Budapest, August 11-16.
And then we went to Budapest for a memorial service for my deceased father-in-law Arpad.
Budapest has two halves, divided by the Danube: the more residential and hilly Buda, and the downtown Pest. They have about seven bridges; the most famous is called the Chain Bridge. This picture is looking towards Buda, which has some old walls and buildings on top, collectively known as the “Var” or Castle. Like Kafka’s castle, a bit.
We spent a lot of time with my wife’s aunt Emmi, a lively old lady who lives on the fourth floor of a walk-up apartment building in Buda — she’s lived there for about fifty years. She made this special cake by rolling up chocolate and ground chestnuts. “Hab” means “Whipped Cream.”
Emmi told us a story about World War II. When the Russians took over Budapest, they were raping all the women. Emmi and my wife’s mother made their way from one basement to what they deemed a safer basement, pushing along five children in two baby-carriages (including my wife and her brother).
They went through big Calvin Square in Pest, and the buildings on each of the square’s four corners were on fire. Dead soldiers and horses lay everywhere. It was winter. Emmi said that later they would go out every day to cut meat from the dead horses; it stayed fresh enough, as the weather was so cold. “Have you had horse meat?” Emmi asks us then. “It’s good.”
My wife has dozens of relatives in Budapest, here’s two especially cute ones: Andrea and Zsuzsa.
We came upon the Frank Zappa Caffe which happens to be next to my wife’s birth place house in Budapest, the very house where Emmi was headed that fateful night. What a treat to find Zappa here, my favorite musician. The waiter played the whole Hot Rats album for us.
Zappa performed at this cafe once or twice, which is why they named themselves after him. Big paintings of him on the wall. So synchronistic to find good old Frank here.
A tunnel cuts through the Var Hill, from Emmi’s Buda neighborhood to the Chain Bridge across the Danube to Pest. Looking at the egglike tunnel shape, I thought of Hungarian mathematicians solving differential equations.
In the Hungarian National Gallery up on the Var Hill I saw some paintings by Jzsef Rippl-Ronai (1861 – 1927), a terrific post-impressionist.
Rippl-Ronai was friends with Gaugin, and is sometimes called a Nabi.
On the Var Hill is a statue of the Magyar totem animal: the Turul, a mythical and very bad-ass relative of the eagle.
Walking around town, the signs began looking more and more like optometrist eye-charts to me, evenly spaced random symbols. This says something like “Retired Actors Rest Home.”
Maybe this graffitto represents a person walking on water?
We had dinner with my wife’s cousin Rita and her son Gyorgy Szentgli. He plays guitar and has some music syntheis software; he’s been making songs and posting them. My favorite is “Tengerparti Pra,” which sounds like a surf song. Oddly enough, Gyorgy had heard of the concept of surf music!
But wait — surf’s up in the Hotel Gellert pool! Budapest is famed for its hot springs, and one of the best public spas is connected with the old Hotel Gellert. That was about the most fun of all that I had in Budapest. I went to the Gellert thermal baths and swimming pools two days in a row. Not many photos here, I’ll just have to describe it and copy a couple of postcards and two new CA images.
I went in nine forms of water:
(1) Heated outdoor soaking pool. It feels a bit like Esalen, warm-soaking in the sun, but these aren’t of sulfur water, I smell chlorine.
(2) Large outdoor ocean-wave pool. I dive down to confirm that the water is alternately sucked into, and powered out of, large vents in the wall at the deep end. I love bobbing up and down in the deep end. Chest-high breakers form in the shallows, I even catch some short rides, but mainly stand there grinning, letting the waves splash out from my bod, big-chesting myself against the crests, spraying sparkling drops far and wide.
(3 & 4) 38 C indoor thermal bath for men, and 36 C ditto. Many of the men are nude, some wear little dick-hiding aprons, I have a bathing-suit. This is the real heart of the place, the water is naturally sulfured, non-chlorinated, continually refreshed. I stretch and do yoga to my heart’s content — I take my suit off for awhile, then put it back on. Men in pairs and groups are talking Hungarian, the voices echoing off the old-timey tiled barrel-vault ceiling. New, hot sulfur water pours into the pools from gargoyle mouths, I get right under a stream, enjoying the heat on my tension-pained back. The railings into the pool have heavy brass balls on the ends, I crouch and rub my back against one of these, massaging it. I went back to the Gellert the next day and did a steambath, a thermal soak, and paid for a real massage. The masseur was casual as a barber, like a Hungarian Seymour Moskowitz — a sarcastic college pal of mine. Wonderful. He kneaded me like dough, and sent me off with a friendly “go git ‘em, big gaah,” slap on the ass.
(5) A steambath so hot (50 C = 110 F) that moving around in it comes alarmingly close to scalding my skin: the motion causes me to contact more superheated droplets per second. It’s hard even to breathe in here, I can barely see through the fog, it’s perfect. But I don’t stay all that long.
(6) The heavy intense stream of the shower off the thermal bath is like being peed on by a divine, life-giving elephant.
(7 & 8) The indoor cool-water pool is an Art Nouveau temple, with a sliding roof open to the blue sky; a hot Sunday sun lays a square of gold on the blue water. At one end is a coed heated soaking pool, separate from the long cool-water pool. These pools smell nasty, like chlorine and sweat, not like the outdoor pools or like the healing thermal baths. I don’t stay here long.
(9) I go back outside and reenter the wave pool when it’s turned on again — seemingly it’s only on for like the first ten minutes of every half hour. Again I end up grinning in the shallows, loving the paracomputation of the waves, a happy California boy. And then, for my ninth form of water, I take an outdoor shower.