Thursday Aug 18th
Because I am dumb and had been taking ibuprofen for almost a full day, I decided to start my day with a big walk around town. For my previous walks, I had gone North on the ring road in front of the hotel. For Thursday’s walk, I was going to head south.
The Pest side of Budapest can be roughly defined by two rings roads, an inner and an outer. My home at the Hotel Nemzeti lies on the outer ring road. The nicer parts of the city lie within the inner ring. My hotel is on the section of the road called Jozsef krt. But if I cross the intersection and head north, it immediately becomes, Terez Krt. Eventually, the road will take me to the Danube across the Margaret Bridge.
But I was heading South. It was time to finally see the Corvin Theater, which plays a prominent role in the 1956 Uprising. The theater lies in a warren of streets and alleys, making it highly defensible when Russian tanks are chasing you. It was one of the flash points of the war and held out for quite some time. A lot of soldiers who defended the theater were kids. They rushed out and threw petrol bombs into the tanks air intake systems.
When I found out the theater still existed, I wanted to see it. Plus, it was a chance to see parts of the city I had bypassed up to this point.
I cursed myself the entire walk for not bringing my big camera, relying instead on my cel phone camera for my pictures.
Corvin was exactly as described. There is a statue outside the curved facade of the theater for the young fighters. Plaques cover every available space detailing heroics, I’m sure. I figured if there was a guide to all the plaques in the city it would be bigger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Corvin is hard to photograph since it does lie in the middle of a big group of buildings. It is made incalculably uglier by the addition of this long metal sculpture that leads to the cinema. Across the street from the theater was supposed to be the Kilian Barracks, which also played a pivotal role, but I couldn’t determine which building it was supposed to be
I crossed the Danube via the Petofi Bridge, which is the southernmost Bridge in Budapest. The sun was just peaking through the fog, illuminating all the buildings on the west side of the river in a golden glow. I’m sure you can still hear me cursing my cel phone camera.
Petofi, for those playing along at home, was a poet during the 1850’s, whose work helped inspire people to revolt during that era. You can find lots of Petofi monuments in Budapest. Initially students protested in Petofi Square at the beginning of the 1956 uprising.
I walked in front of the Gellert Spa, one of three big spas in Budapest. I was fortunate enough to watch them change the ‘L’ on the large sign on the front of the building while I ambled. More cursing.
I crossed back into Pest over the currently closed Liberty Bridge. Our friend Xenia said that people were taking advantage of the closure of the bridge to have picnics on it, going so far as to place out tables to dine upon. The road across the bridge also aligned with the inner ring road of the city. I noticed as I passed about half a dozen antique bookstores for HK to check out later.
We had an appointment at the Sports Museum with Dr. Laszlo Szabo to discuss Piller at the Olympics for 9:30. It was going to be an odd interview, since we didn’t have a private room to do the interview. We were going to hold the interview in the middle of the room and hope no museum attendees walked into frame. I’ve done worse.
What was worse was that I had already been rude to Dr. Szabo. When we had dropped by the museum earlier in the week, there had been an interview going in the same spot where I was going to do the interview this morning. An older gentleman was doing an interview and he was interrupted by some klutz kicking a chair accidentally right in the middle of the interview.
Okay. I was the klutz. I was mortified at the time. I couldn’t skulk from the room fast enough. I was more mortified when I showed up for the interview and realized the man who I had interrupted earlier was Dr. Szabo.
But Dr. Szabo was stealthy. When I came into the museum proper and said I was here to do an interview with Dr. Szabo to the women behind the counter, she had no idea who I was talking about. You know, Dr. Szabo? The man in charge of this facility? She figured I must be in the wrong building.
She figured that until the man standing right next to me at the counter introduced himself as Dr. Szabo. Later that day, I told Dr. Szabo he might want to think about introducing himself to his staff. The flip side of that is, I have no real way of knowing how to pronounce Hungarian names. I kind of know how, but it’s atrocious. The women behind the desk probably just couldn’t understand me. As a for instance, Dr. Szakály is pronounced Sah-kai. Tell me that isn’t messed up.
