Last night, when confronted with multiple transport options between Vienna and Bratislava, I found myself thinking, "what would Jesus do in this situation?". Why, he'd walk there on water of course. That's why I've decided to take the hydrofoil down the Danube.
By the time I booked my ticket for this quasi-biblical one hour journey, the only available departure time was 9am with 8.30 boarding. This affords me a delightful early morning stroll through the deserted the near-deserted streets of Old Vienna. It's grand, sturdy old public buildings seem all the more impressive when basking in a sun-drenched serenity only occasionally disturbed by the nonsensical utterings of a passing drunk.
I arrive at the dock to the disappointing discovery that the hydrofoil I'm taking isn't actually an above-the-water hovercraft like the one Jackie Chan goes crazy on in Rumble In The Bronx. Instead it's just a high speed catamaran capable of completing the 70km downriver journey to Bratislava in a bit over an hour. From my position near the front of the queue, I'm able to scramble upstairs to the top deck, from where I can best view the tall trees on either side of the riverbank and an occasional glimpse of farmland behind them.
We've barely travelled a mile when we pass an old bearded man on the right hand bank, waving his arms frantically about his head and yelling something urgent in German. I initially dismiss him as another drunkard making his way home from the previous night's festivities, but a split second later it's clear what he was shouting about.
Bang! The catamaran, now travelling at full speed, strikes a glancing blow against a floating pier that juts out into the river. All the occupants of the top deck sit bolt upright and look glance around in puzzlement. BANG! This time the boat slams into a rocky outcrop on the right hand bank with thunderous force, its whole starboard side lifting out of the water and then plopping loudly back in. I may not know much about catamarans, but this sort of thing can't be standard procedure. Moments later my suspicions are confirmed when a young stewardess by the name of Katrin appears and orders us down into the main cabin. I'm loath to give up my prized top deck seat, but there's a certain edge to her voice that says "don't fuck with me, I'm Austrian". The rear of the lower deck is already taking on water as I descend the stairs. Looks like my dreams of visiting Bratislava are going down with this boat.
We spend the following half an hour limping along the canal next to the Danube while everyone talks excitedly amongst each other, except me because I'm the only non-German speaker on the boat. I'd love to know what's going on, although my complete state of helplessness does somewhat add to the intrigue. Eventually Katrin comes on the PA system to inform us in English that we'll shortly be disembarking the boat due to a "technical problem". This confuses me further. How can a negligent captain running his boat aground be considered a "technical problem"? Unless she is referring to a technical problem inside the captain's head.
Katrin's usual responsibilities probably wouldn't usually extend beyong pouring the tea and ensuring old people don't fall off the gangplank, but now is her time to shine. She's controlling the PA system, running pieces of equipment up and down the stairs blocking passengers' constant attempts to return to the upper deck, all the while distributing cans of beer to anxious passengers. As ever, the people of Austria seem to have embraced the concept of morning drinking, a stance of which I fully approve.
Eventually the stricken vessel docks at a post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland in the middle of nowhere that makes Greater Los Angeles look like Florence during the Englightenment. This doesn't look like Bratislava at all. Then again, I have no idea what Bratislava looks like, so I guess I could use my imagination. Those disused railway tracks kind of look like cobbled streets, that coal stack over there could easily resemble a church steeple and if you squint hard enough, those giant shipping containers could be 400 year old cottages. As I step off the boat, I catch a glimpse of the captain sitting alone in his cabin. He wears the hounded look of a naughty schoolboy who's been caught stealing by the headmasters and knows he'll have to face the music from his parents when he gets home.
We're herded onto a disused railway platform where everybody lights up a smoke, except me of course, but some as-yet-unexplained meterological phenomenon conspires to blow everyone else's second-hand smoke into my face, so I get to join in the fun too. The captain can also be seen in his cabin, lighting up what will probably be his last cigarette. There'll be a bottle of scotch and a handgun waiting for him at his table when he gets back to HQ. To my surprise, I overhear a middle-aged American couple talking, and go over to make small talk.
"Any idea what's going on?"
"Yeah", says the man, who looks like a pudgy Roy Schieder. "There's two buses coming. One will take people to Bratislava, the other will take people to the metro where they can get a train back to the wharf in Vienna where they can get a refund".
Bratislava or a refund? It's a curly one, for sure.
"You should go on to Bratislava", Roy continues. "In the main street this afternoon they're having some sort of re-enactment of a famous Slovakian battle scene. I believe they're then staging a mock execution at the end". Yes, but will there be any fuckin' Budweiser?
Half an hour later, the two buses that the boat company has commandeered - possibly at gunpoint, or so I'd like to think anyways - arrive to collect us. I take the Bratislava option and by noon - a whole three hours after leaving Vienna - we're hopping off in the Slovakian capital.
Straight away, I can see that something in this town is amiss. Just about everyone in the street - and absolutely everyone in the pubs - is wearing a green football shirt. Many of them are linking arms and singing loudly and boisterously. Uh oh. It had completely slipped my mind that there are 2010 World Cup qualifiers being played all over Europe today, and there's obviously one being played here. I've unwittingly stepped off into the eye of an emerald hurricane. I approach the mildest-looking fan I can see - a tall, freckled man of about 35 with a buttchin to savour - and ask him what the craic is.
"Sure, Northern Ireland is playing Slovakia here tonight, that's what all the boys are here for. 5.30pm at the national stadium".
He turns out to be friendly, engaging and realistic about his teams slim qualification hopes. "We've got these guys, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia and San Marino our group so sure, it won't be easy".
"Do you go to all the away games?", I ask, as casually as possible to as to disguise the jealousy in my voice.
"We try to, yeah. Not sure when the Prague game is yet. That will be fun. There's usually some good fights in Prague".
So will there be tear gas and water cannons in the streets of Bratislava this evening?
"Nah, don't think so. There was a bit of trouble last night but I think that was just our beings getting a bit carried away. It's pretty low key around here to be honest. Still lots of tickets on sale at the stadium when I was there".
I let this piece of information settle on me like a warm duvet in the wintertime. I wonder what it'd be like to go to a football game in Bratislava. Do I dare attend a match that pits two of the craziest sets of people in Europe against each other? Would I regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't? I'm wearing my green t-shirt today; clearly it was meant to be.
"Well, I might have to go and see about a ticket", I hear myself saying. "Are you guys gonna win?"
"Ah sure, who knows. We're pretty up and down at the best of times and I think they are too, so anything could happen".
"Well, cheers for that mate and good luck".
"Cheers mate".
I set off for the stadium with a purposeful stride, which soon turns into a dogged gait and then a listless stagger as the blazing Central European sun takes its toll. I'm hot, bothered and it doesn't help that I don't actually know where the stadium is. There's no shortage of road signs pointing me in the direction of any shop or location I could ever wish to visit - the train station, government house, Burger King, car dealerships, theatres, castles, sex shops - but no mention of a stadium. Occasionally I stop and ask locals for directions but their barely comprehensible instructions just send me somewhere else in town, where their mate is waiting to send me off in an entirely different direction. I feel like an unwilling competitor in The Amazing Race.
My troubles don't end when I do find the stadium, a decaying Soviet monolith that looks like Carisbrook might on a sunny day, if Dunedin ever had one of them. A lap of the perimeter reveals nothing in the way of ticket booths. Perhaps the first 40,000 people to vault the barbed wire fence just get in for free. I approach two policemen who are sitting on their patrol car eating sandwiches, as policemen are wont to do.
"Tickets?, says the younger of the two, baffled, as if I've just asked for his teenage sister's hand in marriage.
"Yes. For football".
He suddenly remembers that he can't speak English, so his partner pipes up instead. "We do not know", he says sternly, "we are police".
"I can see that, but here is the stadium. You must know where tickets are sold.
"straight down, straight down", he says, gesturing down the street whilst swatting me away as if I were a pigeon after his his lunch - an impressive skill.
The ticket costs me 500 Slovakian Something-or-others, which leaves me with only 92 left, but I'm prepared to drop my pants for one at this stage. The long walk back into town in the sweltering heat leaves me in desperate need of a beer, which is likely to be in short supply if the football fans keep up their pace. Things have really kicked off in the town square now. The Northern Ireland boys, young and old, are staggering about singing, waving flags and stuffing Big Macs into their already bulging midriffs. I find my progress into the next square blocked by an entourage of medieval knights on horseback, obviously part of the historical reenactment that Roy Schieder had spoken of. Sadly for the locals in attendance, much of the fanfare is drowned out by the NI boys singing some song about what they did to England in a qualifier a few years ago. This doesn't stop large congregations of Japanese and American tourists from eagerly camcordering the scene so that they can watch it properly when they get home. So this is what happens when globalisation goes wrong.
As mid-afternoon turns into late-afternoon I notice the fans beginning to head off in the direction of the stadium. This precipitates a mild panic, for not only do I have no idea which bus to catch to get there, but I don't know anyone else who is going and if I find myself seated in an area with Slovakian fans then I suspect I'll very quickly regret today's choice of t-shirt colour. Now slightly desperate, I approach a group of middle aged NI supporters sitting at an outdoor bar. This will either be the best of the worst decision I've ever made.
"'scuse me, fellas", I say, trying my best not to sound English. "Can you tell me what bus I need to take to the ground?"
"Eh, there's no buses", says Mark, a fair haired man in his mid-forties with a ginger goatee. "But you can either take the one, two or four tram".
"Righto, cheers boys, and good luck".
"Where ya from anyways?", another man asks. "Are you Canadian?"
"I'm from New Zealand, actually".
"Ahh! New Zealand! We love New Zealanders! Tell ya what boy, come here and have a seat". I hesitate to accept this offer. "Go on, just come along to the game with us. Come on, have a seat, we'll get you a beer, you'll be fine". So I do, and they all roar in drunken approval. And just like that, I've six new friends and a frothing pint of something called Zlaty in front of me.
My fears that the jovial early evening atmosphere could degenerate into a post-match bloodbath between opposing fans are quickly allayed. "No chance, son", says Jimmy, a solid, bespectacled man of about fifty. "UEFA voted us the best fans in Europe last year. And you know why?"
He gives me a moment to think about it, and then continues. "Because we're the best people in the world!"
"Actually, I'm pretty sure that New Zealanders are the best people in the world, but I'm prepared to believe you're second", I reply.
"Hah, so how long have you been away from home, son?"
Just about three months, I tell him.
"Three months? Fock! Ya must be missin' your sheep!"
Ahhh, the puerile sheep-shagging jibe. How I've missed it. I didn't even know that New Zealand was at the forefront of livestock bothering until I arrived at my new school in Australia at the age of 12, and within five minutes had been accused of bestiality, paganism and being Maori. These days I'm wise enough to know that the best way to diffuse this potentially caustic situation is to bring Wales into it.
"Well", I say, "I've been staying in London a bit. So I've managed to head over to Wales for a bit and get my fill". They all laugh uproariously. I'd never have guessed I'd fit in so well with a bunch of middle-aged protestant football tragics. Thinking about it, I suppose it's not necessarily a good thing.
I'm introduced to Rob - another member of the party who is a barman in Munich in his spare time - who shrewdly changes the point of attack. "Must love your All Blacks then?", he asks.
"I sure do".
"You know, before your time, when I was a lad, they were unbeatable. Invincible even. We feared them and we also respected them. But now they don't have that anymore. The aura is gone". I can see where this is going. He's quoting from the same moronic Stephen Jones article that every Northern Hemisphere rugby fan digs out when they're trying to wind up a Kiwi. "They still think they're invincible, but they're not. They're always peaking between World Cups, you see".
The standard placatory response in these situations is to partly agree, whilst pointing out the inevitable changes that the professional era has brought to the game. But before I can wheel it out, I find myself involuntarily blurting out something rather different. “Actually, we lost the last world cup because the ref was a fucking dickhead Englishman”.
I have no idea why I just said this. These guys aren't Irish: they're Northern Irish, still subjects of Her Majesty. There's a brief silence while the table digests this unexpected outburst and then, to my relief, it is greeted with muted nods and grunts of approval. Then someone says, “fockin' English conts”.
In most parts of the world you could be forgiven for never having heard of David Healy. In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, he is a sporting deity held in the same reverance in which Richie McCaw is held back home. In Northern Ireland's last European qualifying campaign, the diminutive forward banged in 13 goals – including a hat-trick in a famous win over Spain – a tally never achieved by an Englishman. In 2005 he scored the winner in a 1-0 victory over bitter rivals England, an occasion that will go down along with Healy in Northern Irish footballing folklore. The fans even have a song just for him: “Away In A Manger” with the words “he lay” crafted changed to “Healy!”. My new friends and I are in dingy, low-ceilinged bar across from the stadium and the singing is impressive, if somewhat deafening.
“He's a fockin' incredible player”, confirms Mark, over the din. “If he were English he'd be getting paid millions and have his photo on the cover of every paper. The winner he scored against Spain? That was the best goal you'll ever see... but I bet you'll probably never see it”.
I confirm that I haven't.
“Exactly. But if Beckham or Gerrard scored had scored it, you'd never see or hear the fockin' end of it. All you hear about is how fockin' great England are”.
“Even though they've been shite for years”, I add, presently reduced to a mere bystander in this conversation”.
“You're not wrong there, Max. Did you know we're the only one of the Home Nations ever to beat the Germans home and away in qualifying? Course you didn't. But then England go and beat Germany 5-1 and you never hear the fockin' end of it. We're a country of barely a million and we're ranked 32nd in the world. We always punch above our weight. But all you ever hear about is fockin' England this, England that”. It's classic little brother syndrome behaviour, but I still warm to Mark very quickly, because he's clearly a passionate fan, and because I don't have much time for the English either.
