A big “woo-who!” for Hungarian wine

I know I probably shouldn’t be surprised at this, but I find it rather shocking that I’m already halfway through my trip. In some ways I feel like I’ve been gone forever, but in others it feels like I just left home. Such is the travelling life, I suppose. So I didn’t end up loving my stay in Slovakia, mostly due to the weather. Because of the weather, everyone from my hostel was cooped up together in a relatively small common area for the time we were all there. While I have come to enjoy socializing with total strangers, I don’t enjoy watching said random strangers play video games and try to come up with new wild and crazy ways to get wasted at 11am. But I did get to hike one morning when it wasn’t raining and it was, of course, spectacular. From the Tatras I went down to Budapest and ended up travelling there with a few people from the hostel – two completely crazy Kiwi girls and a very laid back Aussie guy. The Kiwis were priceless in their sheer entertainment value, and the fact that they succeeded in scaring off any other potential carriage-mates by screaming gibberish into their banana telephones while rocking back and forth. I don’t think the ticket-checker lady appreciated their antics much, but it was all I could do to keep from peeing on the floor I was laughing so hard.

Budapest is lovely, and probably the most beautiful city I’ve been to thus far (yes, even above the vastly overrated Prague).

My hostel was tiny and, ironically enough, considering my temperature complaints about Slovakia, ridiculously overheated but the owner was one of those super helpful types, and on his recommendations I stuffed my face with delicious Hungarian pastries for about four days straight. It was breathtaking. I befriended a couple of Aussie guys at the hostel who took me out to some Hungarian night club they had found, which was packed full of young punk kids, all of whom loved singing American pop songs (because, oh yes, one of the rooms was in fact a karaoke bar) with an especial leaning towards Abba (though I realize they don’t really classify as American). And though I never made it to the microphone to belt out any Avril Lavigne or Madonna (the other two most heavily represented artists) I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Aussies try to sing along to the Hungarian pop songs (though their Hungarian karaoke antics were more to the purpose of getting attention from the local hotties, but they only succeeded in attracting the fawning attention of one 19-year-old boy who was so drunk he couldn’t understand or speak English, though I’m not entirely sure that he could do so while sober though he adamantly proclaimed otherwise). I had my first absinthe experience that night, the details of which I will not go into – suffice it to say I will not be drinking absinthe again. Ever. I definitely got my fill of museums while I was in Budapest and am now an expert on Austro-Hungarian/Ottoman/Communist history relative to the Magyars, that is, until I hit up the next batch of museums and my short-term memory is filled to capacity by the conquests and repressions of somebody else.

So after six days in Budapest I moved on to a (much) smaller college town called Pecs (pronounced Paich, though I never really got it right) and stayed there for only two nights. I had the delightful experience of running into some know-it-all American-born European dude on the train who thought he had the right to lecture me on American politics and foreign policy and the status of our railway system and how unprofessional it is that we have so many female surgeons, not to mention the usual election crap, all because he lived in the US till he was 5. I’ve never had my self-restraint challenged so much as during that two and a half hour train ride, but at least I got a free cab ride to my hostel out of it. Anyway. It was really nice to get away from the intensity of Budapest, and chill out in a town with a slower pace, but after viewing the town square

and the old church that used to be a mosque there really wasn’t a whole lot to do in town. So instead of putz around there, I took a day trip with a couple of Canadians I met at the hostel and went to another (even smaller) town outside of Pecs called Villany to enjoy some of the fine Hungarian wine they make there.

I can’t say much for the town itself, but their wine is fabulous and most of the wine merchant/seller/taster people were really friendly, though my perception of their friendliness could be directly correlated to the amount of wine I imbibed – I’m not entirely sure. The main street of the town is lined with wine sellers and tasting places, so we just went right down the strip and tried different wines at several of them. No one there speaks any English so we had to resort to creative pantomime, which of course got more creative as the afternoon went on (yep, this was an afternoon drinking adventure – got to town around 1pm and left by 6pm – it was definitely an early to bed kind of day, especially after buying – and drinking – a two-liter bottle of wine on the train-ride back to Pecs). We got to go into the cellars of one place, which was a little harrowing because the ceiling was really low and covered in white furry mold, the steps very steep and long and narrow, and overall I was a little afraid that she would shut the cellar doors on us and bake us for dinner, but thankfully that didn’t happen and I got a nice dose of natural penicillin as well as a view of her wine cellars.

And now I’m sitting at my hostel in Zagreb, Croatia, after a very long day on several trains, including several mix-ups and near misses, one very grumpy ticket-checker man who did not like being asked if he spoke English, and a slew of border patrol dudes in SWAT gear who apparently think I could be a threat to Croatian national security. Gotta love the language barriers.