Recovered (17 June 2012)

All memories build. 
All memories build outward on one another.
All memories build outward on one another from this moment,

forever inevitable and irreversible, referring back
this frozen moment:

perpetual comparison, infinite signification. 

A million signifiers.
A million signifiers pointing back to a single referent.

(a moment of clarity and transcendence) 

A million signifiers pointing back to a single referent that appears

constant – a moment of clarity and transcendence –
this shivering perfection:

shackling the moment before to the moments after.

Still on Our Honeymoon... Epilogue

After any experience of duration and interest, the mind seems to have this natural tendency to begin comparing one part to the other – beginning to end, before to after, best to worst. Taken to the extreme, this type of analysis can fragment a single experience into so many pieces that it may never be put back together again, but at the same time this discrimination of the mind is also what allows us to learn, to tell stories, and to play with our reality in a way that prevents us from becoming utterly powerless to the ever-changing world around us.

But this is beside the point.

(Or, at the very least, far too heavy for 9am on a Sunday morning.)

The point is that, almost a month after returning from Europe, whenever I think of our trip I can't help but still feel a special place for Budapest. Pressed to explain this, I find words elusive. It's not as beautiful as Prague, nor as sophisticated as Vienna, but there's something about it that still won't let go of my imagination.

Maybe it was our morning ritual of pointing and grunting at pastries at the neighborhood bakery:

Or perhaps the appreciation for the sensuality of garbanzo beans:

Maybe it was the city's quirky graffiti and street art, which sometimes seemed totally familiar:

And other times made no sense whatsoever:

Don't throw away babies?

The use of English was as concrete as it was creative:

And the city has an appreciation for pink pay phones like no other:

Going to the post office, for instance, becomes an adventure unto itself because even the simple act of pushing a button and taking a number in line takes on epic proportions:

Hmmm....

There are abstract sculptures throughout the city:

Understated memorials to the victims of the Revolution of 1956:

And echoes of communism still reverberating on the rails of the subway:

Where people quietly wait for the next stop as if it were 1977:

And do not eat hamburgers or smoke or snatch purses.

Mustaches, however, are a whole other story.

There is yarn bombing:

And padlock art:

That tells a special kind of history when subjected to closer examination:

Sometimes urinals have advertisements for baby chickens:

And even the airport conspired to frame things differently.

But most of all I remember that language, that beautiful impossible language:

That sounds like this, no matter what was actually said:

Still on Our Honeymoon... Budapest, Day 10 (St. Stephen's Basilica, International Design Show, Danube Cruise)

My yin and I started our last full day in Budapest by heading down to St. Stephen's Basilica:

Where rests the 1,000 year-old holy right hand of St. Stephen himself ("Ishtvan" in Magyar), the first Christian King of Hungary:

Now dismembered and mummified appendages is nothing special for famous European churches, but there was a nice touch to this one: you could drop in 100 forints (about 50 cents) and the small box would light up, illuminating the relic and allowing visitors to see the hand without the glare of the glass case. I wonder what Ishtvan thinks of all this:

"You're going to do what with my hand?"

Anyway, we took obligatory shots of the altar:

And domed ceiling:

Before finally finding our way to the candles:

I don't know why, but ever since I first went to Notre Dame more than a decade ago, I feel compelled to drop a few coins into the box and light a prayer candle whenever I visit a Catholic church:

When I first started this, I didn't attach any specific significance to the act – it just seemed like a nice thing to do.  But this trip I found myself appreciating the ritual itself, and I suppose this is a large part of what draws people to organized religions in the first place.  They fulfill a very basic human need to organize and make sense of a world that often appears to be without order or any guiding force. This is an illusion, of course, but it is a very persuasive illusion. Simple acts like these, repeated tens of thousands of times by tens of thousands of people, connect us back into the larger truth that we are all connected.

[lapse]

When we exited the church, I stumbled onto the bank my yin and I would use if we lived in Budapest:

Any financial institution that has art nouveau on its facade:

And crazy fish holding up its awning is good enough for us:

Next, we hopped a metro and headed away from the city center so we could go to Hõsõk tere ("Heroes' Square"):

Behind my yin, you can see the Millennium Memorial, which was completed in 1900 and exemplifies the same turn of the century exuberance that we saw at the Municipal House in Prague. On one side of the square is the Museum of Fine Arts and on the other is the Palace of Arts, neither of which we visited.  The park behind this monument is home to one of Budapest's famed thermal baths (Schéchenyi), but my yin and I had to pass on this because hot tubbing, even funky geothermal Budapest hot tubbing, wouldn't be good for sidecar. So, we decided to take a walk down the tree-lined Andrassy Way:

