New York to Budapest

10:17 pm PDT ~

It’s 10:17pm in Oregon, 1:17am in New York, and 7;17am in Budapest. How do I keep the times straight? I have clocks on my desktop. Nope, no cheating….being smart.

We left JFK airport on time without any stewardesses cracking any whips. We weren’t in the air more than fifteen minutes when the pilot told us he expected to shave an hour off our flight time because of “favorable tail winds”. A nine-hour flight shortened to eight hours? Fine with us!

This plane has odd sized overhead bins and we had to struggle a little to get Mom’s and my bags in there but we did it.

There is a young boy, maybe two years old, who howled for the first two hours or so. It was better than two hours now that I think about it because he was a pill when we were boarding and he only howled louder as the movie played and supper was consumed. His mom’s method of dealing with him was to “shhhh” him. The only effect it had was to make her sound as if she’d sprung a leak. He eventually fell asleep (thank goodness!) and slept for a couple of hours. Then we got into some pretty fun turbulence again and he’s just woken up. Oh, joy.

I’ve never been overseas so have nothing with which to compare but we’ve had periods of pretty calm flight interspersed with nice, exciting bouncing. The pilot turned on the seatbelt sign shortly after supper and it hasn’t gone off yet. Mom, the experienced international traveler, says this is nothing.

I decided I was thirsty a couple of hours ago (before the Star Trek movie. Mom asked why on Earth those boys seem to keep getting into fights?) Mom had filled my water bottle when she filled hers at JFK and I took it out of my bag to, well, get a drink. This water bottle is a Nikken which has a filter inside and a silicon straw to suck it out with (yes, I know that was un-grammatical. It’s late and I’m tired) The bottle has a flip-top lid that bends the straw over and keeps it from leaking. Now, back to the story.

I pulled the bottle out of the bag and flipped the top over…..and got a miniature Old Faithful down my shirt front. Note to self: When you fill a bottle at sea level, it WILL spew at 33,000 feet elevation. Mom said I had and Old Faceful.

I just happened to look out the windows and saw it’s dawn and brightening up pretty fast. The sun tends to come up quickly when you’re flying straight into it. We still have about three hours inside this metal can with a yelling child.

I was thinking a while ago that an airplane is sort of a world unto itself. We can see by the map (when a movie isn’t playing - they don’t have individual screens on the backs of the seats here like they did the last flight) that we’re flying over, say, Newfoundland or that we’re south of Reykjavik and coming up on Ireland but in the dark, we may as well be flying to the moon for all the connection we have with the world under us.











2:40 Budapest time (4:40 Oregon time) ~

We landed in Budapest at 10:25, a full hour and 5 minutes early. As we came in, my first thought was that the roofs of the houses looked different than they do back home. A lot of them were red-orange and I’m guessing they’re made out of tile. I think you’d get the same effect coming into Spain or another Mediterranean city.

We went through customs and I got the first stamp on my passport. Yay! Hmm….I haven’t looked at it yet, just slid the passport back into my holder and got out of the way of the next person….oh how disappointing! It looks as if they’d nearly run out of ink and the black part is unreadable but he red date stands out clearly. Let’s hope the Czech Republic’s is better.

We’re at the hostel now and I’ve had a number of firsts besides the first stamp in my first passport. Let’s start with all the firsts that came with my first taxi ride…

I’ve heard all kinds of stories about how the taxi driver raced through side streets where cars are parked in a solid wall on both sides and maybe six inches to spare on each side of our car. Well, I lived it this afternoon and Rhonda got a picture from the backseat. How we escaped with nary a scratch is a mystery to me. I found out that yellow lights mean speed up and red lights only count if you see them before you go through the….intersection.

I hesitated because lights don’t occur only at intersections. Sometimes they appear in the middle of the street. I finally noticed broad, dirty white lines painted on the street going with the traffic, not across like our cross-walks would. Those are pedestrian crossings. I understood why they have these special areas for foot traffic when I kept bracing myself expecting the car to stop when people were at the curb and the driver would just plow on. Pedestrians certainly don’t have the right-of-way here!

We were stopped at a light when all of a sudden a dirt bike - at least that’s what it would be called here - came off the curb beside us, cut between us and the car ahead of us (there might have been 18 inches), made a sharp right between that car and the one beside it, and disappeared in a roar and a cloud of grey exhaust.

Rhonda pointed out the strings of parallel parked cars that had - I’m not kidding - four inches or less between their bumpers and the hitch of the one in front of it. Mom wondered how on earth they got out of there, voicing my thoughts before I could speak. Rhonda explained that they go forward until they bump, reverse until they bump, and keep doing that until they’re turned enough to get out.

At another light, I noticed a convertible with Florida plates. Rhonda thought it was a high-end Nissan. I stared at it for a while before I realized what I was seeing. Then I had the weird sensation of my head trying to be in two places at the same time.

We saw a man with his forearm in a cast…painted in some way to make it look like a Holstein cow.

We saw some wonderful buildings. They had to be pre-communist and they looked pre-Victorian, too. They’re built of brick and/or concrete, about six stories tall, filled a city block, and are topped with fancy furbelows. One building had a doorway overhang that was held up by two carved concrete men. One of them had quite a grimace on his face. I would, too, if I’d had to hold up a concrete overhand for a few hundred years.

We’ve checked in to my first hostel. Did you all know I’m a card-carrying member of the Hostel Community? “That explains so much,” you all say. We have a three-bed room to ourselves with an attached bathroom/shower. It’s really a bathroom/shower. The room is rectangular, tiled throughout with the toilet at one end, the sink nearby, and the shower at the other end. Two drains, no curtain and the toilet is tall enough to please a family of professional basketball players.

We didn’t go directly to the hostel. The taxi driver took us to the Budapest Hotel instead of the Budapest Hostel. Quite a difference between a Youth Hostel and a four-star hotel. Yikes!

Added to my list of “I can’t believe I forgot to do this!” was to install a program to take pictures off of the cameras. How brain-dead was that? No, don’t answer. I’m sure I can get something off the internet but in the meantime, you have to slog through my writing when a picture can explain so much.

But pictures can’t give you the complete alien-ness of voices talking around you and not being able to understand a single word. There are cars of different design, buildings of unusual architecture, and incomprehensible street signs without words but what really makes me feel isolated in this great city of hundreds of thousands of people is not being able to communicate. Pantomime only gets you so far. I challenge you to walk into a motel where the receptionist doesn’t speak English and ask if you can use their wi-fi service.