I've always felt a little guilty, telling my friends and family about how the four months I spent in Budapest were the best of my life--I mean, most of them weren't there, so that's kind of offensive for me to tell them how much fun I had without them. I've also always felt like that was a little odd, that I was at my most elated with life during a time when I actually
did so little of note. Sometimes I only remember waiting in lines, or how often my camera would break. Walking around here jogs my memory in weird ways--I pass the street where I first learned that to order a cheeseburger in Hungarian, you ask for a "shite" burger--
sajtburger. Or I walk down a side street, knowing that it is the one that goes through to Andrassy, even without checking my map. And as silly as it sounds, that all reminds me of how thrilling my semester here was, so thrilling that I ended up writing a
book inspired by my time here . . . then a
sequel to that book . . . then another
sequel to that book!
Studying abroad in Budapest was thrilling not because of
what I was doing, but the fact I was doing it
here. I'd never lived in a big city before; I'd never had a cathedral around the corner from my house. Every little thing--from buying sheets at
Ikea and bringing them home on the metro, to walking down empty streets with my friends at four in the morning, felt exciting and glamorous and adult. Except cheaper and with less responsibilities than real adulthood. I remember we did things like go to gallery opening for the free wine; we combed the English movie listings in the
Pesti Est and saw arty films that never would have played a big screen in our towns in the US. People had dinner parties and some of my friends could actually cook real food, like stew, and steak--I'd never known what that was like before. It was just, you know, life, but it was heavenly, and I would have cried all the way home to California if I hadn't been totally zonked from staying out all night before my flight.
Anyway, a nostalgia tour of my Budapest memories might not be very scintillating. In fact, looking at these pictures, I worry that they make the city look grim and uninteresting. That would not be a fair representation of Budapest. I will post proof of that later. For now, join me on a tour of Budapest's more quotidian sights:
This is the street that I lived on.
Dohany means "tobacco."
Bringing visiting friends to my apartment meant walking them past this fallen empire of a building. I reassured people that the whole neighborhood wasn't like that, but in that way of the young wanting to feel tough, I was secretly proud of the grittiness of my street.
My building's entrance. You pushed in the code, and it disabled the locks on two doors separated by a vestibule. You had to dash through the doors because if you took too long, you got stuck in between them until some neighbor came along. In the foyer was an elevator that bore the markings of several generations of graffiti. There was a woman who lived in this building that really disapproved of the parties we had there, and I lived in fear of seeing her in daylight.
My trolleybus stop. The stop has been updated to include a name for the stop and a schedule. When I used it, all bets were off as to whether the line had a schedule or what. Once I got comfortable enough, I started knitting on the trolley on the way to school. Then one day a man berated me, with real, zealous anger, for endangering the other riders with the needles, which I suppose could perhaps fly out of my hands at a sudden stop. I didn't knit on the trolleybus after that.
My gym. Don't have a lot to say about this one because my membership lapsed and I didn't care.
My metro stop. I had a pass, but I often forgot to bring it with me when I went out at night. That mean being on full alert for the
Kontroll. I never got caught, but I had some close calls. Now I don't go for this kind of excitement at all. You shouldn't either--I've noticed that they check WAY more than they used to now. Another thing to know about Budapest is that the metro is not really as necessary as most tourists seem to think. Like Paris, Budapest is a walking city, and you can get everywhere on foot really quickly and enjoyably.
My school. This building, well, the interior at least, was the mental image I had as I wrote about the Lycee de Monceau in the
Beautiful Americans series. Remember how the characters are always hanging around in their computer lab with the old couch? That was us, in the UCEAP's office at
ELTE's Varosliget campus. The computers had Hungarian keyboards and I never learned how to make the @ symbol. So I only wrote emails that were replies to emails I received, because I couldn't type anyone's email address. Thinking about that is a really flashback, because I remember checking my
YAHOO! address and my
FRIENDSTER account. Those were the days!
Our program had all of our classes in the same classroom of this building. It was like being back in high school, or even elementary school. We were an island of English speakers in a sea of Hungarians. That was the same feeling I was going for when I created my fictional study abroad program.
A lot of things that I do remember about Budapest aren't here anymore. The
Subway that I used to go to by the Synagogue, declaring that it was the best Subway in the whole world, is gone. (It was here that I learned my Hungarian vocabulary for wheat, tuna, lettuce, tomatoes, oil, and pickles--the exact Subway sandwich I have been eating since I was six.) The Sark Bar is now something called
Mania Music. Gone also is the crepe place I used to go to, most of the garden bars, and saddest of all, Kultiplex, where I saw my first of many screenings of
Donnie Darko.
Before we left Budapest, I remember sitting with my roommates in the living room of our apartment, making a list of all the things we didn't want to forget that happened here. I wish I had this list with me right now. But it's probably a good thing I don't. Maybe I've had enough
nosztalgia for this trip.