To an outsider like me, the whole Irish Situation is riddled with contradictions. Never is this more apparent as I walk into the ground to find the very men who have spent the day slagging off the English now belting out a loud rendition of “God Save The Queen”. The Slovakian fans are scattered amongst the other stands and their listless singing is drowned out by the raucous visitng Northern Ireland faithful.
“The stars in the bright sky looked down where he lay!
Hea-ly!
Hea-ly!
Hea-ly!”
Mark and I find a seat behind the goal and I press him further on matters of his homeland. “This whole sectarian violence bollocks is blown way out of proportion by the media. Most of us happy living alongside each other, it's only the small minority of fockwits on either side that can't let go of the past”, he says. “The you've got all these fockers in Boston and New York trying to stir up trouble with their money. What the fock would they know? Most of 'em haven't set foot in Ireland for 150 fockin' years”.
So Belfast is a perfectly safe place to bring up your kids?
“Well Max, there's some places I wouldn't go, but at the end of the day, you have to remember a lot more people die on our roads than in sectarian violence”. There's a statistic I can relate to.
We've been chatting so keenly that before we know it, the first half has almost passed us by. It's still scoreless but after a shaky start, the Slovaks are in control. They're too big, strong and confident for the visitors all over the park and Our Hero Healy has barely had a sniff of the ball. It's no surprise when, just a minute into the second half, the locals go ahead with a soft goal from a corner. Mark seems resigned to defeat. “Well son”, he says, turning to face me, “looks like you're about to join the vast legion of people to have witnessed a Northern Ireland away defeat”.
With 20 minutes to go, Northern Ireland appear to be given a lifeline when a Slovakian defender blatantly handballs in front of goal. It looks a cast-iron penalty but incredibly, the referee ignores it and waves play on. The visitors are still angrily protesting with the referee when Slovakia break away downfield and score from a resulting free kick to make it 2-0. It's a heartbreaking two-goal swing and the result appears a foregone conclusion.
“No spirit in the lads today”, Mark says, dejected. “We haven't had a decent chance all game. No fockin' crosses or nothin'. You know, sometimes you just gotta put the ball into the middle and you never know what might happen”.
Not ten seconds later, Northern Ireland break swiftly down the left hand side and the winger floats a hopeful cross into the box, where a Slovakian defender diverts the ball past the keeper and into its own net. Which just goes to show, sometimes you just gotta put the ball into the middle and you never know what might happen. It's 2-1 and for a few brief minutes the travelling faithful believe again. It's too little too late, and the hosts hold on for a deserved win.
“We're not Brazil, we're Northern Ireland!”, chant the visiting fans as they trudge out of the ground, but this refreshingly-honest self-assessment fails to mask a deep disappointment at the result. Mark appears lost for words, for the first time today. “That's a bad result, son. I'd rather we play well and lose 6-0 than to go down by a goal playing insipidly like that”. I can't believe he just used the word “insipid”. For that he has earned my lasting respect.
Rob is far more scathing. “We'll come fifth in the fockin' group if we keep on like that. That was fockin' hopeless”.
“It's the fockin' manager”, chimes in Jimmy. “He's not go motivication at all!”. I'm not sure whether he means “motivation” or “mortification”, though I don't suppose it matters at this point.
The self-flagellation goes on like this all the way back into town. For supposedly the best fans in Europe, they're carrying on like All Blacks fans after defeat, except that at least they're talking rather than just staring shellshocked at the floor.
“And the support just isn't what it used to be either”, says Rob. “Less people going to the away games and fock all youngsters replacing the old fans. It's all well and good to go to the home games but if you're not travellin' with the boys you're not a real fan. Think of all the things we've been through to see games in Europe. Remember Latvia? That was a fockin' nightmare”.
What follows is a kind of bizarre real-life parody of Monty Python's “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, where the four middle-aged Nothern Irishmen recall the increasingly more far-fetched and ridiculous tales of hardships they've encountered travelling to far flung corners of Europe for football games. Rail strikes, ferry sinkings, revolutionary wars, surprise bandit attacks, earthquakes and near-fatal viral attacks have all proven no impediment to seeing their beloved team play.
“Remeber that time in Armenia – this is before the days of EasyJet, remember – when we had to ride for three days through the desert on mules just to get to the hotel?”
“Aye!”
“Christ. And when we ran out of supplies, we had to eat one of the mules”.
“You're not wrong there, Jimmy. And my God didn't we play like shite that day?”
“Aye, but we were there”.
My new friends like me so much that they've spontaneously appointed me president of the New Zealand branch of the Northern Ireland Supporters Club. I haven't a clue what this entails, but I suspect I'll probably just have to buy a keg of beer once every 12 months, dye it green and drink it all myself whilst listening to Van Morrison. They're still moaning about the defeat when we park up at an Irish bar in town, so I change the subject to that of my experience in the Irish bar in Vienna last night.
“I don't understand what people like about Irish bars”, Rob says. “They're all the fockin' same and none of them are anythin' like a bar in Ireland”.
I explain to him that the Irish bar is almost like a global brand, representing familiarity in highly foreign surroundings. Like going to McDonalds or Starbucks in Mongolia, the value lies in the fact that you always know what you're going to get. In effect, the Irish bar is just a fast food joint for alcoholics.
“But you wouldn't walk into any Irish bar and find everyone drinkin' Guinness and singin' fockin' 'Danny Boy'”.
I'm starting to consider calling it a night when rotund, moustachioed man in his 50s approaches our outside table. In his skintight Northern Ireland shirt he looks more or less like every other travelling fan I've seen today, but the lads at our table greet him with a particular enthusiasm and respect.
“Pretty disappointing tonight, eh boys?”, he says.
“It's the fockin' manager. He's got no fockin' motivication at all!”, Jimmy opines.
The man, a pleasant and knowledge fellow, stays and talks for five minutes or so before continuing up the street. As he's walking off, Mark leans over and says to me, “that was David Healy's father”. I think that's pretty neat. The father of the team's star player getting stuck in on tour with the rest of the lads. I can't imagine my father coming to Slovakia to watch me play football when I'm in my 30s.
Mark has spotted another couple that he knows and ushers them over. The husband is a Northern Irishman through and through but the wife, carrying their infant baby, in Australian.
“This is Max”, he says by way of introduction, “he hates Australians”.
Not for the first time this evening I find myself scrambling to diffuse a difficult situation. So I turn my attention to the baby.
“So, will he be supporting Ireland in the future, or Australia?”, I ask with a grin.
“'straaaaa!”, replies the mother defiantly, demonstrating that curious Australian penchant for turning four-syllable words into a single monosyllabic twang.
I could happily sit here enjoying the craic with the boys all night, but I have a train to catch. I say my prolongued goodbyes with my new football mates, who won't let me go without a whole lot of fuss so that I've shaken about 40 pairs of hands by the end of it. It's one of those euphoric occasions where we all make plans to see each other again at a Northern Ireland qualifier in some other European backwater: Estonia, Azerbaijan, maybe even South Ossetia, if I'm ever passing through that way. As I'm walking away I turn back to them and say, “remember boys, you're the second best people in the world”, and they all laugh heartily and don't protest, because they now know it's true.
Sobering up on the train, it occurs to me I learned a lot more about Northern Ireland today than I did about Slovakia. So if you were hoping for much insight into Slovakian people and customs, you're shit out of luck I'm afraid. All I will say is that make sure you don't pay for anything in Euros, and don't be frightened to ask what kind of meat you're about to have for lunch before you buy it. I'm fairly certain I ate barbecued dog this afternoon.
Oh, and make sure you go there on the day of a World Cup qualifier against Northern Ireland.
And don't take the catamaran from Vienna.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Vienna
Today I'm going to do yet another thing that you'd never be able to do in New Zealand, unless you consider yourself a citizen of Tuhoe nation. I'm getting on a train in one country and getting off at another.
Both resting on the banks of the mighty Danube, the ancient cities of Budapest and Vienna are barely 150 miles apart. Despite the fact that they once shared an empire, the Austrians and Hungarians are like chalk and cheese – or more appropriately, like strudel and goulash. Coming from New Zealand, it's hard to comprehend how two cities just a three-hour train ride apart can be separated by thousands of years of history and progress. Whereas in New Zealand you could get on a train in a paddock in the middle of nowhere, ride for three hours and find yourself, well, in a paddock in the middle of nowhere.
Not that you could do that anyways, since we don't have passenger trains anymore. $570m worth of railroads apparently, but no passenger trains. I'm sure there's a Bruce Springsteen song in there somewhere.
Even as we make the brief walk from the station to our hostel, it's clear the Vienna has a much different air about it to Budapest. The locals are well-dressed and demure. The streets and shopfronts seem tidier, more orderly, more in tune with a New Zealand set of sensibilities. Our hostel is clean, affordable, well-staffed and there's a bar in the basement. What's more, there's not many Aussies and it's located just off a main street brimming with kebab houses and Austrian bars. All in all, I think we've done pretty well.
It's early evening, so the girls and I take an outside table at a nearby beer house, looking out on the busy Mariahilfer Strasse. The owners are strictly adhering to the European protocol of only ever having one waiter on duty at a time, regardless of how large and busy the premises is. This premises is very large and busy, and the waiter is a 120-year-old grey-haired elf of a man, who is running about juggling bills, beers and large plates of food, usually at the same time.
The menu boasts typical heartwarming Germanic fare – schnitzel, roast pork, bratwurst – with a few items that are foreign to my vocabularly. What, for instance, is cevapcici? I can't even locate the origin of the word. Is it Italian? German? Slavic? It's an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle, then presumably served warm with potatoes and sauerkraut.
“What's this one, then?”, I ask our prehistoric waiter, pointing uneasily at the word to save myself the embarrassment of having to say it out loud.
“It's like, umm, it is meat, like the pork...”, he says, then trails off altogether and just stares at me apologetically. Then someone at a nearby table hollers for a beer and so he scurries off, leaving us none the wiser. Still, it'd be silly not to order it now, wouldn't it?
You probably could've guessed anyway, but cevapcici is some sort of meat dish comprising of pork or beef mince, spiced and fashioned into little sausages, and served with the curious combination of fries, sauerkraut, raw onion, red pesto and ketchup. I wash it down with another fresh pint of the beerhouse's own special brew and retire to the hostel, where the volatile contents of my evening meal swish about in my stomach like aircraft wreckage in a storm, finally dying down and sinking into the depths at around midnight. I suspect I'll hear more about it in the morning, though.
***
Vienna is home to a ridiculous number of museums; more than could be visited in two weeks, let alone three days. The Albertina, the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Kunsthaus (not as exciting as it sounds), the Museum of Fine Arts, the Leopold Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Clock Museum, the Austrian National Library, the Museum of Military History, the Furniture Museum (a must see for all furniture enthusiasts, I'm told), and many more.
We spent the morning strolling through the grandiose rooms of the Kaiser Apartments, situated in the midst of the Imperial Palace. This was once the home of Emperor Franz Josef I, who was so revered in his native Austria that they decided to name a glacier in a remote part of New Zealand after him. For my afternoon entertainment, I've left the girls and decided to give the Science Museum a go. I know nothing about science, so I figure this is the best place for me to visit if I want value for money.
“One student please”, I ask the lady at the ticket office cheerily.
“Can I see your student card please?”
Yes she can. I'm still a student, you see. A graduand in fact. Yeah I know, it gets all the girls.
“How old are you?”, she asks.
I have to think for a second. Never a good sign. “I'm 23”.
She regards me cautiously, as if suspicious that I've just lied to her to save myself two Euro. And let's be honest, she's right to be.
Suddenly she completely changes tack. “And may I ask what country you are from?”, she says. Wow, I wasn't expecting that.
“Ahhh, New Zealand”. The cautious look again. Has my moment's hesitation proven fatal?
“Seven Euro, please”. She takes my money, prints off a ticket and hands it to me without once looking up from her computer screen. The teutonic reputation for brutal efficiency remains rock solid.
It would've been nice of them to tell me that none of the signs on the exhibits were translated into English, but it's alright. Unable to read anything, I'm transported back to the days of being a wide-eyed young boy, or Winston Peters, wandering through vast halls and gazing in perfectly-ignorant awe at giant paintings, sculptures and diplays. The collection is undeniably impressive; though something is troubling me. Where's all the science stuff? I'm no expert on the matter, but paintings and antiquities seem more in place in an arts museum.
On the top floor is an impressive collection of coins, again introduced only in German. Playing on a crappy old television set in one corner of the room is the only display I can understand: it's a totally shameless videotaped advertisement, in English, for the Canadian Royal Mint.
“To create a world's first, you need cutting edge technology and fiery old world mettalurgy”, says a booming, Canadian-accented voiceover while images of molten iron being fashioned by goggled hardmen flash on the screen. “It's powerful, breathtaking, unique … it's from the Canadian Royal Mint”.
I'd swear it's a piss take but the fact that we're in a museum means that there's surely no way it could be. The voiceover man begins rabbiting on about the largest gold coin ever made, “100 kilos of pure Canadian pride”, which, if this advertisement is to be believed, has been fashioned by melting gold and resting it in a bed of sand, or something like that.
Now the CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint is on screen, staring directly into the soul of the viewer, or so she'd like to think. “We have a solid reputation for raising the bar”, she says in a grating management speak that could not be more incongruous with the setting of a centuries-old museum. With a touch too much zest for my liking, given the rather dry subject matter at hand, she outlines the design specs of their brand new coin, which in case you were wondering contains 99.999% gold bullion. “Once again, our investors can invest in the best”.
This is brilliant. I could stand and watch it all day but I have a city to explore, and besides it's just looped back to the beginning and the original voiceover. “To create a world's first, you need cutting edge technology and fiery old world mettalurgy”. Poor old Canadians eh, they'd do anything for attention.