Dr. Szabo was kind enough to bring along his son to play interpreter if I hadn’t thought to bring one. He also wanted us to move along since this was his last stop before he went away on holiday with aforementioned son. Xenia eventually showed up to perform her duties.
No one popped in during the interview and it went fine. Again, I’m still not sure of the content, but Dr. Szabo seemed authoritative. I can’t wait to get a good translator.
Towards the end, a woman did show up with another photographer. The woman’s father was one of the Olympic athletes in the posters on the walls.
Because I am who I am, I did ask Dr. Szabo a very forward question. Yes, I live by the squeaky wheel theory.
As I sat behind the camera and listened to Dr. Szabo answer the questions, my eyes wandered to the displays of Olympic artifacts. We had been told the museum was in a temporary space. Basically, it was in a long narrow building next to a giant saucer shaped soccer stadium.
The displays, which I had noticed on our previous visit were just cardboard plinths which had been notched at the top to allow for glass cubes to cover the memorabilia. I tried to take photos through the glass of things, like 1912 Olympian Jeno Fuchs (No one liked him according to the Dr.) mask and sabre, but it was miserable. I got a lovely reflection of me and the cel camera over the picture.
Hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could ask the director of the museum if he could slide the glass out of the way for a minute so I could snag a photograph? Hmmm? Wouldn’t it?
At the end of the interviews, I usually have a question to ask that HK might have skipped or a follow up question to one of the earlier conversations. Today, my question was if Dr. Szabo wouldn’t mind taking apart his display so I could get a better photo?
Squeaky wheel wins! Sort of. Rather than just removing the glass, Dr. Szabo took the top off the display and removed the mask, allowing me to photograph it. Which was great. But I kind of wanted it with the sabre. No, I didn’t push my luck.
Since we were now a week into the trip, it was time to do laundry. Yes, I was now in jeans and t-shirts mode after my initial button down shirt time, but I had to do laundry some time.
On our way to the Italian restaurant in the Jewish quarter, we had passed a laundromat multiple times. HK deemed it sketchy. I concurred with him, but we hadn’t actually gone into the place. Online, I had found a chain of clean looking laundromats called ‘Bubbles’. Bubbles were open 24 hours a day. In my mind, I was going to go over there early and get it all done. But my partner who doesn’t wake up quite as early as I did suggested we should go in the middle of the day. Seriously, who would do their laundry in the middle of the day, he argued?
Usually, probably no one. Bubbles most of the time is probably a ghost town. Except for one time of the year when the city is full of young people crowding the city to attend the largest music festival of it’s kind.
Guess what was going on while we were in Budapest? It’s called the Sziget festival. It lasts for a week were the promoters take over an island in the Danube and put on musical acts. Sziget would be the Hungarian word for Island.
When we showed up at Bubbles, being dropped off by Sandor, it was packed with scruffy kids huddled around the 4 washers. Plenty more waited outside, smoking at the picnic tables. HK and I retreated to a nearby restaurant to eat while the crowd thinned a bit.
I don’t care how long we would have waited there eating, the crowd wasn’t going to get any smaller. HK checked his phone for other laundromats nearby. They all got scary reviews on Trip Advisor.
I decided we should come back another day. I still had enough shirts for a few more days.
We grabbed our duffels and walked through the Jewish section back to our hotel, coincidentally walking right by the sketchy laundromat. We opted to go in. Turns out, it wasn’t sketchy at all. It had about 24 machines, all going strong. The Sziget Festival kids had been here, too
But the sketchy laundromat had an important difference from Bubbles. It had Androogy. Androogy wanted to know if we wouldn’t mind just dropping off our clothes and coming back for them tomorrow. That way he could get the overnight crew to wash them.
Are you asking me if I want someone else to take care of washing and drying my clothes? No, I wouldn’t mind that at all.
Androogy made it a strong point to tell us not to lose our claim checks. No claim checks. No laundry. No excuses. I made sure to put my ticket in a safe place. I even woke in the middle of the night to make sure I hadn’t lost the claim check.
Time to head back to the hotel. Recharge batteries. Ingest footage.
