Budapest

In Europe, Eastern Europe 2002 On 08/08/2002 No comments

I arrived in the train station by the end of the afternoon, it was like getting downtown São Paulo. I went to the underground part trying to find a place to get money. There, it was dirty. There were street sellers everywhere, lots of people in a hurry, others observing, a little suspicious for me. The police was agitated, I think something had happened, because they were walking from one side to another, unquiet. I went to the closest hostel I could find. It was a little messy and dirty. I was tired to try to find another place, so I stayed there.

Next day, it was cloudy and raining. I walked all over town, for about 6 hours. I started in “Pest”, the cathedral, opera, commercial town. Then I crossed one of the bridges to “Buda” and walked by the river. I visited some Turkish bathes. The city seamed to be beautiful but it had no glitter, it was opaque. Maybe because it was raining and the days were gray. It was like the old building downtown Sao Paulo, they are beautiful but not well kept, dirty and with no bright.

I met an English girl in the hostel so we went together to a Turkish bath. It was raining but we stayed in the open air pool. It was perfect to relax a little bit. They tryed to cheat on us when we left. We were supposed to get some money back. They pretend they didn’t understand us, as if they didn’t speak English, but they had spoken to us when we got there, so there was no excuse. After a while, we were insisting, they “understood” and gave us the receipt to get the money refund. I believe they try to do that to all the foreigner tourists.

The third day in town, it was raining a lot, I did a bus tour around the city. We visited the most important tourist attractions. Starting in the Cathedral, we passed by the parliament, city park, opera house and the castle. Our guide, a very young lady, spoke fluent English and German, besides Hungarian, of course. Her idol is an older guide from the same tour company who could speak 7 languages. The tour was good to have a general idea of the city. Unfortunately it was raining the whole time, it was had to appreciate the landscape.

From Budapest I came back to Barcelona, I was already “homesick”. I was tired of rainy days, tourists, palaces and churches. The trip was great to have an idea of Eastern Europe. I realized I might have had a wrong impression of these countries. I had imagined them being a lot less capitalist than they really are. It was in Eastern European countries were I had seen the biggest advertising billboards. I haven’t met countries getting out of a communism and entering to a capitalist phase. But, in my opinion, I saw countries that in the first opportunity they had, they jumped and dove deep into capitalism and consumerism… That made me a little disappointed…