As I make my way back out into the courtyard outside, it becomes clear to me why there was so little in the way of scientic exhibits. I've actually walked into the Art History Museum, rather than the Science Museum, and gone right ahead and paid and walked through the entire premises without even realising my mistake. “Nice one Max”, I hear myself saying, “you've really gone and outdone yourself this time”. Such stark revelations about your own spectacular lack of self-worth can really be hard to shake off, especially when alone and so far from home or anything familiar. From here it's a slippery slope into a world of listlessness and self-loathing that can only be arrested by the hasty consumption of alcohol.
Fortunately, my ability to find beer and drink it remains unparalleled. I locate an outdoor bar on the riverbank (when I say “riverbank” I mean it in the European sense. That is to say, a concrete accessway separated from the road above by a retaining wall and the water below by another retaining wall), from which I can watch the evening boats come in as the sun sets pleasantly on my back. A sign above the bar says “Drink with me :) You are at home”. You can't argue with that sort of thinking.
A decent smattering of patrons are lounging on chairs around the bar. On a stool at the bar is a large Austrian man of about forty with tats and ear piercings, staring at his beer as if it might suddenly spew forth some revelation to send him on the path to enlightenment. Maybe it will. An English lady is sitting by herself at a nearby table, her head buried in a Sudoku book that she no doubt purchased at Gatwick Airport on the way over for £1.50 (I know the price because I picked one up myself). A young Italian couple on deckchairs are arguing about something, or having a joke, I can't really figure it out with Italians anymore. And there's a pretty, red-haired Austrian girl sitting upright in her deckchair, crying. I want to invite her over to my table for a yarn, but am not sure quite how to go about asking. “So, you look like you went to the wrong museum this afternoon too. Wanna talk about it?” doesn't quite seem appropriate. So I let her be, instead focusing my attention on the American tourists with their shirts tucked into the belts on the far riverbank, hoping my concentrated energy may cause one of them to suddenly stagger backwards and fall in. Sadly not.
I still can't help but feel that something is missing from the evening as I walk back through Vienna's tourist-clogged main streets at dusk, pleasant buzzing from my riverside beers. I'm in no hurry to get back to the hostel, so I turn off the main drag and find myself in another of those uniquely-European mazes of streets that twist and turn every which way and occasionally bend back on each other, leading to much grimacing and scratching of heads. But there in the depth of those alleyways, as if ordained by a higher power, I find what I've been looking for. Yes. It's an Irish pub.
There's something tremendously comforting about an Irish pub when you've spent a long while on the road. Throughout the world it's an homogenous social space, inhabited by the same people with different names, adorned with the same furnishings and imbued with the same faux-Irish sentimentality that makes you want to spontaneously burst into a rendition of Dirty Old Town, if you could just remember any of the words. I'm drinking in Vienna, but I could be in Cork, Dunedin, Memphis or Ulan Bator.
This Irish bar proves to be just like any other, with it's dark wood pannelling, low ceilings, smoky ambience and the Corrs playing on the sound system. I take a seat at the bar at contemplate my choice of drink. Picking the wrong brew in an Irish bar in Vienna could mean social suicide, so it's worth taking the time to think it through. Ordering a Guinness would of course immediately identify me as a novice, and going for a Newcastle Brown would arouse suspicions of being a loyalist. The other options are Kilkenny and McAffrey's Irish Ale, a “traditional draught beer raised by hand pump from the cellar” - a Tui billboard candidate if ever I saw one. Kilkenny it is, then.
It's not until I put my glass down and look around the small room that I realise everyone else is drinking pissweak Austrian lager, which no doubt cost them roughly 3 Euro each. My pint cost me a scarcely believable 4.90, of which I handed over a 5 Euro note and received no change. What's more, not a single other occupant of the bar is a foreigner, let alone Irish; they're just workers who have come to enjoy a pint and blow smoke in some strange backpacker's face. The two old guys next to me, who look like burned-out roadies for a 1970s heavy metal band, are conversing with the Austrian bartender and laughing horrendous, throaty smokers' laughs. The couple next to me - a pair of younger, wealthier Austrians - are having a conversation with some lesbians seated at a booth in the corner. I just sit in between, dumbfounded, as volleys of conversation are fired over my head and every which way around the bar except mine. I realise that I've been totally gypped. I've been lured into a tourist trap and forced to pay way over the odds for a so-called slice of Irish culture. But the only thing Irish about this place is the beer.
The sound of mocking laughter follows me out the door and into the dimly-lit alleyway as I slink back towards what I believe to be the direction of the main street. “You haven't heard the last of this, you bastards”, I mutter under my breath. “I'm gonna tell my Irish mates about this place, and they'll come and burn it to the fuckin' ground”. Actually, they'll drink it to the ground first, then burn it to the ground. Priorities of course.
***
It would appear, from the campaign banners and billboards taking up every square inch of available public space, that there's an election coming up in Austria. Not being a particularly ardent follower of Austrian politics, I know nothing about the candidates and so the only conclusions I can draw about who I'd vote for (if eligible) come from the manner in which the would-be leaders are presented in their campaigns. This puts me in the curious position of disregarding policies and voting entirely based on who looks like more of a leader, which is probably how a large chunk of every electorate around the world votes anyway.
The jury's out on the current deputy prime minister, representing what looks like a centre-right party. There's something about the uneasy grin on his face that's not quite right. "His eyes aren't smiling", says Georgina. "You can tell a person isn't really smiling by the eyes". Not just that, but his stubbly grey goatee seems ill-at-ease with his otherwise cleancut, "I was organising peaceful student protests while my mates were smoking dope and listening to Hendrix" appearance. His main rival, whose red banners indicate he's some sort of social democrat, isn't showing his teeth at all in his banners. Still, he looks like my high school French teacher, so I like him. I don't know about his policies though: "Sozial. Entschlossen. Zuverlassig". Clearing one's throat may be an important part of the speech process but I'm sure the people of Austria would be more interested in hearing his key policy points.
Then there are the minority party leaders who will, in my completely uninformed opinion, probably fight over the scraps come election night. The Green Party candidate also has a grey beard and appears to be standing in the dark, perhaps foreshadowing what might happen to you the voter unless you heed your conscience and tick the box for him. Then there are the two right-wing nationalist candidates. The first is a young, dynamic looking man with photoshopped blue eyes who has been superimposed over an image of the national emblem, the Austrian eagle. He's giving the thumbs up and fixing the camera with a "vote for me and I'll shag you!" grin that's just bordering on creepy. The other right-wing candidate is our old friend and Nazi admirer Jorg Haider. He's the only candidate I recognise, and my prejudices would rule out the possibility of ever voting for him. If I had to vote tomorrow I'd probably lean towards the Social Democrat, but there's a long way to go in this election and any significant change in billboard portrayals could swing my vote in a new direction.
Our final evening in Vienna sees us in a traditional Austrian wine tavern, below street level in a tucked-away part of the old town. By this point we have debated to death the various merits of each party leader's billboard and instead turn our intentions to sampling each of the wines listed on the menu. They arrive in little quarter-litre jugs that are deceptively hard-hitting, and before long I'm grinning inanely as I tuck into a meal of bratwurst and (you guessed it) potatoes. There is a certain Olde World charm to the place that even our surly waitress cannot dampen. It's a convivial little haven from the tourist chaos in the above-ground world, the kind of place you could've imagined Allied spies hanging around in during the war years. I can see them now, sitting at a table in a little alcove in the corner, talking quietly and handing each other brown paper bags from trenchcoats and then sneaking out of the place while the soundtrack plays suspicious, plodding trumpet music. Hmmm, looks like I've drunk too much wine again.
After dinner, we emerge from the rain-soaked streets of Vienna and half-sprint, half-stagger down into the subway, where I take photos of myself grinning moronically and the girls pretend not to know me, as is now customary when we're on public transport together. Back at the dorm, I drink my own body weight in water than climb into bed, where a restless and shallow sleep awaits me for much of the evening.
Suddenly, at around 3am, I spring bolt upright in my bed as a little light bulb flicks on above my head. So that's what's been missing in my life, that's where I've been going wrong. It's clear exactly what I have to do now: I have to invest all my remaining money in the Canadian Royal Mint! Will get onto it first thing in the morning. Yes.
Both resting on the banks of the mighty Danube, the ancient cities of Budapest and Vienna are barely 150 miles apart. Despite the fact that they once shared an empire, the Austrians and Hungarians are like chalk and cheese – or more appropriately, like strudel and goulash. Coming from New Zealand, it's hard to comprehend how two cities just a three-hour train ride apart can be separated by thousands of years of history and progress. Whereas in New Zealand you could get on a train in a paddock in the middle of nowhere, ride for three hours and find yourself, well, in a paddock in the middle of nowhere.
Not that you could do that anyways, since we don't have passenger trains anymore. $570m worth of railroads apparently, but no passenger trains. I'm sure there's a Bruce Springsteen song in there somewhere.
Even as we make the brief walk from the station to our hostel, it's clear the Vienna has a much different air about it to Budapest. The locals are well-dressed and demure. The streets and shopfronts seem tidier, more orderly, more in tune with a New Zealand set of sensibilities. Our hostel is clean, affordable, well-staffed and there's a bar in the basement. What's more, there's not many Aussies and it's located just off a main street brimming with kebab houses and Austrian bars. All in all, I think we've done pretty well.
It's early evening, so the girls and I take an outside table at a nearby beer house, looking out on the busy Mariahilfer Strasse. The owners are strictly adhering to the European protocol of only ever having one waiter on duty at a time, regardless of how large and busy the premises is. This premises is very large and busy, and the waiter is a 120-year-old grey-haired elf of a man, who is running about juggling bills, beers and large plates of food, usually at the same time.
The menu boasts typical heartwarming Germanic fare – schnitzel, roast pork, bratwurst – with a few items that are foreign to my vocabularly. What, for instance, is cevapcici? I can't even locate the origin of the word. Is it Italian? German? Slavic? It's an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle, then presumably served warm with potatoes and sauerkraut.
“What's this one, then?”, I ask our prehistoric waiter, pointing uneasily at the word to save myself the embarrassment of having to say it out loud.
“It's like, umm, it is meat, like the pork...”, he says, then trails off altogether and just stares at me apologetically. Then someone at a nearby table hollers for a beer and so he scurries off, leaving us none the wiser. Still, it'd be silly not to order it now, wouldn't it?
You probably could've guessed anyway, but cevapcici is some sort of meat dish comprising of pork or beef mince, spiced and fashioned into little sausages, and served with the curious combination of fries, sauerkraut, raw onion, red pesto and ketchup. I wash it down with another fresh pint of the beerhouse's own special brew and retire to the hostel, where the volatile contents of my evening meal swish about in my stomach like aircraft wreckage in a storm, finally dying down and sinking into the depths at around midnight. I suspect I'll hear more about it in the morning, though.
***
Vienna is home to a ridiculous number of museums; more than could be visited in two weeks, let alone three days. The Albertina, the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Kunsthaus (not as exciting as it sounds), the Museum of Fine Arts, the Leopold Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Clock Museum, the Austrian National Library, the Museum of Military History, the Furniture Museum (a must see for all furniture enthusiasts, I'm told), and many more.
We spent the morning strolling through the grandiose rooms of the Kaiser Apartments, situated in the midst of the Imperial Palace. This was once the home of Emperor Franz Josef I, who was so revered in his native Austria that they decided to name a glacier in a remote part of New Zealand after him. For my afternoon entertainment, I've left the girls and decided to give the Science Museum a go. I know nothing about science, so I figure this is the best place for me to visit if I want value for money.
“One student please”, I ask the lady at the ticket office cheerily.
“Can I see your student card please?”
Yes she can. I'm still a student, you see. A graduand in fact. Yeah I know, it gets all the girls.
“How old are you?”, she asks.
I have to think for a second. Never a good sign. “I'm 23”.
She regards me cautiously, as if suspicious that I've just lied to her to save myself two Euro. And let's be honest, she's right to be.
Suddenly she completely changes tack. “And may I ask what country you are from?”, she says. Wow, I wasn't expecting that.
“Ahhh, New Zealand”. The cautious look again. Has my moment's hesitation proven fatal?
“Seven Euro, please”. She takes my money, prints off a ticket and hands it to me without once looking up from her computer screen. The teutonic reputation for brutal efficiency remains rock solid.
It would've been nice of them to tell me that none of the signs on the exhibits were translated into English, but it's alright. Unable to read anything, I'm transported back to the days of being a wide-eyed young boy, or Winston Peters, wandering through vast halls and gazing in perfectly-ignorant awe at giant paintings, sculptures and diplays. The collection is undeniably impressive; though something is troubling me. Where's all the science stuff? I'm no expert on the matter, but paintings and antiquities seem more in place in an arts museum.
On the top floor is an impressive collection of coins, again introduced only in German. Playing on a crappy old television set in one corner of the room is the only display I can understand: it's a totally shameless videotaped advertisement, in English, for the Canadian Royal Mint.
“To create a world's first, you need cutting edge technology and fiery old world mettalurgy”, says a booming, Canadian-accented voiceover while images of molten iron being fashioned by goggled hardmen flash on the screen. “It's powerful, breathtaking, unique … it's from the Canadian Royal Mint”.
I'd swear it's a piss take but the fact that we're in a museum means that there's surely no way it could be. The voiceover man begins rabbiting on about the largest gold coin ever made, “100 kilos of pure Canadian pride”, which, if this advertisement is to be believed, has been fashioned by melting gold and resting it in a bed of sand, or something like that.
Now the CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint is on screen, staring directly into the soul of the viewer, or so she'd like to think. “We have a solid reputation for raising the bar”, she says in a grating management speak that could not be more incongruous with the setting of a centuries-old museum. With a touch too much zest for my liking, given the rather dry subject matter at hand, she outlines the design specs of their brand new coin, which in case you were wondering contains 99.999% gold bullion. “Once again, our investors can invest in the best”.
This is brilliant. I could stand and watch it all day but I have a city to explore, and besides it's just looped back to the beginning and the original voiceover. “To create a world's first, you need cutting edge technology and fiery old world mettalurgy”. Poor old Canadians eh, they'd do anything for attention.
