Saturday, May 19, 2007 — Books and Sausages

07-05-19 BLOG Saturday, May 19, 2007 - Books and Sausages pic 1Three days in Budapest. We did a lot of walk­ing in this city, which has a feels total­ly dif­fer­ent from Prague. Often, we ate in the gigan­tic Cen­tral Mar­ket. This grand struc­ture orig­i­nal­ly incor­po­rat­ed an indoor canal by which goods were deliv­ered to the mar­ket’s traders. It must be four times the size of the St. Lawrence Mar­ket in Toron­to, and hous­es only god knows how many tons of sausages. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked snack­ing on lán­gos, flat disks of fried dough which came with a vari­ety of ingre­di­ents, sort of like piz­za slices. They would be a big hit in Cana­da if they were introduced.

07-05-19 BLOG Saturday, May 19, 2007 - Books and Sausages pic 5The archi­tec­ture of Budapest is quite dif­fer­ent from Prague. The Hun­gar­i­ans seem to like mon­u­men­tal grandeur. There are broad Parisian-style boule­vards. Stat­ues of mighty-thewed Mag­yar war­riors, look­ing like they stepped out of a Conan com­ic, are every­where. But the most dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of the city is its unusu­al num­ber of book­stores. I have nev­er seen any place with such a num­ber and vari­ety of book­stores, from hum­ble lit­tle nooks to huge mul­ti-floor empo­ria. The Hun­gar­i­ans must read a lot. Almost all of this huge mass of print­ed mat­ter is in Mag­yar, though you can usu­al­ly find a few Ger­man, French, and (more rarely) Eng­lish shelves in any store. Almost any­thing of sig­nif­i­cance seems to be trans­lat­ed and pub­lished here.

07-05-19 BLOG Saturday, May 19, 2007 - Books and Sausages pic 4Our most seri­ous tourist for­ay was to the Nation­al Muse­um. This was a very well planned and orga­nized muse­um of Hun­gar­i­an his­to­ry, pro­ceed­ing sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, room by room, from pre­his­to­ry to the present. The muse­um even includ­ed a repro­duc­tion of a 1930’s Budapest cin­e­ma, with news­reels run­ning, and posters of Hun­gar­i­an movie stars on the walls. I was par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased by the Avar room, since I had nev­er seen any arti­facts from that cul­ture before. The Avars were an Asian tribe, either Tur­kic or Mon­golic, or some com­bi­na­tion of both, who pushed their way into cen­tral Europe, and had a more-or-less sta­ble king­dom based in Hun­gary from 568 AD to 810 AD., after which the self-iden­ti­fied eth­nic­i­ty quick­ly van­ished. Pre­sum­ably, they sim­ply melt­ed into the grow­ing Slav­ic pop­u­la­tion. When the Mag­yars arrived in Hun­gary, in 895 AD, there was lit­tle trace of them. But dur­ing the height of their pow­er, they were the prin­ci­pal threat to the Byzan­tine Empire, and it was their inva­sion that drove the Ger­man­ic Lom­bards across the alps into Italy.

In the base­ment, there was some­thing real­ly fine. Budapest, in Roman times, was the city of Aquin­cum. The city had around 30,000 inhab­i­tants by the end of the 2nd cen­tu­ry, most of whom would have been Roman­ized celts. But a full Roman legion was sta­tioned there, so there would have been a fair num­ber of peo­ple from all over the empire. Aquin­cum was a cen­ter of stonework, mass-pro­duc­ing tomb­stones, among oth­er things. Because of this, the muse­um has an entire room of engraved tomb­stones, often for peo­ple of quite hum­ble sta­tion. A mule-dri­ver, for instance, had quite a nice tomb­stone. There was an extra­or­di­nary vari­ety of styles, reli­gious sym­bols, and types of inscrip­tion. There were poignant sto­ries: a beau­ti­ful girl who died young, a legion­naire from Cyprus who mar­ried a local girl. Rarely have I felt so strong a con­nec­tion with peo­ple in the Roman world, as in this room.

We walked all over the city. We climbed the steep bluffs on the Buda side of the Danube. We entered a church inside a cave. We walked the full length of Andrássy Avenue, all of which is des­ig­nat­ed a World Her­itage Site. We walked the grounds of the High Cas­tle. We some of the lux­u­ri­ous Baths, which are essen­tial­ly ancient Roman baths as trans­mit­ted through Byzan­tium and the Ottoman Empire to the Haps­burgs, with rooms at dif­fer­ent tem­per­a­tures, masseurs, and so forth. I was tempt­ed by this sybarit­ic paas­time, but Isaac was not, and I did­n’t feel like going alone. We saw a bizarre lit­tle cas­tle in a park which con­tained a stat­ue memo­ri­al­iz­ing the works of “Anony­mous“. It is def­i­nite­ly an ele­gant city.

The hos­tel we stayed at was built into one of the typ­i­cal inner-court apart­ment blocks. These are the lin­ear descen­dants of the Roman insu­lae, each one being a lit­tle vil­lage in the city. The hos­tel was run by a young Cana­di­an and Amer­i­can, and it hap­pened that there were oth­er Cana­di­ans stay­ing while we were there, so we found our­selves in a long evening of pok­er, fol­lowed by a trip to a sleazy bar. We dis­cov­ered that Hun­gary pro­duces some of the world’s most ined­i­ble pota­to chips. Isaac expe­ri­enced momen­tary ter­ror when the slats of the bunk-bed above him broke under the strain of a guest known as The Behemoth.

My nemesis: a vast temple of schnitzel and sausages.

My neme­sis: a vast tem­ple of schnitzel and sausages.

I deter­mined that if I stayed in Budapest, I would soon weigh 200 lbs. Just too much good food, most of it involv­ing pota­toes and sausages. A dan­ger­ous place for me.

After three days, we returned to Prague. Isaac is head­ed off, alone, to Aus­tralia. I’m stay­ing for a few days, until I catch my flight back home.

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