Back in Budapest

The last time I was in Hungary was in 1979. My father and
uncle took me to Halászbástya (Fisherman's Bastion)
where this photo was taken. That maybe half an hour
was my first time on Castle Hill.

As I sit here enjoying an autumn sunrise in the Sonoran Desert, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, the windows open and a mild breeze, I think about the shock of flying into cold, central European rain.

In Greece, I wore shorts every day and forgot about the jeans that I had packed and worn for our one day in Reykjavik. In Hungary, I ended up wearing those jeans every day, plus long sleeved shirts and my one wool sweater. I forgot about the shorts.

It did not help that our flight from Athens arrived three and a half hours late at the Budapest airport. It was another hour waiting for the young girl, the U-Save employee, to find and shuttle us to the car rental office. Shari used the time to email the Burg Hotel to advise them we would be checking in late.

The car rental counter was my first occasion for testing my Hungarian language skills. The man spoke English well but I switched to Hungarian and he obliged. I understood pretty much everything he said, including about the Citroën car and diesel fuel, the purpose for the credit card deposit, directions to the city, and how the vignette toll road system worked.

I liked being addressed as ur ("lord"). The Hungarian language has its formalities and despite four decades of communism, I was pleased to observe its ornate politeness had not changed since my parents' days in the royal Hungary of the interwar years.

I eased into using a language I had not really used since childhood. We spoke Hungarian growing up at home and in the large Hungarian community in Sydney, Australia. By high school in Seattle, we had abandoned Sydney, brothers and sisters spoke in English, and conversations with parents became more infrequent. Mum never did learn English well and although Dad did, he would always switch to Hungarian when he philosophized, and at that level of speech, I understood less than half of what he was saying, and even that I often got wrong.

View from our window at the Burg Hotel on
Szentháromságtér (Holy Trinity Square).
Mátyás Templom (Mathias Church), named
after the Hungarian king who was
coronated there. Two sharp spires of
Halászbástya (Fisherman's Bastion) are
visible behind on the right.

For decades I spoke Hungarian only to myself and to the dog, and the dog didn't understand. Freshly arrived in Hungary, I became surprisingly comfortable speaking my odd language in a foreign country where everybody spoke it fluently.

It was long since dark. Shari and I had to navigate from the airport on the east side of sprawling Pest to the heart of the city, across one of its iconic bridges over the Danube to Buda, then find our way up narrow, steep streets to the old baroque-on-medieval Castle Hill. I was given the fob to operate the fancy Citroën sedan and I fumbled in the dark exploring its multiple LED screens and dashboard buttons ("start"), acting calm but actually stressed, trying to figure out how to turn on the headlights and the windshield wipers.

Shari successfully navigated in a completely foreign environment with unpronounceably difficult words. We only took one bad turn, and I blame that on city planners. The main road from airport to city center splits. The left lanes turned into an extended flyover; a viaduct. I kept to the right lanes, as is my habit, and managed to stay on that arterial until we got shunted off to some industrial side street. The raised lanes continued straight towards downtown Pest.

We crossed the Erzsébet Híd (bridge) over the Danube River and I found the windy narrow steep street that is one of the few ways of getting up and into the old town that is Buda. I remembered the street from my previous visit to Castle Hill, in 1979. We found our hotel on Castle Hill. Look up Burg Hotel on Google Maps. It is across Szentháromságtér from Mátyás Templom and Halászbástya, wonderfully located in the heart of Várhegy (Castle Hill).

I practiced more Hungarian with the desk clerk to learn where I could park and where we could get some dinner nearby. By the time we dragged our luggage up the stairs into our room and parked the car, it was a quarter to eleven.

We walked around the corner to the almost empty Jamie's Italian Budapest. Shari recognized the chef's name (Jamie Oliver) as famous. I had never heard of him. What I recognized was my disappointment at having to eat in an Italian restaurant with "Budapest" in its name. Fortunately, the server spoke Hungarian and I was once again addressed as "lord."

Most fortunately, we were allowed to order our meals even though the kitchen was shutting down for the night. I admit, that Italian food was excellent, although the portions were much too generous.

Well sated and washed down with a couple of draft pints, we walked the few doors back to our hotel on Szentháromságtér. I would have been eager to walk around and soak in the familiarity of Castle Hill, but we were tired and it was late, cold, dark and drizzling. Instead, I made Shari use her telephone to take a photo of me with Mátyás Templom in the background.

I was back in Budapest.