As I make my way back out into the courtyard outside, it becomes clear to me why there was so little in the way of scientic exhibits. I've actually walked into the Art History Museum, rather than the Science Museum, and gone right ahead and paid and walked through the entire premises without even realising my mistake. “Nice one Max”, I hear myself saying, “you've really gone and outdone yourself this time”. Such stark revelations about your own spectacular lack of self-worth can really be hard to shake off, especially when alone and so far from home or anything familiar. From here it's a slippery slope into a world of listlessness and self-loathing that can only be arrested by the hasty consumption of alcohol.
Fortunately, my ability to find beer and drink it remains unparalleled. I locate an outdoor bar on the riverbank (when I say “riverbank” I mean it in the European sense. That is to say, a concrete accessway separated from the road above by a retaining wall and the water below by another retaining wall), from which I can watch the evening boats come in as the sun sets pleasantly on my back. A sign above the bar says “Drink with me :) You are at home”. You can't argue with that sort of thinking.
A decent smattering of patrons are lounging on chairs around the bar. On a stool at the bar is a large Austrian man of about forty with tats and ear piercings, staring at his beer as if it might suddenly spew forth some revelation to send him on the path to enlightenment. Maybe it will. An English lady is sitting by herself at a nearby table, her head buried in a Sudoku book that she no doubt purchased at Gatwick Airport on the way over for £1.50 (I know the price because I picked one up myself). A young Italian couple on deckchairs are arguing about something, or having a joke, I can't really figure it out with Italians anymore. And there's a pretty, red-haired Austrian girl sitting upright in her deckchair, crying. I want to invite her over to my table for a yarn, but am not sure quite how to go about asking. “So, you look like you went to the wrong museum this afternoon too. Wanna talk about it?” doesn't quite seem appropriate. So I let her be, instead focusing my attention on the American tourists with their shirts tucked into the belts on the far riverbank, hoping my concentrated energy may cause one of them to suddenly stagger backwards and fall in. Sadly not.
I still can't help but feel that something is missing from the evening as I walk back through Vienna's tourist-clogged main streets at dusk, pleasant buzzing from my riverside beers. I'm in no hurry to get back to the hostel, so I turn off the main drag and find myself in another of those uniquely-European mazes of streets that twist and turn every which way and occasionally bend back on each other, leading to much grimacing and scratching of heads. But there in the depth of those alleyways, as if ordained by a higher power, I find what I've been looking for. Yes. It's an Irish pub.
There's something tremendously comforting about an Irish pub when you've spent a long while on the road. Throughout the world it's an homogenous social space, inhabited by the same people with different names, adorned with the same furnishings and imbued with the same faux-Irish sentimentality that makes you want to spontaneously burst into a rendition of Dirty Old Town, if you could just remember any of the words. I'm drinking in Vienna, but I could be in Cork, Dunedin, Memphis or Ulan Bator.
This Irish bar proves to be just like any other, with it's dark wood pannelling, low ceilings, smoky ambience and the Corrs playing on the sound system. I take a seat at the bar at contemplate my choice of drink. Picking the wrong brew in an Irish bar in Vienna could mean social suicide, so it's worth taking the time to think it through. Ordering a Guinness would of course immediately identify me as a novice, and going for a Newcastle Brown would arouse suspicions of being a loyalist. The other options are Kilkenny and McAffrey's Irish Ale, a “traditional draught beer raised by hand pump from the cellar” - a Tui billboard candidate if ever I saw one. Kilkenny it is, then.
It's not until I put my glass down and look around the small room that I realise everyone else is drinking pissweak Austrian lager, which no doubt cost them roughly 3 Euro each. My pint cost me a scarcely believable 4.90, of which I handed over a 5 Euro note and received no change. What's more, not a single other occupant of the bar is a foreigner, let alone Irish; they're just workers who have come to enjoy a pint and blow smoke in some strange backpacker's face. The two old guys next to me, who look like burned-out roadies for a 1970s heavy metal band, are conversing with the Austrian bartender and laughing horrendous, throaty smokers' laughs. The couple next to me - a pair of younger, wealthier Austrians - are having a conversation with some lesbians seated at a booth in the corner. I just sit in between, dumbfounded, as volleys of conversation are fired over my head and every which way around the bar except mine. I realise that I've been totally gypped. I've been lured into a tourist trap and forced to pay way over the odds for a so-called slice of Irish culture. But the only thing Irish about this place is the beer.
The sound of mocking laughter follows me out the door and into the dimly-lit alleyway as I slink back towards what I believe to be the direction of the main street. “You haven't heard the last of this, you bastards”, I mutter under my breath. “I'm gonna tell my Irish mates about this place, and they'll come and burn it to the fuckin' ground”. Actually, they'll drink it to the ground first, then burn it to the ground. Priorities of course.
***
It would appear, from the campaign banners and billboards taking up every square inch of available public space, that there's an election coming up in Austria. Not being a particularly ardent follower of Austrian politics, I know nothing about the candidates and so the only conclusions I can draw about who I'd vote for (if eligible) come from the manner in which the would-be leaders are presented in their campaigns. This puts me in the curious position of disregarding policies and voting entirely based on who looks like more of a leader, which is probably how a large chunk of every electorate around the world votes anyway.
The jury's out on the current deputy prime minister, representing what looks like a centre-right party. There's something about the uneasy grin on his face that's not quite right. "His eyes aren't smiling", says Georgina. "You can tell a person isn't really smiling by the eyes". Not just that, but his stubbly grey goatee seems ill-at-ease with his otherwise cleancut, "I was organising peaceful student protests while my mates were smoking dope and listening to Hendrix" appearance. His main rival, whose red banners indicate he's some sort of social democrat, isn't showing his teeth at all in his banners. Still, he looks like my high school French teacher, so I like him. I don't know about his policies though: "Sozial. Entschlossen. Zuverlassig". Clearing one's throat may be an important part of the speech process but I'm sure the people of Austria would be more interested in hearing his key policy points.
Then there are the minority party leaders who will, in my completely uninformed opinion, probably fight over the scraps come election night. The Green Party candidate also has a grey beard and appears to be standing in the dark, perhaps foreshadowing what might happen to you the voter unless you heed your conscience and tick the box for him. Then there are the two right-wing nationalist candidates. The first is a young, dynamic looking man with photoshopped blue eyes who has been superimposed over an image of the national emblem, the Austrian eagle. He's giving the thumbs up and fixing the camera with a "vote for me and I'll shag you!" grin that's just bordering on creepy. The other right-wing candidate is our old friend and Nazi admirer Jorg Haider. He's the only candidate I recognise, and my prejudices would rule out the possibility of ever voting for him. If I had to vote tomorrow I'd probably lean towards the Social Democrat, but there's a long way to go in this election and any significant change in billboard portrayals could swing my vote in a new direction.
Our final evening in Vienna sees us in a traditional Austrian wine tavern, below street level in a tucked-away part of the old town. By this point we have debated to death the various merits of each party leader's billboard and instead turn our intentions to sampling each of the wines listed on the menu. They arrive in little quarter-litre jugs that are deceptively hard-hitting, and before long I'm grinning inanely as I tuck into a meal of bratwurst and (you guessed it) potatoes. There is a certain Olde World charm to the place that even our surly waitress cannot dampen. It's a convivial little haven from the tourist chaos in the above-ground world, the kind of place you could've imagined Allied spies hanging around in during the war years. I can see them now, sitting at a table in a little alcove in the corner, talking quietly and handing each other brown paper bags from trenchcoats and then sneaking out of the place while the soundtrack plays suspicious, plodding trumpet music. Hmmm, looks like I've drunk too much wine again.
After dinner, we emerge from the rain-soaked streets of Vienna and half-sprint, half-stagger down into the subway, where I take photos of myself grinning moronically and the girls pretend not to know me, as is now customary when we're on public transport together. Back at the dorm, I drink my own body weight in water than climb into bed, where a restless and shallow sleep awaits me for much of the evening.
Suddenly, at around 3am, I spring bolt upright in my bed as a little light bulb flicks on above my head. So that's what's been missing in my life, that's where I've been going wrong. It's clear exactly what I have to do now: I have to invest all my remaining money in the Canadian Royal Mint! Will get onto it first thing in the morning. Yes.
Budapest
I wouldn't normally find myself consulting a tourist guidebook before visiting a city because let's face it, it just spoils all the surprises when you get there. As far as Hungary is concerned though, I'm about as familiar with it as an Frenchman is with a bath. Pretty much all I know is that they had a ridiculously good football team in the 1950s and have the highest number of moustaches per capita of any country in Europe, but these facts aren't much help to me now.
I've arrived in the country with 24,600 Hungarian forint. By my calculations, that's enough to buy 61 pints of Budvar, 82 kebabs, 7 nights accomodation at the hostel, 49 bottles of Hungarian dessert wine, 14 map-of-Hungary t-shirts, 3 vacuum cleaners, 492 apples, 3 full body massages (2 with happy endings), or some combination of the above. I also have with me two university friends, Georgina and Caroline. They devoted a fair slice of their time in Dunedin to the difficult task of keeping me out of harm's way, so I'll be hoping they do the same on our travels.
Too bad they can't be watching over me 24 hours a day. Upon checking into the hostel, my first act is to jam my adapter thumb-first into the wall socket without checking to see if it was live, sending 250 volts of Hungary's finest through my body. My bed appears to have been hastily assembled from old whisky crates and the thinnest mattress they could find, but I haven't slept in a proper bed for six weeks now so I'm well beyond caring.
Meanwhile in the bathroom, I'm confronted by another of those horrendous "viewing platform" toilets that I first encountered in Utrecht, a few pages ago. I still don't understand how this feature could possibly be advantageous to the toilet-going process, unless you happen to be a 12-year-old boy who regularly contributes to ratemypoo.com. Our only other dorm mate is a quiet Swiss engineering student, who does not tell us his name and thus becomes Stefan by default.
The advantage of knowing nothing about a city before you visit it is that you're endlessly surprised by the scenes you encounter upon arrival. For a person who has read up on everything beforehand, each new site is usually greeted with a "oh yep" or "oh, it looks the same as it does in all the photos". Whereas arriving totally unprepared frequently causes one to involuntarily blurt out things like "holy shit! That's awesome", or "Wow! I had no idea the Eiffel Tower was in Paris! Bonus".
So on our first morning in Budapest I walk wide-eyed along the banks of the Danube, gazing in awe at the impressive buildings along the river. Most impressive is the Parliament building, but then there is also St Stephen's Basilica, Mattias Church and the massive Castle Quarter, a fortress sitting atop a hill on the far bank that dominates the landscape. Adoring the near side of the castle are are giant mugshots of a handsome young man and woman, who look like models from an OPSM advertisement but are actually presumably the two heads of state, in whichever guise in which they exist.
After strolling around the hilltop castle and taking in some of Hungary's rich and varied history at the museum, our attention inevitably turns to the subject of lunch. One of the immutable facts of travel in Europe is that wherever large numbers of tourists congregate, so too do the tacky, overpriced cafes with their "menus touristique" that will try to sell you authentic ham and cheese sandwiches for twenty times the price you'd pay at your local dairy. We're a bit too clever for that, though; we've found our way, after much u-turning and ummming-and-ahhhing, to a local Hungarian canteen tucked away on the second floor of some back alley building, well beyond the reaches of even the most adventurous package tourist.
The other diners to a man turn and look at us suspiciously as we walk in. It's one of those places where the music would've abruptly stopped too, had there been any music playing to start with. The server at the canteen is one of those hulking Soviet brutes who looks like he used to compete in those ridiculous World's Strongest Man competitions they sometimes show on ESPN, in which lumberjacks and a couple of roided up Americans called Chuck pick up houses and throw cars around for fun.
"Speak English?", I ask him, a touch optimistically I suspect.
"Uh?" comes the reply. So I point at something that vaguely resembles lasange and he slams it onto my plate with a fish slice. Caroline ends up with something you might loosely term schnitzel, while Georgina gets a bowl of what looks like lurid pink macaroni and cheese, but upon tasting, really isn't.
Even though communism was shown the door in Hungary 20 years ago, its influence can be found just about everywhere you look. Even my "lasange" evokes a Soviet-era simplicity and functionality, with its jaundiced brown hue and perfect cube shape not dissimilar to the many cheap apartment blocks that litter the city. A fly lands on it - always a guarantor that you're eating at a fine establishment, irrespective of the country - and is warded off by my tentatively probing fork. My first few bites indicate little about the composition of the dish, except that it isn't lasange. By the time I've picked apart the cube I've positively identified bits of potato, onion and cauliflower, but am unable to ascertain whether or not there was any meat involved. The large dollop of white stuff on top appears to be a close relative of sour cream, adding a curiously Mexican angle to the dish that you wouldn't necessarily expect in a working man's canteen in Budapest.
Onto the equally-perplexing question of the dessert I've ordered: little pastry parcels with a brown mystery filling. It could be chocolate, it could be hazelnut paste, it could be that horrid mince stuff that people put in their pies at Christmas for some reason; or it could be anything else. It turns out to be none of the above. I think I can detect traces of blueberry in there somewhere, but it's hard to tell. I stow one of the little parcels away in my bag in case the taste becomes easier to identify later after a few beers.
Things are no less mystifying at dinnertime. Caroline has led us to a little-known local eatery that her guidebook has recommended for the more economically-challenged diners. From the outside it doesn't look quite as exotic as our canteen, but just about. So you can imagine our surprise and relief when we enter the restaurant only to be overwhelmed by New Zealand, Australian, British and American accents. Everything on the menu is accompanied by a picture too, so even if you don't know what you're eating, eat least you have an idea of what it's gonna look like.
