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:
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| "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.
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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:
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| Blister pack Tiffany lamp |
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| 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:
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| Parliament |
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| Chain Bridge and Buda Castle |
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| Matthias Church |
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| Liberty Statue |
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| Hungarian National Theater |
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| Erzsébet Bridge, Budapest, October 2012 |
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