after having such a somber morning. 

Lunch time

After a very busy day, I realized I hadn’t planned a lunch for myself.  I don’t think I had planned to spend quite so much time folk dancing in the square. So now, I am having lunch at 3:30 in the afternoon, quite low on blood-sugar after all the dancing and hot water. I go to a restaurant recommended from the cooking class teacher, and it is amazing. I honestly don’t know how I managed to eat all of this looking back, but I have an extra stomach for travel food. I started off with a bowl of goulasch soup, which was, of course, delicious. For the main course, I had a goose leg with a slice of seared foie gras on top with some potato croquettes and red cabbage. Of course, it was divine. Finally, I ended my meal with a dessert. I ordered cheese balls, kind of expecting like marble-size balls… or maybe golf-ball size like gulab-jamun? But no, they brought out 2 baseball-sized deep fried cheese balls, covered in some creamy sauce. It was so good, but I was not able to finish eating a whole pound of cheese on my own.  I maybe got through half of it before giving up.  Maybe next time…

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This a meal that perhaps changed the course of my culinary experiences irrevocably.  There was a time in my life where I did not eat liver. At all. Beef liver is especially offensive, but I’d had what I thought was fancy foie grass before. On our honeymoon in Ireland, we were served a huge portion of the cold foie gras pate. It was…. just, I don’t know.  I can’t get behind that. It is just like eating cold butter. The texture is so fatty, it coats your tongue and clings to everything.  Here was my ill-informed opinion from that day:  

I usually *hate* liver, pate, foie gras, all of it. But fried? I have died and gone to heaven. It was delicious.

But I ate that whole piece of liver. You’d be so proud. I still had to eat it a tiny bit at a time, as it’s very fatty and very strongly flavored

Tina – October 2015

But this…. I didn’t even know you could fry it. This is game-changing.  It turns out, in the end, life-changing. This was the day I became obsessed with foie gras. It guided us to SoBou in New Orleans, and to Au Pied du Cochon in Montreal, always in search of some amazing foie gras, at times unobtainable in California.  I still don’t care for the cold stuff. And goose is 100% better than duck. But now I have very strong opinions on something I never even liked before. All it takes is trying something new!

A walk and a folk show

I walked back from the baths instead of taking the bus. I went to Heroes Square and looked at all of the statues lit up at night. I visited the 1956 uprising memorial. And I strolled through the streets of downtown, by the St. Stephen’s Cathedral, on my way to the Danube Palace, where the folk show for the evening is. I get front row seats, as the first 2 rows are actually discounted because they are right next to the stage and you have to look directly up. This, for me, is the best case scenario. I love sitting really close and watching the dancers’ feet, pretty much in every dance form. 

The Danube Palace is a beautiful venue, and I can hear the band warming up backstage. I really, really enjoyed this show. The dancing is so fun and energetic. And, unlike most other dance forms, the focus here is the men. The women twirl around some, but I guess the entire premise of the folk dancing is that men are trying to impress the ladies in the village. So the men’s parts are far more complex and interesting than the women’s parts. The women are mostly passive while the guys are slapping and stomping and jumping. 

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I enjoyed the folk dancing so much, and it was so different from anything I’d ever seen before. I have 3 things I like to do when I travel: see a local dance performance, take a cooking class, visit a spa. So I’ve seen dances in tons of places. Belly dancing in Morocco, ballet from some of the most prestigious ballet companies in the world, Flamenco in Barcelona, Irish, Polish, Russian, Indian folk dancing, and this is a wholly unique form of dance in the world. I just enjoyed it so much. 

There is a Hungarian festival near us every year in May. So in 2015 when I came back, I told Joe we have to go to the festival this year. But 2016 was the 60-year anniversary of the 1956 uprising, so many of the local Hungarian people were planning trips back to Hungary and the festival was canceled that year. So what could we do but pack our bags? Joe and I went together, back to Prague and back to Budapest. We went to the October 23 commemoration speeches, but this time, the President of Poland was there and there were lots of political announcements. There were more people. There was more security. And there was no space for folk dancing in the town square.  We did, however, make it back to the folk dance performance in the Danube Palace. Not once, but twice. 

In 2017 we went to one Hungarian festival nearby, a smaller one. And Finally, in 2018, we made it to the large festival which is literally like 20 minutes from our house. We watched the music and dancing all day. We ate langos and cakes. And in the end, we stayed for the Táncház and I got to participate in the large group circular dances. Then a guy who is a dance instructor in Seattle offered to teach me some things and I danced with him until I was so dizzy I could barely stand. It was such a fun night. 

At the festival, I got the info for the local dance group that performs at these festivals and events, and I e-mailed them. Now, I do Hungarian folk dancing every week for about 3 hours. I definitely am not good enough to be in a performance yet, but I’m having a blast and I am so thankful and so lucky to live in an area where I can just decide to try something new and find other people who are into the same thing. What a boring world it would be if we were all the same. 

Great Market Hall

My final day in Budapest, I started out by visiting the Great Market Hall. This is a giant building with tons of stalls in the bottom floor, selling all kinds of produce, fish, meat, cheeses, and spices. Then the top floor is full of folk crafts, hand-painted things, folk dresses, handmade tablecloths and embroidery. And of course, there are stalls of street food. I could spend hours here, but this particular day, since it’s my first stop, I know I’ll have to carry everything with me all day, so I try not to buy too much stuff. 

However, I don’t mind carrying street food in my belly. Having skipped the hotel breakfast, I scour the Great Market in search of Langos. This is a traditional Hungarian dish, again recommended by the cooking class teacher. It is a plate-sized flat piece of fried bread, which is then topped with sour cream cheese, and usually raw garlic and onions. This is a thing that will wake you up on a lazy morning. As it was technically brunch, I had a Hungarian beer with my Langos.  After brunch, I did a bit of shopping, of course picking up some of my favorite paprika to take home (yes, I have a favorite paprika now), as well as a few gifts for family and friends. 

Buda Castle

I have a thing for castles. So I was excited to visit the Buda Castle across the bridge in the old part of town. After 10 days of walking on cobblestone streets, though, my right knee was just not happy. So I scheduled for myself a Segway tour. Even though I don’t generally like tours, I figured it would be better to actually see the castle on Segway than to not see it at all because I’m in too much pain to walk it. However, nothing ever goes as planned. 

First, I need to get to the other side of the river. I am looking at the map and I think I’m walking from the Great Market Hall to a metro stop, but I have no luck finding it. So I cross one bridge and start slowly hobbling down the sidewalk, expecting to eventually come to a metro stop. This was fruitless, as I passed one after another of the famed 6 bridges of Budapest. One foot in front of the other, I just kept walking until I reached the castle. No metro needed!

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But, as I am sure everyone knows, castles are always built on top of a hill. Fortifications, trying to have the high ground to fight off enemies, all that. So I arrive at the bottom of the hill that the castle is on and the only thing between me and taking my Segway tour is about 150 stairs. There is a funicular, but it looks to be about an hour wait, so I start up the stairs, trying to get to the tour on time. I take a flight and then stare out at the majestic city. Then another flight of stairs. Then pausing to regret carrying so many souvenirs with me today. Then another flight of stairs. and another. and another. I made it to the top!

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I was the only person on the tour, and the tour guide was lovely and friendly. We rode around the castle on top of the hill, visiting Matthias Cathedral, with its beautiful tiled roof, fisherman’s point, the ruins of Buda Castle, and finally the national art gallery. The castle ruins have people selling roasted chestnuts and there are silly medieval children’s games set up, like a renn faire. Fortunately, I had plenty of time after the tour to go back to the hotel and change before dinner. I also found a little walkway down to the river and touched the Danube.

Kis Pipa

For my final evening in Budapest, I dined at the famous Kis Pipa restaurant. In this restaurant, in 1933, there was a local pianist who wrote a song, called “Gloomy Sunday”. This was in the midst of WWII and there were lots of very terrible things happening, so this song became very popular with people who were sad. But the song was so sad that it became even more popular for people who were committing suicide. Suicide, unsurprisingly, was on the rise during WWII, and people’s bodies were being found with the lyrics of this song in their pockets, or with the song playing on the record player over and over. The song was immensely popular and then it was banned in many countries. The composer, Reszo Seress, was very unhappy with his song’s infamy, and was often depressed. He lived in poverty in Budapest, refusing to leave his home to collect the royalties for his hit song. He was Jewish, and was eventually sent to a labor camp in Ukraine. He survived the labor camp, but his mother didn’t. He became more disillusioned with Hungary and the communist party. Hungary had allied with the Nazis, with the agreement that the Nazis would protect them from the Soviets. They let the Nazis take all of the Jewish people in Budapest and send them to camps and ghettos. And then, when the Nazis lost, they destroyed as much of the town as possible to prevent the Soviet Union from following them. And then, as punishment for allying with the Germans, the Soviet Union was particularly brutal to Hungary when Hungary was granted to them as part of the spoils of war. And I’ve already gone into that part…. So eventually, the composer himself committed suicide. He jumped out of a window, but survived, only to hang himself in the hospital. 

Tina: this sounds like the most depressing restaurant on planet earth; what is wrong with you?  –Well, I will start out with how I even know that this restaurant or this song exists. When I was an exchange student in Germany in 2001, there was a movie made about this topic, called ‘Das Lied von Traurigen Sonntag’ (or ‘The Song from Gloomy Sunday’). It was a very romanticized version of events that had nothing to do with reality. But I guess I was young and impressionable and it was really interesting to experience this movie with my host family, and to see the difference between what is allowed to be shown on television in Germany vs. in the US. The story involved a love triangle with the restaurant’s owner, Laszlo, the beautiful waitress, Illona, and the restaurant’s pianist, Andrash. It’s a tale of love and sadness and the Nazi occupation, a portrait of how Jewish people just kept living their lives during this horrific time, knowing every day they could be taken away forever. And then there’s the song. It absolutely lives up to its reputation, even today. It is haunting and beautiful and sad. It just kind of felt like coming full circle to visit this restaurant that I had learned so much about. I can also say that I have no idea how faithful the German translation of this song is, as I don’t speak Hungarian, so I’ve never seen the lyrics in Hungarian. The German words are beautiful and so very very sad. It’s all about the death of a loved one, and how committing suicide will let you be together again. Lots of imagery about being sad and seeing your lost loved one everywhere, followed by idealized imagery of going with the angels, of feeling lightness in the shadows.

The restaurant has a pianist who comes every night an plays music. Behind him, there is a large framed portrait of Reszo Seress. And probably once an hour, he plays the song. What I ate there wasn’t nearly as interesting as why I decided to go there, but it’s a very nice restaurant. I enjoyed some palinka and red wine with dinner. I had goulasch, which is always delicious. Then I had a steak topped with foie gras, with more little potato croquettes, and a famous Hungarian dessert, Somloi. The dessert is a sponge cake, custard, raisin mixture that is then topped with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. It’s quite good, though I found the raisins off-putting and would have preferred just cake and chocolate and custard. 

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Final Thoughts on Budapest

Budapest is by far one of my favorite places I have ever been. It’s beautiful and it’s unique. It hasn’t yet become the tourist-y over-populated, super commercialized city that many European cities struggle with now. And it has a vibrant and interesting culture separate from everything else in Europe. The language, the dancing, the food, the folk clothing, are all so different from the neighboring European countries. It make Hungary really feel like you are visiting a different place, not like you’re just visiting an outlet mall where no one speaks English (like, say, the Champs-Elysees). If you want to see something different, I would absolutely recommend Budapest. 

There were also some different feelings for me personally on this trip. When I was in college and I got the chance to do a foreign exchange, I thought:  I have to make the most of this because I will never get to travel like this again. Which is absolutely true; I don’t think I’ll get to just go for 6 months and live somewhere else as an educational exercise ever again. But it would be another 7 years before I left the country again. This time, I visited Thailand for 2 weeks. The trip was amazing, but again, I was quite certain that I should just see everything I wanted to see because I’m not likely to be here again. I’ve always wanted to travel, but I’ve also seen traveling as consumption of knowledge about life and food and culture. Joe and I joke about travel in that, when someone asks “Would you go to *this* place?” Joe laughs and says, has she been there before?  If not, she’ll go.  So this was maybe the first time I felt like, yes, some day I will be back here, even though I’ve been here before. Given the opportunity to continue traveling as time goes on, I would come back here and still be happy visiting. I felt such a connection to the place that I didn’t want to just consume it but rather, I enjoyed experiencing it. I could definitely imagine someday living in Budapest.