It's Christmas time already in London. Without Thanksgiving setting the boundary between the rest of the year and Christmas, the lights go up and the sales start right after Halloween's done. And it was even warmer in London this week than it's been in a month.
 |
| A tram stops in front of the short-distance train station in Budapest. |
It's fall break, so I have over a week to escape this madness. NYU in London dorms are empty and everyone's off traveling around Europe. My first stop was Budapest in Hungary. Budapest was a part of the USSR until 20 years ago, and it shows. On the train ride into the city from the airport, I rolled by Budapest's ugly suburbs. Block after block of poured concrete buildings lined the streets, a reminder of a tense time in history that didn't happen all that long ago.
Budapest's city center is very different from the suburbs. It's very beautiful, with colorful buildings and the famous narrow Chain Bridge near the large and elaborate Hungarian Parliament building. Budapest is divided into Buda, on the western side of the Danube river, and Pest on the east. Pest is where the city center is, but in Buda there is the Castle, a neighborhood that sits on top of a steep hill that offers great views of the entire city below.
 |
| View from the castle in Buda. |
 |
| Street with colorful houses near the castle in Budapest. |
The Budapest hostel is the best hostel I've stayed in so far, partly because of its intimate setting in a small 100-year-old apartment building and partly because of the people I met there. On the first evening, I met Mohamed, a man in his late 20s who had been invited to Europe (I can't remember which city) for a major peace talk conference that his friend was helping organize. Mohamed said that as he was planning his trip to the conference, he decided that he might as well take three months off from work and travel more. He had been everywhere, born in Syria, raised in The Hague, and currently living in Detroit when he's not traveling Asia, South America, or Europe. He had tried all sorts of jobs after college and hasn't really found anything he likes yet, but he said that all the jobs he's had have provided interesting experiences and insights on the way people live. He sounded like he had experienced more in the last fifteen years that many people experience in a lifetime. Now THAT'S living! Back at the hostel, I met Seth, a Toronto native, just a couple of years older than me, who had come to travel Europe for sailing competitions. Seth was seated talking with a few students my age from Slovakia who were visiting Budapest for a few days on a long weekend, and a couple of Swiss men in their thirties. Seth was talkative, fitting the 'friendly Canadian' stereotype, and everyone else was responding in English at various skill levels. When someone asked where the time zone jumped an hour forward when traveling east, Seth proudly announced, "The man who invented time zones was Canadian!" complete with a small fist pump of pride. The Slovakians instantly refuted this, insisting that time zones were a product of Magellan's expedition around the world, obviously a European idea. I had always thought time zones were conceived as a way of keeping American railroads running on the same schedule in the 1800s. The proceeding argument did not reach any conclusions, except I did realize that each area of the world has its own version of history and, while the phrase "history is written by the winners" is tossed around a lot, one culture's view of who the winner is might differ from another's.
No comments:
Post a Comment