Wary from my lunchtime experience, I take the soft option of the schnitzel. Caroline's roast turkey arrives shredded rather than whole, and with a side "salad" of assorted pickled vegetables. I am especially proud of Georgina though, who has opted for a dish purporting to be "fried cheese with boiled rice"; and true to their word, the restaurant produces a plate of rice decorated by three rectangular chunks of deep-fried cheddar with a healthy side serving of tartare sauce. It's a pretty steep culinary learning curve in this corner of Europe, but when you're paying less than four pounds per head it pays not to get your hopes up too high I suppose.
I now know a little bit about Hungary. Believe it or not, it was occupied by the Celts over 2500 years ago. It is bordered by seven other countries - Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia - which is seven more than New Zealand is bordered by. The inventor of the ball point pen, one Laszlo Biro, was a Hungarian. Their language, Magyar, is Finno-Ugric rather than Indo-European and therefore is virtually impossible for an outsider to come to terms with. Luckily the Hungarians are a friendly bunch and do their best to converse in English, or at least don't seem to get to upset when I point at items I wish to purchase instead of asking politely in the local tongue.
It's fair to say that the Hungarians had a pretty shit time of things in the 20th century. Things got off to a bad start when their empire collapsed after World War I and two-thirds of their lands were divvied up amongst the victorious Allied powers. They spent the inter-war years looking nervously over both shoulders as the two imperalistic monoliths either side of them - Russia and Germany - flexed their growing military muscle. When war broke out again, Budapest was bravely defended and did not fall to the Nazis until 1944. When it did, the consequences were depressingly similar to those in other major Central European cities. 437,000 Jews were deported between May and July of that year, never to return, and millions more Hungarians from all walks of life found themselves displaced.
By this time it was clear the Nazis were losing the war and it wasn't long before - hip hip hooray - along came the Soviets to sweep those nasty Germans out of the city. But the locals were soon to discover that life under the commies was no walk in the park either, as the Soviets brought with them all those unfortunate aspects of their modus operandi - repression, terror, hideous uniforms - that were to become bywords for communism throughout much of Europe. For forty years the Hungarian people lived in fear - fear of being different, of expressing opinion, of accumulating wealth, of displaying their cultural or religious beliefs too overtly. Thousands were incarcerated for no good reason other than they were suspected to be a threat to the state; many were tortured and killed. Show trials were common and men as young as 17 were executed, often on the scantest of evidence.
I know all this because this morning, I've come along to the Terror House. The old HQ of the Hungarian secret police - considered for a long time to be the most fearsome in Europe - that has since been converted into an historic site. It would be easy to be put off by its name - which puts me in mind of a crappy Gold Coast amusement park ride - but once inside, it is without doubt one of the most moving and informative museums I've ever visited. An eerie pall hangs over the building and its many rooms, augmented by the dim lighting, stark decoration and foreboding looped guitar music, that sounds almost like the Doom II theme tune if it hadn't been written for PC speakers. The harrowing tale of terror and oppression unwinds through the labrynthine corridors as we read about the oppressors and watch documentary footage of the oppressed. "They say you must forgive, but how can you forgive this?", asks an elderly man, weeping uncontrollably despite the camera's presence. "They were just boys, so young...", then his voice tails off and the footage fades to black.
Taking up an entire wall in the final room is is "The Victimisers", a kind of wall-of-shame displaying the names and mugshots of all the men and women known to have taken part in the torture and oppression of their fellow Hungarians on behalf of the state. Each wear those unrepentent, vaguely-disturbed expressions that immediately mark them as enemies of freedom, just like George W. Bush describes. The museum guard, a gruff looking old man in a dapper uniform, notices that I've taken great interest in the display and comes over to join me.
"See this man?", he says, drawing my attention to mugshot of a young man in military uniform, "Who is this?". He allows me a moment to consider, but not long enough to answer, then says triumphantly, "James Dean!" The man in question, with his thick crop of blond hair and smouldering eyes, is indeed a dead ringer for the iconic Hollywood heartthrob.
"And see here" - he points to another photo - "and who is this?" The man featured in this photo has dark hair combed tightly back over his scalp and innocent features that bear a startling resemblance to a young Leonardo Decaprio.
"Titanic!", says the guard, letting forth a satisfied chuckle. Then he wanders off again. Whatever gets you through your day, I suppose. Bemused, I join the girls in the gift shop, though not before discovering that Humphrey Bogart, John Belushi and Sally Field were also one-time members of the Hungarian State Police.
Europe loves its wacky conspiracy theories, but this one seems like a pretty open and shut case, I think to myself whilst consuming a "cheesy tomato you-are-a-turkey cheesy sandwich" at a neighbouring cafe. According to the display, the James Dean lookalike (one Laszlo Kiss) was born in 1931, the same year as Dean, and is still alive and in hiding today. This pretty much settles it for me. It's him. The only question that troubles me is, what was it that lured so many of Hollywood's best and brightest to communist Hungary to join the fight against the forces of enlightenment and intellect? Was it indeed the uniforms? It certainly wasn't the "cheesy tomato you-are-a-turkey cheesy sandwiches", this much I know.
"The best thing that ever happened to this city was getting invaded by the Turks", says a tongue-in-cheek backpacking brochure I've picked up. I assume it isn't referring to the sandwiches of the type I just ate. It had cheese, tomato, ham but no turkey in it. I suppose that makes me the turkey, for thinking it would contain turkey. Oh well, life goes on. "I wish no disrespect to any people who suffered this bloody time", it continues, " but it could've been worse. It could've been the bloody Brits that invaded and I can say with absolute certainty that they wouldn't have left behind them those wonderful baths..."
In light of this glowing appraisal of Budapest's bath scene, the girls and I are visiting one this afternoon to see what all the fuss is about. Certainly from the outside it appears grander and more exotic than anything the British could come up with, and the atrium is equally spacious and impressive. A board on the far wall outlines the various pools and services the baths provide - which is just about everything. Outdoor swimming pools, private spas, Turkish massages, relaxation therapy, manicures, pedicures, all those other things that you don't really need but pay for anyway. They even have "safe sex spas", although it's unclear whether this means the water is treated with some disinfecting agent or the pool boy has to watch you put the condom on before you get busy.
Unfortunately the general rule of thumb where public spas are concerned is that if two people want to have sex in one, they're generally going to. In part this observation comes from my experience in the hotel industry, and my worringly-regular barroom conversations with the night porter regarding the sordid liaisons he'd gatecrashed.
"So I'm just out on the deck cleaning up some rubbish, and I hear this rhythmic slapping noise coming from round the corner. So I walk over towards the spa pool and holy shit, there's this bloke taking his missus from behind in the pool! He doesn't even hear me so he just goes on slapping her on the arse. Hadn't they heard about the three-year-old girl in Brisbane who caught gonorrhoea in a hotel spa?"
I arrive at the public pool to discover, to my relief, that there's none of that going on today. On the other hand, the pool is well-stocked with young lovers sucking each other's faces off in desperate primeval mating dances. They're all keeping a safe distance apart from each other and twisting and twirling around in the pool like actors in Busby Berkeley film. Surely this is taking the European tolerance for shameless public displays of affection a bit too far. For the unattached bathers such as myself, it's a matter of picking our way through the fornicating masses whilst pretending not to see or notice them, like when your boss (or other social superior) farts in a confined space and you're expected not to pass comment, much less grimace or flinch. Instead I just swim a couple of laps in the lap pool then retire to a poolside chair to dry off, painfully aware that I'm the only bather out of thousands here today who has forgotten to bring a towel.
Back at the hostel, we're not feeling brave enough to try on any more Hungarian haute cuisine, so Georgina cooks us pasta instead. When we're done with dinner she takes a seat on the public computer in the lobby where she has an important online exam to sit, and I park up with a book on the couch behind her to provide moral support. About five minutes into her exam, The young female receptionist begins watching a film on her personal laptop with the volume turned to 11. I can't see what it is but judging by the sound affects and music, we can safely assume it's some sort of Hungarian version of the Lord of the Rings. It's filled with terse dialogue and sweeping orchestral arrangements that periodically make the walls shudder; still Georgina stoically works on. Every ten minutes or so, the soundtrack builds to a crescendo, indicating that another battle scene is imminent. Then come the unmistakable sound effects of horses galloping, men yelling, swords clanging and soldiers being brutally dismembered. I'd go over and ask the receptionist to turn it down but I'd have to be screaming into her ear before she'd ever hear me.
After half an hour or so, her movie watching is interrupted by a newly-arrived guest. She pauses it with a sigh and greets him with the barely-disguised annoyance of an employee who's just been forced to actually do some work while on the job. He is a strangle little man, German I think, with grey hair and safari clothes on. When he's finished checking in, he goes and stands right over Georgina's shoulder and watches her doing the exam, waiting for her to turn and look at him so that he can pretend he wasn't looking and go and irritate someone else. Eventually she does turn around, and that's exactly what he does. Now he comes over and stand behind me, watching me read and waiting for me to turn around and look at him so that he can pretend he wasn't looking and bugger off. I ignore him for a good few minutes, before finally running out of patience and turning around to look at him. He pretends he wasn't looking at me, and leaves the room. Meanwhile the Lord of the Hungarian Rings has started up again in a violent cacophany of explosions and tense violin music. I need a drink.
I take my book into our dorm room, lie down on my whisky crates and reach into my bag for the bottle of Hungarian dessert wine I purchased for 500 forints this afternoon. In the other corner of the room, Stefan sits up and looks like he's going to say something, but then he doesn't. I offer him a glass of dessert wine and he accepts.
"I don't blame you for finding England a bit miserable", he says. "The weather is so depressing. I go to university in Bath, and most of the year I go to class when it's dark and come home from class when it's dark".
"What do you study, then?", I ask.
"Mechanical engineering". A conversation stopper if ever I heard one.
"Cool. Want another glass of wine?"
"No thanks", he says with a grimace. "I'm used to drinking quality wines".
"Your loss buddy", I think to myself. I'll just drink the rest of it myself then. And I do.
Backpacking really does have its ups and downs.
I didn't intent to be eating a piece of chicken schnitzel at 8am. Really I didn't. I walked into the local bakery with the honest intention of purchasing maybe a croissant or a piece of fruit. It's just that when the four policemen at the front table all turned and eyed me suspiciously, I couldn't help but notice they were all eating schnitzel, so you see I really had no choice in the matter because it pays to try and fit in when visiting strange countries. Yeah, that's it.
Still, I could be eating worse things for breakfast. Just needs a blob of mayo on it I reckon, maybe some shredded lettuce and a tomato, a toasted bun, maybe a nice side of fries, oh and a decent block of that quasi-lasange stuff I had the other day... there, you can see what Hungarian cuisine will do to a person. I can scarcely remember what a vegetable looks like. Even in my darkest Dunedin days when mince on toast and $7 burger-fries-jug deals at the Cook were my main form of sustenance, I was never this in danger of contracting scurvy.
The unexplained national fixation with meat and carbs aside, I can't find much fault in Budapest and its people. It's a cheerful, bustling, compact city that exhibits none of the stereotypes that unfairly tarnish some Eastern European cities. There's very little sleaze, smut, or gangsters waiting around every corner to nick your wallet and your kidneys. Considering they've spend much of the last century getting shat on by all and sundry, the locals are a happy and pleasant lot. Most speak good English and seem genuinely pleased to have you in their city, no doubt aware of the shot in the arm to the economy that the tourists provide with their willingness to pay way over the odds for plates of goulash and bottles of dessert wine.
As we take one last stroll along the picturesque Danube, Caroline makes an interesting observation that I previously hadn't considered. "They've done pretty well from being invaded so often", she says. "The Turks invade, they leave behind the baths. The Austrians invade, they leave behind all this gorgeous architecture".
Good point, well made and well worth making. All they need now is for New Zealand to invade. Then they'd be blessed with Turkish baths, gorgeous architecture, Blue Powerade and a rugby team that implodes every four years.
I've arrived in the country with 24,600 Hungarian forint. By my calculations, that's enough to buy 61 pints of Budvar, 82 kebabs, 7 nights accomodation at the hostel, 49 bottles of Hungarian dessert wine, 14 map-of-Hungary t-shirts, 3 vacuum cleaners, 492 apples, 3 full body massages (2 with happy endings), or some combination of the above. I also have with me two university friends, Georgina and Caroline. They devoted a fair slice of their time in Dunedin to the difficult task of keeping me out of harm's way, so I'll be hoping they do the same on our travels.
Too bad they can't be watching over me 24 hours a day. Upon checking into the hostel, my first act is to jam my adapter thumb-first into the wall socket without checking to see if it was live, sending 250 volts of Hungary's finest through my body. My bed appears to have been hastily assembled from old whisky crates and the thinnest mattress they could find, but I haven't slept in a proper bed for six weeks now so I'm well beyond caring.
Meanwhile in the bathroom, I'm confronted by another of those horrendous "viewing platform" toilets that I first encountered in Utrecht, a few pages ago. I still don't understand how this feature could possibly be advantageous to the toilet-going process, unless you happen to be a 12-year-old boy who regularly contributes to ratemypoo.com. Our only other dorm mate is a quiet Swiss engineering student, who does not tell us his name and thus becomes Stefan by default.
The advantage of knowing nothing about a city before you visit it is that you're endlessly surprised by the scenes you encounter upon arrival. For a person who has read up on everything beforehand, each new site is usually greeted with a "oh yep" or "oh, it looks the same as it does in all the photos". Whereas arriving totally unprepared frequently causes one to involuntarily blurt out things like "holy shit! That's awesome", or "Wow! I had no idea the Eiffel Tower was in Paris! Bonus".
So on our first morning in Budapest I walk wide-eyed along the banks of the Danube, gazing in awe at the impressive buildings along the river. Most impressive is the Parliament building, but then there is also St Stephen's Basilica, Mattias Church and the massive Castle Quarter, a fortress sitting atop a hill on the far bank that dominates the landscape. Adoring the near side of the castle are are giant mugshots of a handsome young man and woman, who look like models from an OPSM advertisement but are actually presumably the two heads of state, in whichever guise in which they exist.