Having maintained a pretty ambitious pace for the entire vacation, my yin and I decided to take it easy after lunch and check out some local boutiques:

Which were clearly geared for Western tourists, but still had that funky Budapest vibe:

I'm not quite sure how to describe this atmosphere, except to say that it is halfway between American indy craft culture and post-Soviet aspiration. During this jaunt we stumbled onto a eco-design fair:

 
That epitomized this same impulse – repurposing the past without obfuscating it – and in the process creating an intoxicating, quirksome aesthetic:

Blister pack Tiffany lamp

Mason jar and table leg chandelier

After this, my yin and I went back to hotel to shower and rest up for the main event, a cruise on the Danube that allowed us to see these breathtaking views of Budapest after dark:

Parliament

Chain Bridge and Buda Castle

Matthias Church

Liberty Statue

 

Hungarian National Theater

Palace of the Arts

All set to the sounds of live music:

Suffice to say, we loved it:

And when we finally returned to the dock, we crossed back to the Pest side for a late dinner:

We found Macska our first night in town, calling upon the wisdom of the interwebs to find a vegetarian restaurant. As you might guess from the marquee, macska translates to "cat" in English:

Funky hand rails in the upstairs loft.

The first time we went to Macska, it was a quite Wednesday night, and the own (who spoke excellent English) made us feel more welcome than any other restaurant on our vacation. The hand-written English menu had several vegetarian takes on traditional Hungarian cuisine and, for reasons still unclear to me, burritos. She gave us salty biscuits called pogača, which might be Magyar for "delicious."

This was Friday, however, and the entire downstairs was packed with Hungarian twenty-somethings playing foosball and drinking imported beers.  (Hungarian wine? Yes. Hungarian beer? Not so much.) My yin and I were able to find a spot upstairs, though, and plopped down on the cushions strem across the floor of the loft. Next to us was the funkiest radio I have ever seen, which allowed you to tune into countries as opposed to frequencies:

We spent the next couple of hours lounging and eating and savoring our final night in Budapest. We gave thanks for the opportunity to travel, to be together, and to be embarking on the next chapter of our live. At times it still seems almost like a fairy tale:

Erzsébet Bridge, Budapest, October 2012

Still on Our Honeymoon... Budapest, Day 9 (Matthias Church, Buda Castle, Shoes on the Danube)

My yin and I began our second day in by crossing the Danube and going to the Fisherman's Bastion, which affords fantastic views of landmarks on the Pest side of the river like Parliament:

 St Stephen's Basilica:

And the Liberty Statue atop Gellért Hill, which was erected in 1947 and commemorates the city's liberation by the Soviets in 1945.

Yes, I know this is on the Buda side, but 3 is a nice number...

Also, my favorite sight of all:

Speaking of my yin, she took this lovely photo of Parliament framed by the Fisherman's Bastion:

Eventually we finished gawking across the river and headed to Mátyás Templom:

Mátyás provided another interested example of the different between Prague and Budapest. Whereas all of the sites in Prague were rehabilitated and scrubbed and cleaned, many of the major attractions in Budapest (such as this one) are still in the process of being renovated from decades of neglect:

 Nonetheless, it was beautiful from altar:

To ceiling:

With the early morning light coming through the stained glass windows:

And casting beautiful shadows on the exterior of the building:

Next we went to the Buda Castle complex:

View from the Chain Bridge

Which still houses the Hungarian president:

We walked by during the changing of the guard.

And celebrates heroes of the past:

In typical European courtyard style:

We didn't actually tour this building because, after Vienna, we were suffering somewhat with tourist fatigue, that unmistakable feeling you get when you've walked past so many Gothic spires, Baroque arches, and Neoclassical columns that it all starts blending together. Plus, we were getting hungry (worst pun ever), and I was practically ready to scream:

Not really.

Luckily, there was some delicious Indian food just on the other side of the Chain Bridge (aka Széchenyi Lánchid):

Well-fed, we headed out to see the "Shoes on the Danube" memorial, erected in 2005 and designed by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay:

On Christmas Day 1944, less than a month before the Soviet liberation, members of the fascist Arrow Cross militia forced dozens of Jews who had been under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg (remember him from yesterday?) to take off their shoes and jump into the freezing Danube. This understated memorial was eerily beautiful, and one of the highlights of the whole trip for me: