WombatNation

Treat the taxi drivers at the Budapest train station like a bad mariachi band in a Mexican restaurant. Avoid eye contact at all times and pretend you can’t hear them. All the guide books warn you about these “hyenas” (the guidebook’s term, not mine). One was particularly aggressive towards us. He came up to me three times, insisting that we should get a ride with him. He even reached for our bags to take them out to his car. All of this despite the fact that we repeatedly told him the Metro would take us right to our hotel and that we weren’t going with him. After we escaped the train station, our experience in Hungary was much, much better.

Budapest is a combination of the cities Buda and Pest on opposite sides of the Danube. Buda is mostly residential, though some of the main tourist sites are on Castle Hill. Pest has the more interesting downtown area. We stayed at Kalvin Haz near Kalvin tér (square).

Kalvin Haz was an excellent hotel and I couldn’t recommend it more highly for a stay in Budapest. The room rate was very reasonable and the location was nearly perfect. It was only two stops on the Metro from Deák tér, where you can transfer to the other lines. Our room was large, clean, and had a balcony overlooking a tree-filled courtyard. Breakfast was included and everyone who worked there was extremely nice and very helpful. The breakfast room had a computer with free Internet access.

Our first in-situ Hungarian meal was at the Magyar Restaurant, which was very good, though the service was as indifferent as restaurant service in Hungary is generally described to be. Not bad, just indifferent.

Our first stop was St. Stephen’s Basilica. This is a gorgeous cathedral with great views of the city from the top. Then we walked across the Chain Bridge and took the funicular to the top of Castle Hill.

Not quite realizing what we were about to see, we wandered into Matthias church. Although a lot of restoration work was being conducted on the outside, the inside was fully accessible. Nearly every wall and pillar was covered with paintings. There was also a very nice museum inside.

Long ago, hot springs allegedly carved out underground passageways inside the hill. These passageways were used over the years for storage, hiding spots, etc. You can tour these labryinths, which have now been turned into effectively a large art project. I don´t want to provide too much of a spoiler, though, so you should just go and enjoy the experience as it unfolds through the various labryinths. You should definitely walk the Labyrinth of Courage.

Before dragging ourselves off to dinner, we stopped at the National Gallery to browse through the works of Hungarian and other European masters.

We dined at the hip Menza restaurant with its groovy Communist inspired interior. Actually, the interior appeared to me as much just 70’s style design as Communist. Lots of orange and brown, fake wood veneer, Formica counter tops, and op art wall patterns.

Finally, we stopped by Fat Mo’s to watch the England-Hungary friendly. Despite the big screen, only 3 or 4 people were watching the game. Hungary’s failure to qualify for the World Cup finals obviously greatly dampened their interest in the sport.

There was virtually no evidence in Budapest that the World Cup would be happening in just a week. The atmosphere in Bratislava was essentially the same, as Slovakia also failed to qualify.

Why is there a horrible food product sold in the States that is called Vienna Sausages? Tiny, tasteless (unless you consider tin-flavored sawdust mixed with lard to be tasteful) sausage-like items stacked like vertical sardines in a can bear no relation to the sausages served in Vienna.

So, after arriving in Vienna in the evening, we dumped our bags at the Intercity Hotel Wien, which is only a block away from the Westbahnhof. Not only conveniently located, it was a pretty nice hotel. Few frills, but the frills it did have were quite nice and the price was definitely right. I highly recommend it. Just be aware that you need to put your room cardkey in the slot just inside the door before the lights will turn on. It’s a great way to keep people from wasting money by leaving the room lights on, though.

We then stumbled (for having been traveling as long as we had in the past 30 hours, it’s amazing we weren’t crawling) over to the Gästhaus Francesci (formerly, Gästhaus Siebold) for dinner. Inga, a quiet Austrian, married Tony Francesci, a garrulous former trucking company owner from the San Francisco Bay area. We talked to him for quite a while about the Bay area. Tony is quite a character. It would probably be more accurate to say we listened rather than we talked. Especially when he told us the story of when his family traveled to Empire, Alabama, to see the only statue in the US dedicated to an insect. The statue is of a woman holding some sort of platter with a large boll weevil on it. Or at least that is what I think he said.