After strolling around the hilltop castle and taking in some of Hungary's rich and varied history at the museum, our attention inevitably turns to the subject of lunch. One of the immutable facts of travel in Europe is that wherever large numbers of tourists congregate, so too do the tacky, overpriced cafes with their "menus touristique" that will try to sell you authentic ham and cheese sandwiches for twenty times the price you'd pay at your local dairy. We're a bit too clever for that, though; we've found our way, after much u-turning and ummming-and-ahhhing, to a local Hungarian canteen tucked away on the second floor of some back alley building, well beyond the reaches of even the most adventurous package tourist.
The other diners to a man turn and look at us suspiciously as we walk in. It's one of those places where the music would've abruptly stopped too, had there been any music playing to start with. The server at the canteen is one of those hulking Soviet brutes who looks like he used to compete in those ridiculous World's Strongest Man competitions they sometimes show on ESPN, in which lumberjacks and a couple of roided up Americans called Chuck pick up houses and throw cars around for fun.
"Speak English?", I ask him, a touch optimistically I suspect.
"Uh?" comes the reply. So I point at something that vaguely resembles lasange and he slams it onto my plate with a fish slice. Caroline ends up with something you might loosely term schnitzel, while Georgina gets a bowl of what looks like lurid pink macaroni and cheese, but upon tasting, really isn't.
Even though communism was shown the door in Hungary 20 years ago, its influence can be found just about everywhere you look. Even my "lasange" evokes a Soviet-era simplicity and functionality, with its jaundiced brown hue and perfect cube shape not dissimilar to the many cheap apartment blocks that litter the city. A fly lands on it - always a guarantor that you're eating at a fine establishment, irrespective of the country - and is warded off by my tentatively probing fork. My first few bites indicate little about the composition of the dish, except that it isn't lasange. By the time I've picked apart the cube I've positively identified bits of potato, onion and cauliflower, but am unable to ascertain whether or not there was any meat involved. The large dollop of white stuff on top appears to be a close relative of sour cream, adding a curiously Mexican angle to the dish that you wouldn't necessarily expect in a working man's canteen in Budapest.
Onto the equally-perplexing question of the dessert I've ordered: little pastry parcels with a brown mystery filling. It could be chocolate, it could be hazelnut paste, it could be that horrid mince stuff that people put in their pies at Christmas for some reason; or it could be anything else. It turns out to be none of the above. I think I can detect traces of blueberry in there somewhere, but it's hard to tell. I stow one of the little parcels away in my bag in case the taste becomes easier to identify later after a few beers.
Things are no less mystifying at dinnertime. Caroline has led us to a little-known local eatery that her guidebook has recommended for the more economically-challenged diners. From the outside it doesn't look quite as exotic as our canteen, but just about. So you can imagine our surprise and relief when we enter the restaurant only to be overwhelmed by New Zealand, Australian, British and American accents. Everything on the menu is accompanied by a picture too, so even if you don't know what you're eating, eat least you have an idea of what it's gonna look like.
Wary from my lunchtime experience, I take the soft option of the schnitzel. Caroline's roast turkey arrives shredded rather than whole, and with a side "salad" of assorted pickled vegetables. I am especially proud of Georgina though, who has opted for a dish purporting to be "fried cheese with boiled rice"; and true to their word, the restaurant produces a plate of rice decorated by three rectangular chunks of deep-fried cheddar with a healthy side serving of tartare sauce. It's a pretty steep culinary learning curve in this corner of Europe, but when you're paying less than four pounds per head it pays not to get your hopes up too high I suppose.
I now know a little bit about Hungary. Believe it or not, it was occupied by the Celts over 2500 years ago. It is bordered by seven other countries - Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia - which is seven more than New Zealand is bordered by. The inventor of the ball point pen, one Laszlo Biro, was a Hungarian. Their language, Magyar, is Finno-Ugric rather than Indo-European and therefore is virtually impossible for an outsider to come to terms with. Luckily the Hungarians are a friendly bunch and do their best to converse in English, or at least don't seem to get to upset when I point at items I wish to purchase instead of asking politely in the local tongue.
It's fair to say that the Hungarians had a pretty shit time of things in the 20th century. Things got off to a bad start when their empire collapsed after World War I and two-thirds of their lands were divvied up amongst the victorious Allied powers. They spent the inter-war years looking nervously over both shoulders as the two imperalistic monoliths either side of them - Russia and Germany - flexed their growing military muscle. When war broke out again, Budapest was bravely defended and did not fall to the Nazis until 1944. When it did, the consequences were depressingly similar to those in other major Central European cities. 437,000 Jews were deported between May and July of that year, never to return, and millions more Hungarians from all walks of life found themselves displaced.
By this time it was clear the Nazis were losing the war and it wasn't long before - hip hip hooray - along came the Soviets to sweep those nasty Germans out of the city. But the locals were soon to discover that life under the commies was no walk in the park either, as the Soviets brought with them all those unfortunate aspects of their modus operandi - repression, terror, hideous uniforms - that were to become bywords for communism throughout much of Europe. For forty years the Hungarian people lived in fear - fear of being different, of expressing opinion, of accumulating wealth, of displaying their cultural or religious beliefs too overtly. Thousands were incarcerated for no good reason other than they were suspected to be a threat to the state; many were tortured and killed. Show trials were common and men as young as 17 were executed, often on the scantest of evidence.
I know all this because this morning, I've come along to the Terror House. The old HQ of the Hungarian secret police - considered for a long time to be the most fearsome in Europe - that has since been converted into an historic site. It would be easy to be put off by its name - which puts me in mind of a crappy Gold Coast amusement park ride - but once inside, it is without doubt one of the most moving and informative museums I've ever visited. An eerie pall hangs over the building and its many rooms, augmented by the dim lighting, stark decoration and foreboding looped guitar music, that sounds almost like the Doom II theme tune if it hadn't been written for PC speakers. The harrowing tale of terror and oppression unwinds through the labrynthine corridors as we read about the oppressors and watch documentary footage of the oppressed. "They say you must forgive, but how can you forgive this?", asks an elderly man, weeping uncontrollably despite the camera's presence. "They were just boys, so young...", then his voice tails off and the footage fades to black.
Taking up an entire wall in the final room is is "The Victimisers", a kind of wall-of-shame displaying the names and mugshots of all the men and women known to have taken part in the torture and oppression of their fellow Hungarians on behalf of the state. Each wear those unrepentent, vaguely-disturbed expressions that immediately mark them as enemies of freedom, just like George W. Bush describes. The museum guard, a gruff looking old man in a dapper uniform, notices that I've taken great interest in the display and comes over to join me.
"See this man?", he says, drawing my attention to mugshot of a young man in military uniform, "Who is this?". He allows me a moment to consider, but not long enough to answer, then says triumphantly, "James Dean!" The man in question, with his thick crop of blond hair and smouldering eyes, is indeed a dead ringer for the iconic Hollywood heartthrob.
"And see here" - he points to another photo - "and who is this?" The man featured in this photo has dark hair combed tightly back over his scalp and innocent features that bear a startling resemblance to a young Leonardo Decaprio.
"Titanic!", says the guard, letting forth a satisfied chuckle. Then he wanders off again. Whatever gets you through your day, I suppose. Bemused, I join the girls in the gift shop, though not before discovering that Humphrey Bogart, John Belushi and Sally Field were also one-time members of the Hungarian State Police.
Europe loves its wacky conspiracy theories, but this one seems like a pretty open and shut case, I think to myself whilst consuming a "cheesy tomato you-are-a-turkey cheesy sandwich" at a neighbouring cafe. According to the display, the James Dean lookalike (one Laszlo Kiss) was born in 1931, the same year as Dean, and is still alive and in hiding today. This pretty much settles it for me. It's him. The only question that troubles me is, what was it that lured so many of Hollywood's best and brightest to communist Hungary to join the fight against the forces of enlightenment and intellect? Was it indeed the uniforms? It certainly wasn't the "cheesy tomato you-are-a-turkey cheesy sandwiches", this much I know.
"The best thing that ever happened to this city was getting invaded by the Turks", says a tongue-in-cheek backpacking brochure I've picked up. I assume it isn't referring to the sandwiches of the type I just ate. It had cheese, tomato, ham but no turkey in it. I suppose that makes me the turkey, for thinking it would contain turkey. Oh well, life goes on. "I wish no disrespect to any people who suffered this bloody time", it continues, " but it could've been worse. It could've been the bloody Brits that invaded and I can say with absolute certainty that they wouldn't have left behind them those wonderful baths..."
In light of this glowing appraisal of Budapest's bath scene, the girls and I are visiting one this afternoon to see what all the fuss is about. Certainly from the outside it appears grander and more exotic than anything the British could come up with, and the atrium is equally spacious and impressive. A board on the far wall outlines the various pools and services the baths provide - which is just about everything. Outdoor swimming pools, private spas, Turkish massages, relaxation therapy, manicures, pedicures, all those other things that you don't really need but pay for anyway. They even have "safe sex spas", although it's unclear whether this means the water is treated with some disinfecting agent or the pool boy has to watch you put the condom on before you get busy.
Unfortunately the general rule of thumb where public spas are concerned is that if two people want to have sex in one, they're generally going to. In part this observation comes from my experience in the hotel industry, and my worringly-regular barroom conversations with the night porter regarding the sordid liaisons he'd gatecrashed.
"So I'm just out on the deck cleaning up some rubbish, and I hear this rhythmic slapping noise coming from round the corner. So I walk over towards the spa pool and holy shit, there's this bloke taking his missus from behind in the pool! He doesn't even hear me so he just goes on slapping her on the arse. Hadn't they heard about the three-year-old girl in Brisbane who caught gonorrhoea in a hotel spa?"
I arrive at the public pool to discover, to my relief, that there's none of that going on today. On the other hand, the pool is well-stocked with young lovers sucking each other's faces off in desperate primeval mating dances. They're all keeping a safe distance apart from each other and twisting and twirling around in the pool like actors in Busby Berkeley film. Surely this is taking the European tolerance for shameless public displays of affection a bit too far. For the unattached bathers such as myself, it's a matter of picking our way through the fornicating masses whilst pretending not to see or notice them, like when your boss (or other social superior) farts in a confined space and you're expected not to pass comment, much less grimace or flinch. Instead I just swim a couple of laps in the lap pool then retire to a poolside chair to dry off, painfully aware that I'm the only bather out of thousands here today who has forgotten to bring a towel.
Back at the hostel, we're not feeling brave enough to try on any more Hungarian haute cuisine, so Georgina cooks us pasta instead. When we're done with dinner she takes a seat on the public computer in the lobby where she has an important online exam to sit, and I park up with a book on the couch behind her to provide moral support. About five minutes into her exam, The young female receptionist begins watching a film on her personal laptop with the volume turned to 11. I can't see what it is but judging by the sound affects and music, we can safely assume it's some sort of Hungarian version of the Lord of the Rings. It's filled with terse dialogue and sweeping orchestral arrangements that periodically make the walls shudder; still Georgina stoically works on. Every ten minutes or so, the soundtrack builds to a crescendo, indicating that another battle scene is imminent. Then come the unmistakable sound effects of horses galloping, men yelling, swords clanging and soldiers being brutally dismembered. I'd go over and ask the receptionist to turn it down but I'd have to be screaming into her ear before she'd ever hear me.
After half an hour or so, her movie watching is interrupted by a newly-arrived guest. She pauses it with a sigh and greets him with the barely-disguised annoyance of an employee who's just been forced to actually do some work while on the job. He is a strangle little man, German I think, with grey hair and safari clothes on. When he's finished checking in, he goes and stands right over Georgina's shoulder and watches her doing the exam, waiting for her to turn and look at him so that he can pretend he wasn't looking and go and irritate someone else. Eventually she does turn around, and that's exactly what he does. Now he comes over and stand behind me, watching me read and waiting for me to turn around and look at him so that he can pretend he wasn't looking and bugger off. I ignore him for a good few minutes, before finally running out of patience and turning around to look at him. He pretends he wasn't looking at me, and leaves the room. Meanwhile the Lord of the Hungarian Rings has started up again in a violent cacophany of explosions and tense violin music. I need a drink.
I take my book into our dorm room, lie down on my whisky crates and reach into my bag for the bottle of Hungarian dessert wine I purchased for 500 forints this afternoon. In the other corner of the room, Stefan sits up and looks like he's going to say something, but then he doesn't. I offer him a glass of dessert wine and he accepts.
"I don't blame you for finding England a bit miserable", he says. "The weather is so depressing. I go to university in Bath, and most of the year I go to class when it's dark and come home from class when it's dark".
"What do you study, then?", I ask.
"Mechanical engineering". A conversation stopper if ever I heard one.
"Cool. Want another glass of wine?"
"No thanks", he says with a grimace. "I'm used to drinking quality wines".
"Your loss buddy", I think to myself. I'll just drink the rest of it myself then. And I do.
Backpacking really does have its ups and downs.
I didn't intent to be eating a piece of chicken schnitzel at 8am. Really I didn't. I walked into the local bakery with the honest intention of purchasing maybe a croissant or a piece of fruit. It's just that when the four policemen at the front table all turned and eyed me suspiciously, I couldn't help but notice they were all eating schnitzel, so you see I really had no choice in the matter because it pays to try and fit in when visiting strange countries. Yeah, that's it.
Still, I could be eating worse things for breakfast. Just needs a blob of mayo on it I reckon, maybe some shredded lettuce and a tomato, a toasted bun, maybe a nice side of fries, oh and a decent block of that quasi-lasange stuff I had the other day... there, you can see what Hungarian cuisine will do to a person. I can scarcely remember what a vegetable looks like. Even in my darkest Dunedin days when mince on toast and $7 burger-fries-jug deals at the Cook were my main form of sustenance, I was never this in danger of contracting scurvy.