Because I am dumb and had been taking ibuprofen for almost a full day, I decided to start my day with a big walk around town. For my previous walks, I had gone North on the ring road in front of the hotel. For Thursday’s walk, I was going to head south.
The Pest side of Budapest can be roughly defined by two rings roads, an inner and an outer. My home at the Hotel Nemzeti lies on the outer ring road. The nicer parts of the city lie within the inner ring. My hotel is on the section of the road called Jozsef krt. But if I cross the intersection and head north, it immediately becomes, Terez Krt. Eventually, the road will take me to the Danube across the Margaret Bridge.
But I was heading South. It was time to finally see the Corvin Theater, which plays a prominent role in the 1956 Uprising. The theater lies in a warren of streets and alleys, making it highly defensible when Russian tanks are chasing you. It was one of the flash points of the war and held out for quite some time. A lot of soldiers who defended the theater were kids. They rushed out and threw petrol bombs into the tanks air intake systems.
When I found out the theater still existed, I wanted to see it. Plus, it was a chance to see parts of the city I had bypassed up to this point.
I cursed myself the entire walk for not bringing my big camera, relying instead on my cel phone camera for my pictures.
Corvin was exactly as described. There is a statue outside the curved facade of the theater for the young fighters. Plaques cover every available space detailing heroics, I’m sure. I figured if there was a guide to all the plaques in the city it would be bigger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Corvin is hard to photograph since it does lie in the middle of a big group of buildings. It is made incalculably uglier by the addition of this long metal sculpture that leads to the cinema. Across the street from the theater was supposed to be the Kilian Barracks, which also played a pivotal role, but I couldn’t determine which building it was supposed to be
I crossed the Danube via the Petofi Bridge, which is the southernmost Bridge in Budapest. The sun was just peaking through the fog, illuminating all the buildings on the west side of the river in a golden glow. I’m sure you can still hear me cursing my cel phone camera.
Petofi, for those playing along at home, was a poet during the 1850’s, whose work helped inspire people to revolt during that era. You can find lots of Petofi monuments in Budapest. Initially students protested in Petofi Square at the beginning of the 1956 uprising.
I walked in front of the Gellert Spa, one of three big spas in Budapest. I was fortunate enough to watch them change the ‘L’ on the large sign on the front of the building while I ambled. More cursing.
I crossed back into Pest over the currently closed Liberty Bridge. Our friend Xenia said that people were taking advantage of the closure of the bridge to have picnics on it, going so far as to place out tables to dine upon. The road across the bridge also aligned with the inner ring road of the city. I noticed as I passed about half a dozen antique bookstores for HK to check out later.
We had an appointment at the Sports Museum with Dr. Laszlo Szabo to discuss Piller at the Olympics for 9:30. It was going to be an odd interview, since we didn’t have a private room to do the interview. We were going to hold the interview in the middle of the room and hope no museum attendees walked into frame. I’ve done worse.
What was worse was that I had already been rude to Dr. Szabo. When we had dropped by the museum earlier in the week, there had been an interview going in the same spot where I was going to do the interview this morning. An older gentleman was doing an interview and he was interrupted by some klutz kicking a chair accidentally right in the middle of the interview.
Okay. I was the klutz. I was mortified at the time. I couldn’t skulk from the room fast enough. I was more mortified when I showed up for the interview and realized the man who I had interrupted earlier was Dr. Szabo.
But Dr. Szabo was stealthy. When I came into the museum proper and said I was here to do an interview with Dr. Szabo to the women behind the counter, she had no idea who I was talking about. You know, Dr. Szabo? The man in charge of this facility? She figured I must be in the wrong building.
She figured that until the man standing right next to me at the counter introduced himself as Dr. Szabo. Later that day, I told Dr. Szabo he might want to think about introducing himself to his staff. The flip side of that is, I have no real way of knowing how to pronounce Hungarian names. I kind of know how, but it’s atrocious. The women behind the desk probably just couldn’t understand me. As a for instance, Dr. Szakály is pronounced Sah-kai. Tell me that isn’t messed up.