The next day we went to see “Crazy Love: From Dalí, to Bacon” at the Kunstforum. This fantastic exhibit includes many famous (and some not so famous, but still brilliant) works of surrealist art and more from the private collection of Ulla & Heiner Pietzsch. Picasso, Breton, Ernst, Tanguy, David Smith, Rothko, Miró, Pollock, Motherwell, Masson, Magritte, Delvaux, and the list goes on and on. There was even a Kahlo and a Rivera thrown in for good measure.

After being blown away by the art, we wandered in the cold in the nearby Volksgarten. Little did we know that the cold weather would continue for the first part of our trip. And, yes, I am backdating these posts so they appear roughly at the corresponding times of our trip.

After waking up around 5 am, we got a ten minute ride to a BART stop with a friend. About an hour later, we were at the BART stop at SFO for our first flight to Chicago. After a 4 hour flight and a 3 hour layover, we boarded a flight to Frankfurt. Fortunately, by using a big chunk of my frequent flyer miles to go business class, we received free access to United’s Red Carpet Club lounge at all the airports.

After the 7.5 hour flight to Frankfurt, we grabbed our bags and made our way down to the train station next to the airport. Since the flight arrived on time and baggage collection and customs went more quickly than we expected, we were able to catch an earlier train to Vienna. That was quite fortunate, since the two hours we spent in Frankfurt were followed by a 7 hour train ride to Vienna. Even on the high speed ICE train, it’s still a long journey.

By this time, I was struggling, and often failing, to keep my eyes open. The seat on the train wasn’t comfortable enough to get any real sleep, though. The seats on the plane were much more comfortable, so we slept some them. By the time we arrived at the Westbahnhof in Vienna, nearly 30 hours had passed since we had seen a bed. Almost 20 of those hours had been spent on transport vehicles with a few hundred of our best friends.

We now have our tickets for the 3 first round matches in which the US national team will play at World Cup 2006 in Germany this summer. Woohoo!!

We leave for Europe near the end of May, two weeks before the games begin. Our current itinerary has us heading first to Vienna, next to Budapest, on to Bratislava, and then to Prague before meeting up with two of our friends in Berlin.

After a couple of days in Berlin, we travel to Duisburg for the first US match in Gelsenkirchen. The US will face the Czech Republic in that match. Currently, the Czech Republic is ranked number 2 in the world by FIFA and the US is ranked number 4. We’ve come a long way in the last ten years. FIFA rankings can be pretty suspect, but there is no doubt that in the last four or five years the US has become one of the world’s major soccer powers. Odds are very slim for the US winning the tournament, though. Given that the US ended up in the toughest group (the group of death) or possibly the second toughest group, it will be a very difficult challenge just to make it out of group play.

The US-Czech match should be one of the best matches of the first round. In addition, the stadium is absolutely gorgeous; one of the nicest in all of Europe. We watched a recorded Fox Soccer World special tonight on Gelsenkirchen and the Arena AufSchalke, the home stadium of Schalke 04. The roof over the field is retractable. Much more impressive, though, is the field. The grass field can be moved in and out of the stadium. In addition to allowing more even exposure of the grass to the sun between games, it allows the stadium to be used for other events without damaging the field.

Next, we go to Bruges and Ghent in Belgium for a few days. While the beer in Germany is quite good, the beer in Belgium is even better to my taste, not to mention the Flemish fries. I consumed a draft Maredsous 8 at a pub in Oakland with my dinner tonight as part of on going regimen to get myself in the right frame of mind for this trip.

Then we drift back to Heidelberg for the game in Kaiserslautern against Italy. Since I’ve read that 1/4 to 1/3 of the residents of K-Town are US Americans at a military base there, we’re hoping the US will have good support. Of course, there are a few tens of millions of Italians not that far away, too. Italy is ranked 14th by FIFA, but they are still the popular favorite in our group and are always a tough competitor at the World Cup final.

From there, we travel to Bamberg to stay with a former boss of my wife. He now teaches English Studies (I think) at Bayreuth University. From our base camp there we will travel to nearby Nuremberg to cheer for the Yanks as they take on Ghana. Even though Ghana is ranked only 50th, they are considered to be a very good squad, and possibly even the best of all the African teams.

After two days in Munich, we catch a train back to Frankfurt to fly home. Even though we are stopping for 3 days at a time in most cities, I’m sure it is going to feel like an extremely crazy, whirlwind pace. There will be so much partying going on over there at all times, I just hope we can sneak in a little sleep. I already feel tired just writing this.