The unexplained national fixation with meat and carbs aside, I can't find much fault in Budapest and its people. It's a cheerful, bustling, compact city that exhibits none of the stereotypes that unfairly tarnish some Eastern European cities. There's very little sleaze, smut, or gangsters waiting around every corner to nick your wallet and your kidneys. Considering they've spend much of the last century getting shat on by all and sundry, the locals are a happy and pleasant lot. Most speak good English and seem genuinely pleased to have you in their city, no doubt aware of the shot in the arm to the economy that the tourists provide with their willingness to pay way over the odds for plates of goulash and bottles of dessert wine.
As we take one last stroll along the picturesque Danube, Caroline makes an interesting observation that I previously hadn't considered. "They've done pretty well from being invaded so often", she says. "The Turks invade, they leave behind the baths. The Austrians invade, they leave behind all this gorgeous architecture".
Good point, well made and well worth making. All they need now is for New Zealand to invade. Then they'd be blessed with Turkish baths, gorgeous architecture, Blue Powerade and a rugby team that implodes every four years.
Rome
Like New York, Rome is another of those cities that you feel like you know intimately before you've even been there. You've seen and heard about the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps so many times that it's virtually been transplanted into your own memory. Although its ancient history and way of life cannot be experienced, it can certainly be imagined. But while my mental image of New York came from movies and cop shops, what I imagine of Rome comes from drawings and boring high school text books.
I was a fairly capable Latin student – I always had a knack of excelling at the subjects that were of no vocational value – and recall well my early teenage years poring over page upon page of declensions and conjugations, and wondering why. I fear that I will never shake off the memories of my first Latin teacher, a severe, hulking brute of a woman who probably only taught Latin because she'd just been kicked off a nearby construction site. I dare not name her, lest she track me down, pin me to my chair and force me to recite third conjugation verbs in the pluperfect tense until I'm blue in the face.
In the early days of learning any language, one's vocabulary is naturally going to be limited, meaning there was a certain farcically improbable nature to our first sentence translations. “The farmers are attacking the poets” was a good early one. “The sailor is walking to the Roman house”, or “why is the girl throwing the table?”, and so on. And so those of my first impressions of Rome: towering ancient structures and broad forums, within which poets and farmers and sailors attacked each other and girls and boys threw inanimate objects about the place.
It's certainly a far cry from the Rome that greets you when you step out of the train station. Instead it's a massive bus depot on one side and a busy street lined with fast food joints and beggars on the other side. We could be anywhere in Europe, really. The only clue that it's Rome comes from the massive hulking ruin down the street that rises, quite unexpectedly, in an otherwise empty lot surrounded by cheap hotels and tenements.
The mingling odours of urine and decomposing garbage are almost enough to have the three of us retching as we haul our bags down to a nearby hostel and gratefully step inside into the relatively unspoilt air. Not that conditions inside the hostel are much more pleasant than they are on the street. An initial inspection of the premises finds it to be cramped, dirty and - like any hostel with its beans - depressingly full of Australians. Whether its their newfound mineral wealth or just a desire to distance themselves as much as possible from Germaine Greer, young Australians - all named Dazza, Shazza, or Josh - have scattered themselves around the globe in large quantities, all in search of cheap beer and cheaper women. Indeed, just as the noble salmon returns to its home territory to breed, Aussies do the opposite when they reach mating age, venturing forth into the fertile spawning grounds of Europe, Asia and the Americas in what is known as the Great Chlamydia Migration.
There's a Dazza standing over the sink in the kitchen when I enter, in what turns out to be a futile search for a bottle opener. I can't even get in the door because it's blocked by a Shazza, who is kneeling down and staring into the fridge. "Hello", I say, in a tone that registers my acknowledgement of their presence without betraying any feelings of cheer or goodwilld.
"Shazza, can you get me smokes from on top the microwave?", asks Dazza.
The bedroom is alright, except that I've been given one of those filmsy child foldaway beds with the wafer-thin mattresses that I used to enjoy lumping upon brattish youngsters during my portering days. Except even then I was usually nice enough to give them a pillow, a luxury that has not been afforded to me on this occasion. I'd really like one, to be honest. A quick look through my Italian phrasebook and I'm off to reception again, with my most polished Italian accent in tow.
"Scusa, uno cuscino, per favore".
"I'm sorry?"
"Uno cuscino..."
"Umm..."
"Can I have a pillow, please?"
"Ahhh! A pillow!", says the owner, suddenly animated. He disappears into the back room, rummages around in an unconvincing attempt to make it look like he's actually got spare pillows lying around, and re-appears several hours later with three beanbags stuffed into a pillowslip.
"But please, you return to tomorrow!", he says sternly. Oh don't worry buddy. I won't keep it a moment longer than I need to.
It'd be easy not to like any town if you spent too much time festering in a hostel room. By early evening we're back on the street and embarking on a bus ride to another of those “free buffet” restaurant/bar setups that Michael sniffed out in his travel guide. I have no idea how places such as this stay in business, but I'm determined to do my darnest to push them one step closer towards bankrupcy while I still have the chance. Presumably they rely either on that very British notion that to take more than your fair share is somehow shameful or rude (my American genes tell me that this idea is rubbish), or the Italian notion that small meal portions are the key to maintaining one's Mediterannean moviestar looks. Either way, I've just finished reading an article that blames the obesity epidemic on the advent of air-conditioning – since we tend to be neither too hot nor too cold for much of the time these days, our metabolism has less work to do – and since it's a hot day, I'll be able to eat as much as I like and sweat my way back to equilibrium. Easy.
We step off the bus at a handsome old street corner opposite the Tiber, another of Europe's famous waterways that was probably once a river but is now a mucky storm drain with concrete retaining walls on both sides. The bar across we're looking for is easy to spot, thanks to the telltale signs of hungry-looking people eating improbably-high mounds of food off plastic plates. Before eating we must enact the usual charade at the bar of ordering a beer for each person – buying a drink before you set about demolishing the buffet appears to be the only courtesy these establishments insist upon – and finding a seat near the food. And this is food not to be sneezed at either: a sumptuous spread of pasta dishes, salads, breads, dips, roast chicken, pork knuckles and more. There are even desserts for any diner who can get that far without exploding. “Oh Max, we've hit the motherload”, proclaims Ellen, but I can't even grunt in agreement because my mouth is too full of basil pesto penne and bulghur wheat salad. The meal is glorious and excessive, and after my fourth and final helping I cannot stand up without assistance – the mark of a truly world class buffet.
Knowing the possibility of finding any room for beer in our already distended stomachs, we instead take a table at a sheesha bar next to the Tiber. I've only smoked it once before and don't know much about it except that it's legal (just) and made from some sort of tobacco extract. That young mother over there at the next table is blowing it into her three-year-old daughter's face while teaching her how to dance to the Justin Timberlake tune on the sound system, so it can't be all that bad for you. “Just breathe it in real deep”, commands Ellen, so I do. Who am I to argue? Whether real or imagined, it does have some near-immediate relaxing effect.
All of a sudden Rome doesn't seem so bad. It's a mild evening beside the river and we're well-fed and content. The walkway is lit up with carnival lights and permeated with the sound of drunken chatter. The best part of the evening is that the beer, food and sheesha cost us a combined total of 25 Euro for the three of us. Who said Rome was expensive?
***
It's too late to do anything about it now, but we have picked just about the worst weekend to be in Rome. It's a holiday weekend – which means nothing to me since Italians seem to regard life in general as a holiday anyway – so all the locals are out of town, and all the tourists are in. The only Romans to have stuck around are the ones who know how to swindle money out of the naïve, clueless tourists that predominate the city. Just like the bastard who charged me five bucks for a gelato this morning.
Michael and I are in a queue for the Vatican City that seems like a thousand miles long, but is actually only 100 kilometres or so. Owing to the Italian holiday, it's been closed to the public for the last two days and will be closed again tomorrow, so every man, woman, dog, Catholic, Muslim, Jew and Australian is in this line. I hear this place is pretty holy and all that, and has a pretty painting on the ceiling, but somehow that doesn't seem worth standing out in the blistering heat for half the day just to get in the bloody place. Just quietly, the thing that excites me most is being able to tell people that I wandered over to visit another country this afternoon, all casual-like, as if I do it all the time.
A stout young English lady in front of us turns around, sees Michael's and my anxious faces and calms us with a few reassuring words. “Oh, don't worry, you'll be in soon”, she says cheerily. “I was in this very spot in the line last summer and it only took me forty-five minutes to get in from here”.
“That's good to know”, Michael replies, believing her words about as much as I do. Not at all.
“Whereabouts are you from?”
“New Zealand”.
“Oh! So you've come all the way around the world to see this, you may as well stick it out in the line!”.
I want to tell her that actually we've come all the way around the world to see more than just this bloody place, but I don't want to seem like a pedant.
“Anyways”, she continues, filling a conversation silence as I suspect she often does, “like I said, we'll be in an hour, bit over an hour at the most”.
Two-and-a-half hours later, we have rounded the final bend in the queue and can see the entrance for the first time. I don't even care about the Vatican anymore. I can't even remember what the Vatican is. I'm more concerned with working out whether the teenagers fondling each other in the line just ahead of us are boyfriend or girlfriend, or brother and sister. If the latter then they are rather affectionate than what we're used to back home; if the former then they may want to get their family trees checked before they advance the relationship any further.
The Vatican is impressive enough I suppose, but the interior is so clogged with sightseers pouring through its endless twisting corridors like blood through a fat man's arteries that much of its holiness and mystique are swept away with them. We are taken along in the tourist tide, occasionally holding our heads above the crowds long enough to get a good look at a tapestry, or an ancient map of the Mediterranean, or a window view out onto beautifully manicured lawns. The Sistine Chapel itself, accessed after half an hour of wandering through corridors, is the epicentre of the tourist chaos. People are yelling in myriad languages, which causes their tour guides to try and yell over the top of them, which results in the guards yelling at everyone to shut up. After a brief moment of serenity, the yelling begins again. Still, the walls do present an awe-inspiring sight. We've all been specifically asked not to take photos, so I just take five or so out of respect. Then before we know it, we're being flushed out the other end of the chapel, through the bowels of the building past souvenir stalls that are entirely inappropriate given the holiness of the site (besides which who comes to the Vatican to spend US$49 on “The Official Vatican Tour DVD”?), then out onto the street and down past the ever-lengthening queue of jaded tourists, many of whom are no doubt under the misapprehension that they'll get in before Christmas.
For an atheist and occasional pagan lout such as myself, however, the most holy site in all of Rome is the colosseum. Built almost 2000 years ago, it is almost as old as Eden Park and although it has fallen into a state of disrepair every bit as a acute as our very own home of rugby, just the fact that it stands defiant amidst the filth and chaos of modern day Rome is enough to warrant its iconic status. At its heyday, it held 45,000 fans on four levels of seating. Today there is a crowd approaching 45,000 gathering in the concourses and strolling about inside, though the lions, elephants and slaves being mercilessly being gouged by said exotic animals are long gone.
As we stroll around the main internal concourse imagining what a fantastically difficult task it must've been to build a structure of such immense height and mass two millennia ago, I can't help but feel we in New Zealand can take a lesson from the Emperor Vespasian, who authorised its construction in 70AD. I'm fairly certain – or at least I'd like to think – that the idea to build it came to old Vessy in a dream one night, whereupon he woke and said something dramatic like “and so shall it come to pass”. There'd have been no soil erosion tests, no planning consents, no environment court hearings, no building consent applications, no dickhead neighbours complaining about it blocking the sun, no furore in the papers, no crisis meetings at the council. He wanted a bloody colosseum, so got a bloody colosseum. And in this day and age when you need consent from the council just to put a sandpit in your own backyard, we should look to young go-getters like Vespasian, and do as the Romans do. Or did.
At evening time, we return to the scene of last night's buffet-related crime and fill our boots once again. Then we amble homewards through the near deserted city streets, wondering what all the tourists are doing and why we weren't invited. Are they gorging themselves at buffet dinners that you actually have to pay for? Or perhaps they're all in their hotel rooms eating room service and watching CNN. The eerie quiet of the streets is only punctuated by the occasional ambulance siren, and you'll be pleased to know that they sound like party buses in Rome too. We're just sitting waiting for the bus home when a party bus comes flying through the intersection next to us. It has to swerve and brake to avoid another party bus, also travelling at full steam, heading down the same road in the opposite direction. You know when you see two ambulances pass each other that someone somewhere has fucked up. Put it down to that wonderfully carefree Italian attitude to life and death, I suppose.
Back at the hostel, Shazza, Dazza and a bunch of Spaniard backpackers are out on the deck drinking cheap Italian beer and flirting with each other. To me the notion of sitting around drinking at the hostel seems kind of perverse when you have Rome's wild and diverse nightlife at your doorstep, then I remember that the Australians have been carried here by primitive forces far greater than I could comprehend. As I make my way to bed I silently wish them best of luck with their ancient mating rituals, then lie down on my three beanbags and drift off to a sleep occasionally disturbed by the joyful blaring of a passing party bus.
***
There's still no sign of the locals the next day as we haul our bags to the station and wait for the train back to Pisa. I can't say I have been overly impressed by Rome and the lack of local flavour has much to do with that. Ultimately, you can have all the history and mystique and remarkable buildings in the world (and Rome pretty much does), but if there's no locals around to make it real, it just seems like a great big Disneyland. I have seen no evidence of the pickpockets I was so thoroughly warned against; only marauding packs of tourists, talking loudly and brushing aside everything in their way. Rome's famous coffee-shop culture, with young Romans sipping cappucinos and watching the street scene while looking glamorous and important, seems almost invisible. This weekend, Rome seems like a glimpse into the future where the locals have been wiped out and tourists rome the streets at their leisure; the only survivors being the opportunistic vendors who thrive on the tourists' profligacy.