Dr. Szabo was kind enough to bring along his son to play interpreter if I hadn’t thought to bring one. He also wanted us to move along since this was his last stop before he went away on holiday with aforementioned son. Xenia eventually showed up to perform her duties.
No one popped in during the interview and it went fine. Again, I’m still not sure of the content, but Dr. Szabo seemed authoritative. I can’t wait to get a good translator.
Towards the end, a woman did show up with another photographer. The woman’s father was one of the Olympic athletes in the posters on the walls.
Because I am who I am, I did ask Dr. Szabo a very forward question. Yes, I live by the squeaky wheel theory.
As I sat behind the camera and listened to Dr. Szabo answer the questions, my eyes wandered to the displays of Olympic artifacts. We had been told the museum was in a temporary space. Basically, it was in a long narrow building next to a giant saucer shaped soccer stadium.
The displays, which I had noticed on our previous visit were just cardboard plinths which had been notched at the top to allow for glass cubes to cover the memorabilia. I tried to take photos through the glass of things, like 1912 Olympian Jeno Fuchs (No one liked him according to the Dr.) mask and sabre, but it was miserable. I got a lovely reflection of me and the cel camera over the picture.
Hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could ask the director of the museum if he could slide the glass out of the way for a minute so I could snag a photograph? Hmmm? Wouldn’t it?
At the end of the interviews, I usually have a question to ask that HK might have skipped or a follow up question to one of the earlier conversations. Today, my question was if Dr. Szabo wouldn’t mind taking apart his display so I could get a better photo?
Squeaky wheel wins! Sort of. Rather than just removing the glass, Dr. Szabo took the top off the display and removed the mask, allowing me to photograph it. Which was great. But I kind of wanted it with the sabre. No, I didn’t push my luck.
Since we were now a week into the trip, it was time to do laundry. Yes, I was now in jeans and t-shirts mode after my initial button down shirt time, but I had to do laundry some time.
On our way to the Italian restaurant in the Jewish quarter, we had passed a laundromat multiple times. HK deemed it sketchy. I concurred with him, but we hadn’t actually gone into the place. Online, I had found a chain of clean looking laundromats called ‘Bubbles’. Bubbles were open 24 hours a day. In my mind, I was going to go over there early and get it all done. But my partner who doesn’t wake up quite as early as I did suggested we should go in the middle of the day. Seriously, who would do their laundry in the middle of the day, he argued?
Usually, probably no one. Bubbles most of the time is probably a ghost town. Except for one time of the year when the city is full of young people crowding the city to attend the largest music festival of it’s kind.
Guess what was going on while we were in Budapest? It’s called the Sziget festival. It lasts for a week were the promoters take over an island in the Danube and put on musical acts. Sziget would be the Hungarian word for Island.
When we showed up at Bubbles, being dropped off by Sandor, it was packed with scruffy kids huddled around the 4 washers. Plenty more waited outside, smoking at the picnic tables. HK and I retreated to a nearby restaurant to eat while the crowd thinned a bit.
I don’t care how long we would have waited there eating, the crowd wasn’t going to get any smaller. HK checked his phone for other laundromats nearby. They all got scary reviews on Trip Advisor.
I decided we should come back another day. I still had enough shirts for a few more days.
We grabbed our duffels and walked through the Jewish section back to our hotel, coincidentally walking right by the sketchy laundromat. We opted to go in. Turns out, it wasn’t sketchy at all. It had about 24 machines, all going strong. The Sziget Festival kids had been here, too
But the sketchy laundromat had an important difference from Bubbles. It had Androogy. Androogy wanted to know if we wouldn’t mind just dropping off our clothes and coming back for them tomorrow. That way he could get the overnight crew to wash them.
Are you asking me if I want someone else to take care of washing and drying my clothes? No, I wouldn’t mind that at all.
Androogy made it a strong point to tell us not to lose our claim checks. No claim checks. No laundry. No excuses. I made sure to put my ticket in a safe place. I even woke in the middle of the night to make sure I hadn’t lost the claim check.
Time to head back to the hotel. Recharge batteries. Ingest footage.
As a matter of fact, my anger does keep me warm