Monthly Archives: May 2012

Day 107 Budapest – a poem

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Here’s a poem I wrote in November 2009 (prompted, if memory serves, by finding a tourist map of Budapest in a box of stuff in my study).

I’d marked the poem as a ‘work in progress’ but I don’t think it ever progressed much beyond this:

I want to go to Budapest (a work in progress)

I want to go to Budapest.
To ride the tram and walk small cobbled streets.
To stand upon the hill of Buda
To watch the river and old Pest beyond.
To sip my coffee at Gerbaud,
And nibble Esterhazy Torte.
To sail upstream and round the islands,
Share cocktails in the languid afternoon.
To lower myself into hot springs
And melt beneath the masseur’s hands.
To climb the towers of Esztergom
And watch the ballet of the swallows.
I want to take the train to Prague,
To breathe the scent of pines,
To watch the mountains red with the sun’s blood.
To drink Tokay and dance to violins.
To laugh with the hordes as they sweep across the plains,
To lie in the arms of a dark eyed Attila.
I want to go to Budapest again.

(c) Linda Rushby, 2009

Day 106 Timisoara, Romania – Budapest, Hungary

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Day 106, Monday 29 May

Timisoara, Romania – Budapest, Hungary 330 kms/205 miles Cumulative total: 12,183 kms/7,570 miles

Hungarian passport control. I wasn’t really expecting it. After all, Romania is in the EU now and there has never been any inspection at any other of the internal borders.

Still, the inspectors seem by far the most charming I’ve come across. The young man who takes my passport gazes deep into my eyes, and I gaze back into his, before he looks away and checks my appearance against the photo.

I’d just been thinking about Romania, how in a way I’m relieved to be leaving it, but despite what I’ve said, I really hope to come back. I want to return in about five years to see what has been done with the buildings in Constanta, I want to get out to the end of the delta (and I want to do that Black Sea cruise and get to Odessa and the Crimea and find out why Jan Morris calls the Sea of Azov ‘awful’ – or maybe I don’t). But I’d really like to go back to Timisoara, which is a sweet little place, though sadly too far from the coast to think of living there.

But going to Budpaest almost feels like going home, partly no doubt because I’ve been there before and know some of what to expect, but mostly of course because I’ll be staying with Gabriella. It’s five weeks today since I left Ilze in Turin, and the longest time I’ve been dependent on the kindness of strangers. It’s not that I’m getting tired of my own company, but I know it will be so good to kick back in a proper home again, not to be thinking about check-ins and check-outs and taxis and train routes and where to go for dinner, just for a few days at least, and to sit over a bottle or two and reminisce and swap stories and catch up…

As all these thoughts were going through my head, the charming young inspector was working back up the carriage. I heard him speaking to the two French girls in the next seat, something about ‘vos baggages’, and them denying that they had anything other than what they were carrying with them.

And I started to panic.

Now, catching the train was a relief in itself. I had to change at Arad, with 13 minutes to make the connection. The train from Timisoara to Arad was great, with the filthiest toilet I’ve ever seen, and when I went to the toilet, the outside door next to it was wide open – maybe someone had opened it to get rid of the smell, or at least to cool down the carriage a bit. I’d had to leave the Wardrobe by itself in a luggage compartment, so ten minutes before we were due in I went to stand with it so I could get it out OK.

A young man came up the corridor and said something to me about Budapest.

‘Budapest, yes’ I said enthusiastically.

‘Do you know which platform it goes from?’ he asked.

‘No’ I admitted ‘I need to know that too’.

We both stood near the open door as the train pulled into the station, and bravely, he gave it a kick to open it wider before we’d come to a stop.

‘You go first’ I said, starting to lift the Wardrobe. ‘You’ve got a smaller bag’.

He jumped down then gallantly took one end of the Wardrobe and helped it down. There were people milling around waiting to get on, including one very unhelpful lady who didn’t budge even when I almost pushed into her.

I could see a bloke in a peaked cap leaning against the top of the steps, so I dragged it over to him and said ‘Budapest? Budapest?’ several times before I got his attention. He pointed to a train on the opposite platform. I dragged the Wardrobe down a step at a time, through the tunnel and up the other side. The young German man was there before me and finding the carriage. I pulled my ticket out of the backpack and another bloke in a peaked cap, standing by the train, took it from me, read the number and pointed down the platform.

I’ve learnt from experience that it’s best not to try dragging the Wardrobe between carriages actually inside a train, so I walked briskly down the platform till I was level with it and pressed the automatic button to open the door, then climbed the steps, put the backpack down on the floor of the compartment, and hoisted the Wardrobe up behind me.

When I tried to move it, I found that somehow the wheel had got caught up with the strap of the backpack, so I stood just inside the train disentangling it, then looked at the size of the luggage compartment.

The floor area was about the same size as the cross section of the Wardrobe standing on its end, but the height was nowhere near enough to clear it standing that way round. Still, the top of the frame is now so bent and broken out of shape that I made a good effort at squashing it under.

I walked down the train looking for my seat number, 96. It was at a table opposite a silver haired lady in slacks and a jumper who looked about my age and smiled at me and said something about the Wardrobe, which I interpreted from her expression and gestures to mean ‘Don’t worry, bring it down here, there’s plenty of room, it’ll be fine’.

I plonked the backpack down on the seat opposite her and gave her a grateful smile. This train was a very different kettle of fish from the previous one. Across the aisle there was another pair of double seats with a table in between, and a sign showing that there were power sockets for use with laptops and phones. A civilised train!