What saves Rome from being Disneyland is that all the great buildings and structures are actually real. They provide our only link to a distant past that the 21st century man can only dream of seeing for himself. It is possible to stand in the colosseum, block out all the noise and imagine for a moment the scenes of pandemonium that were once commonplace within, or glance up at the remains of an aqueduct and marvel at what an improbably brilliant feat of engineering it took to make water run all the way through it. Without these structures, Rome would just be another ancient European city with lots of pretty buildings. Their presence alone makes Rome a city worth visiting. And I don't know if they ate gelatos in ancient Rome, but they're pretty bloody good too.
I was a fairly capable Latin student – I always had a knack of excelling at the subjects that were of no vocational value – and recall well my early teenage years poring over page upon page of declensions and conjugations, and wondering why. I fear that I will never shake off the memories of my first Latin teacher, a severe, hulking brute of a woman who probably only taught Latin because she'd just been kicked off a nearby construction site. I dare not name her, lest she track me down, pin me to my chair and force me to recite third conjugation verbs in the pluperfect tense until I'm blue in the face.
In the early days of learning any language, one's vocabulary is naturally going to be limited, meaning there was a certain farcically improbable nature to our first sentence translations. “The farmers are attacking the poets” was a good early one. “The sailor is walking to the Roman house”, or “why is the girl throwing the table?”, and so on. And so those of my first impressions of Rome: towering ancient structures and broad forums, within which poets and farmers and sailors attacked each other and girls and boys threw inanimate objects about the place.
It's certainly a far cry from the Rome that greets you when you step out of the train station. Instead it's a massive bus depot on one side and a busy street lined with fast food joints and beggars on the other side. We could be anywhere in Europe, really. The only clue that it's Rome comes from the massive hulking ruin down the street that rises, quite unexpectedly, in an otherwise empty lot surrounded by cheap hotels and tenements.
The mingling odours of urine and decomposing garbage are almost enough to have the three of us retching as we haul our bags down to a nearby hostel and gratefully step inside into the relatively unspoilt air. Not that conditions inside the hostel are much more pleasant than they are on the street. An initial inspection of the premises finds it to be cramped, dirty and - like any hostel with its beans - depressingly full of Australians. Whether its their newfound mineral wealth or just a desire to distance themselves as much as possible from Germaine Greer, young Australians - all named Dazza, Shazza, or Josh - have scattered themselves around the globe in large quantities, all in search of cheap beer and cheaper women. Indeed, just as the noble salmon returns to its home territory to breed, Aussies do the opposite when they reach mating age, venturing forth into the fertile spawning grounds of Europe, Asia and the Americas in what is known as the Great Chlamydia Migration.
There's a Dazza standing over the sink in the kitchen when I enter, in what turns out to be a futile search for a bottle opener. I can't even get in the door because it's blocked by a Shazza, who is kneeling down and staring into the fridge. "Hello", I say, in a tone that registers my acknowledgement of their presence without betraying any feelings of cheer or goodwilld.
"Shazza, can you get me smokes from on top the microwave?", asks Dazza.
The bedroom is alright, except that I've been given one of those filmsy child foldaway beds with the wafer-thin mattresses that I used to enjoy lumping upon brattish youngsters during my portering days. Except even then I was usually nice enough to give them a pillow, a luxury that has not been afforded to me on this occasion. I'd really like one, to be honest. A quick look through my Italian phrasebook and I'm off to reception again, with my most polished Italian accent in tow.
"Scusa, uno cuscino, per favore".
"I'm sorry?"
"Uno cuscino..."
"Umm..."
"Can I have a pillow, please?"
"Ahhh! A pillow!", says the owner, suddenly animated. He disappears into the back room, rummages around in an unconvincing attempt to make it look like he's actually got spare pillows lying around, and re-appears several hours later with three beanbags stuffed into a pillowslip.
"But please, you return to tomorrow!", he says sternly. Oh don't worry buddy. I won't keep it a moment longer than I need to.
It'd be easy not to like any town if you spent too much time festering in a hostel room. By early evening we're back on the street and embarking on a bus ride to another of those “free buffet” restaurant/bar setups that Michael sniffed out in his travel guide. I have no idea how places such as this stay in business, but I'm determined to do my darnest to push them one step closer towards bankrupcy while I still have the chance. Presumably they rely either on that very British notion that to take more than your fair share is somehow shameful or rude (my American genes tell me that this idea is rubbish), or the Italian notion that small meal portions are the key to maintaining one's Mediterannean moviestar looks. Either way, I've just finished reading an article that blames the obesity epidemic on the advent of air-conditioning – since we tend to be neither too hot nor too cold for much of the time these days, our metabolism has less work to do – and since it's a hot day, I'll be able to eat as much as I like and sweat my way back to equilibrium. Easy.
We step off the bus at a handsome old street corner opposite the Tiber, another of Europe's famous waterways that was probably once a river but is now a mucky storm drain with concrete retaining walls on both sides. The bar across we're looking for is easy to spot, thanks to the telltale signs of hungry-looking people eating improbably-high mounds of food off plastic plates. Before eating we must enact the usual charade at the bar of ordering a beer for each person – buying a drink before you set about demolishing the buffet appears to be the only courtesy these establishments insist upon – and finding a seat near the food. And this is food not to be sneezed at either: a sumptuous spread of pasta dishes, salads, breads, dips, roast chicken, pork knuckles and more. There are even desserts for any diner who can get that far without exploding. “Oh Max, we've hit the motherload”, proclaims Ellen, but I can't even grunt in agreement because my mouth is too full of basil pesto penne and bulghur wheat salad. The meal is glorious and excessive, and after my fourth and final helping I cannot stand up without assistance – the mark of a truly world class buffet.
Knowing the possibility of finding any room for beer in our already distended stomachs, we instead take a table at a sheesha bar next to the Tiber. I've only smoked it once before and don't know much about it except that it's legal (just) and made from some sort of tobacco extract. That young mother over there at the next table is blowing it into her three-year-old daughter's face while teaching her how to dance to the Justin Timberlake tune on the sound system, so it can't be all that bad for you. “Just breathe it in real deep”, commands Ellen, so I do. Who am I to argue? Whether real or imagined, it does have some near-immediate relaxing effect.
All of a sudden Rome doesn't seem so bad. It's a mild evening beside the river and we're well-fed and content. The walkway is lit up with carnival lights and permeated with the sound of drunken chatter. The best part of the evening is that the beer, food and sheesha cost us a combined total of 25 Euro for the three of us. Who said Rome was expensive?
***
It's too late to do anything about it now, but we have picked just about the worst weekend to be in Rome. It's a holiday weekend – which means nothing to me since Italians seem to regard life in general as a holiday anyway – so all the locals are out of town, and all the tourists are in. The only Romans to have stuck around are the ones who know how to swindle money out of the naïve, clueless tourists that predominate the city. Just like the bastard who charged me five bucks for a gelato this morning.
Michael and I are in a queue for the Vatican City that seems like a thousand miles long, but is actually only 100 kilometres or so. Owing to the Italian holiday, it's been closed to the public for the last two days and will be closed again tomorrow, so every man, woman, dog, Catholic, Muslim, Jew and Australian is in this line. I hear this place is pretty holy and all that, and has a pretty painting on the ceiling, but somehow that doesn't seem worth standing out in the blistering heat for half the day just to get in the bloody place. Just quietly, the thing that excites me most is being able to tell people that I wandered over to visit another country this afternoon, all casual-like, as if I do it all the time.
A stout young English lady in front of us turns around, sees Michael's and my anxious faces and calms us with a few reassuring words. “Oh, don't worry, you'll be in soon”, she says cheerily. “I was in this very spot in the line last summer and it only took me forty-five minutes to get in from here”.
“That's good to know”, Michael replies, believing her words about as much as I do. Not at all.
“Whereabouts are you from?”
“New Zealand”.
“Oh! So you've come all the way around the world to see this, you may as well stick it out in the line!”.
I want to tell her that actually we've come all the way around the world to see more than just this bloody place, but I don't want to seem like a pedant.
“Anyways”, she continues, filling a conversation silence as I suspect she often does, “like I said, we'll be in an hour, bit over an hour at the most”.
Two-and-a-half hours later, we have rounded the final bend in the queue and can see the entrance for the first time. I don't even care about the Vatican anymore. I can't even remember what the Vatican is. I'm more concerned with working out whether the teenagers fondling each other in the line just ahead of us are boyfriend or girlfriend, or brother and sister. If the latter then they are rather affectionate than what we're used to back home; if the former then they may want to get their family trees checked before they advance the relationship any further.
The Vatican is impressive enough I suppose, but the interior is so clogged with sightseers pouring through its endless twisting corridors like blood through a fat man's arteries that much of its holiness and mystique are swept away with them. We are taken along in the tourist tide, occasionally holding our heads above the crowds long enough to get a good look at a tapestry, or an ancient map of the Mediterranean, or a window view out onto beautifully manicured lawns. The Sistine Chapel itself, accessed after half an hour of wandering through corridors, is the epicentre of the tourist chaos. People are yelling in myriad languages, which causes their tour guides to try and yell over the top of them, which results in the guards yelling at everyone to shut up. After a brief moment of serenity, the yelling begins again. Still, the walls do present an awe-inspiring sight. We've all been specifically asked not to take photos, so I just take five or so out of respect. Then before we know it, we're being flushed out the other end of the chapel, through the bowels of the building past souvenir stalls that are entirely inappropriate given the holiness of the site (besides which who comes to the Vatican to spend US$49 on “The Official Vatican Tour DVD”?), then out onto the street and down past the ever-lengthening queue of jaded tourists, many of whom are no doubt under the misapprehension that they'll get in before Christmas.
For an atheist and occasional pagan lout such as myself, however, the most holy site in all of Rome is the colosseum. Built almost 2000 years ago, it is almost as old as Eden Park and although it has fallen into a state of disrepair every bit as a acute as our very own home of rugby, just the fact that it stands defiant amidst the filth and chaos of modern day Rome is enough to warrant its iconic status. At its heyday, it held 45,000 fans on four levels of seating. Today there is a crowd approaching 45,000 gathering in the concourses and strolling about inside, though the lions, elephants and slaves being mercilessly being gouged by said exotic animals are long gone.
As we stroll around the main internal concourse imagining what a fantastically difficult task it must've been to build a structure of such immense height and mass two millennia ago, I can't help but feel we in New Zealand can take a lesson from the Emperor Vespasian, who authorised its construction in 70AD. I'm fairly certain – or at least I'd like to think – that the idea to build it came to old Vessy in a dream one night, whereupon he woke and said something dramatic like “and so shall it come to pass”. There'd have been no soil erosion tests, no planning consents, no environment court hearings, no building consent applications, no dickhead neighbours complaining about it blocking the sun, no furore in the papers, no crisis meetings at the council. He wanted a bloody colosseum, so got a bloody colosseum. And in this day and age when you need consent from the council just to put a sandpit in your own backyard, we should look to young go-getters like Vespasian, and do as the Romans do. Or did.
At evening time, we return to the scene of last night's buffet-related crime and fill our boots once again. Then we amble homewards through the near deserted city streets, wondering what all the tourists are doing and why we weren't invited. Are they gorging themselves at buffet dinners that you actually have to pay for? Or perhaps they're all in their hotel rooms eating room service and watching CNN. The eerie quiet of the streets is only punctuated by the occasional ambulance siren, and you'll be pleased to know that they sound like party buses in Rome too. We're just sitting waiting for the bus home when a party bus comes flying through the intersection next to us. It has to swerve and brake to avoid another party bus, also travelling at full steam, heading down the same road in the opposite direction. You know when you see two ambulances pass each other that someone somewhere has fucked up. Put it down to that wonderfully carefree Italian attitude to life and death, I suppose.
Back at the hostel, Shazza, Dazza and a bunch of Spaniard backpackers are out on the deck drinking cheap Italian beer and flirting with each other. To me the notion of sitting around drinking at the hostel seems kind of perverse when you have Rome's wild and diverse nightlife at your doorstep, then I remember that the Australians have been carried here by primitive forces far greater than I could comprehend. As I make my way to bed I silently wish them best of luck with their ancient mating rituals, then lie down on my three beanbags and drift off to a sleep occasionally disturbed by the joyful blaring of a passing party bus.
***
There's still no sign of the locals the next day as we haul our bags to the station and wait for the train back to Pisa. I can't say I have been overly impressed by Rome and the lack of local flavour has much to do with that. Ultimately, you can have all the history and mystique and remarkable buildings in the world (and Rome pretty much does), but if there's no locals around to make it real, it just seems like a great big Disneyland. I have seen no evidence of the pickpockets I was so thoroughly warned against; only marauding packs of tourists, talking loudly and brushing aside everything in their way. Rome's famous coffee-shop culture, with young Romans sipping cappucinos and watching the street scene while looking glamorous and important, seems almost invisible. This weekend, Rome seems like a glimpse into the future where the locals have been wiped out and tourists rome the streets at their leisure; the only survivors being the opportunistic vendors who thrive on the tourists' profligacy.
What saves Rome from being Disneyland is that all the great buildings and structures are actually real. They provide our only link to a distant past that the 21st century man can only dream of seeing for himself. It is possible to stand in the colosseum, block out all the noise and imagine for a moment the scenes of pandemonium that were once commonplace within, or glance up at the remains of an aqueduct and marvel at what an improbably brilliant feat of engineering it took to make water run all the way through it. Without these structures, Rome would just be another ancient European city with lots of pretty buildings. Their presence alone makes Rome a city worth visiting. And I don't know if they ate gelatos in ancient Rome, but they're pretty bloody good too.
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