As my new friend was pointing out, there were plenty of empty tables and seats along the train, so I probably really didn’t need to worry. I went back to the wardrobe, extracted it from its hole and pulled it down the aisle. But I couldn’t squeeze it between the empty seat and the table, whichever way I turned it. I thought about trying to heave it up onto one of the double seats, but that seemed a bit too much.

I carried on to the other end of the carriage, where there was another set of luggage shelves, and facing them a single seat. I wedged it in between this and the shelves, and it looked quite snug and safe. It occurred to me then that anyone who sees it probably thinks I’m carrying the spring and summer collection of some Milan or Paris fashion house with me, rather than the few scuzzy and stained selection of well-worn garments I’ve actually got to wear.

So, now we get back to the charming passport inspector.

Oh god, I thought, he’s seen it all the way up there on its own and he wants to know what’s inside it. The thought of having to open it for searching filled me with horror, not to say shame.

He was speaking now to the lady opposite.

‘It’s mine!’ I piped up. ‘The big case?’ Might as well face up to it. I held up my arms like a proud fisherman.

‘Black?’ he asked. I concurred, and he gave me a wonderful smile.

‘Ah, it’s yours? Then there’s no problem!’

And sadly, he didn’t seem to think a body search was necessary.

There was a sequel though. Evidently, that was Romanian passport control, because about ten minutes after we moved off again, the train stopped again and Hungarian police passed through the train with a lot less finesse. The police woman who studied my photograph didn’t smile once. I watched them as they walked down to the end of the train and past the Wardrobe in its nook, without taking any notice of it. But they were followed by an officer carrying a stepladder which was a tad disturbing. The silver haired lady and I exchanged conspiratorial grins across the aisle (I’d taken occupation of the table opposite and set up my laptop, with no objections from anybody) but they left the train without further incident.

 

Day 101 – On Coasts

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Day 101 Thursday 24 May

Constanta – Tulcea, Romania 131 kms/81 miles Cumulative total: 10,952 kms/6,805 miles

I lie in bed in the grey morning light and listen to the gulls and swallows,

I cling to the coast like a child to its mother’s skirts. Atlantic, Mediterranean, Cote d’Azur, Bay of Naples, Adriatic, Sea of Marmara, Bosphorus, Black Sea – a game where I have to run round touching every wall and corner of the room. But a few more days a little further up the coast – or is it coast, is it inland, I’m not so sure, maybe it will become clearer in a few more hours – and then it will be time to strike out diagonally, corner to corner, south east to north west. The next coast I touch will be the Baltic.

I read somewhere that the Black Sea is fresh water, not salt. Is that true? I didn’t get in deep enough to taste it. Perhaps the water rushing into it from the Danube – and other rivers, my geography is hazy but clearly there are other rivers, probably ones whose names I would recognise – is enough to flush it through. When I walked on the beach the other day the sand was wet a long way from the water’s edge, like a tidal English beach, but surely it can’t be tidal, not when the Mediterranean isn’t? Unless the surge of those rivers varies that much? And how does it all squeeze out through the narrow neck of the Bosphorus? The current through there must be fearsome.  I feel shamefully ignorant sometimes, but that’s what makes the world exciting, knowing that there is always more to know. How boring it would be to understand everything, to have nothing to discover.

Victor Saad of the Leap Year Project posted a little feature on me yesterday (which I’m very excited about!) and called me an ‘explorer’. Well, I’m only an explorer in a limited sense, after all, I’m following well worn paths that others have been down before me, though the seuquence and combination of them is I guess unique.

In Turin I bought a fridge magnet, with a quote from Proust (oh god, how pretentious does THAT sound?), translated from French into Italian of course, but my ropy Italian was just enough to decipher it, and my multilingual Latvian friend Ilze confirmed it for me: ‘The true voyage of exploration lies not in discovering new lands but in seeing with new eyes’. Or words to that effect. Which sounds good to me.

But to get back to the coast, I was thinking ,as I was lying in bed listening to the gulls, about seas and rivers, and one of my favourite metaphors about journeys and stories, which comes from JRR Tolkien, when he says (if I remember correctly) that all journeys are really one and all stories are really one, and it just depends where you start from, that you can step outside the door of your cosy hobbit-hole one morning and set off and who knows where you’ll end up? Which was one of the inspirations really for this journey, the first time I saw the new Eurostar terminus at St Pancras and realised all I had to do was catch a train (instead of going to the other platform and catching one home to Bedford) and I could be in Brussels or Paris with a whole continent before me.

And remembering that and putting it together with thinking about the sea and the rivers and fresh water and salt water got me pondering on how they’re all linked too, with the great cycle of evaporation and clouds and raindrops falling on land and into the rivers, in those sketches we drew in our geography exercise books, so that a message in a bottle dropped into the Black Sea off Constanta this morning could theoretically go south and through the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, the Dardenelles, the Med, the Straits of Gibraltar… well, you see what I mean.

That’s what I started thinking, when I woke this morning and was listening to the gulls and swallows (or are they swifts?) And this is where it’s got me. Which somehow seems significant, though I’m not sure why.

And now I’d better go and finish my packing.

Time to move on.

Day 98 Bucharest to Constanta, Romania: First impressions can be…

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Day 98 Monday 21 May

Bucharest to Constanta, Romania 223 kms/139 miles; cumulative total: 10,821 kms/6,724 miles

Romania is a strange country, at first it felt more alien than anywhere I’d been before, certainly much more so than Istanbul, which is very much a European tourist city (in the centre at least), and even more than Bosnia/Herzegovina and Serbia. Which is weird, because Irina, who I stayed with when I first got to Italy (in Terni), is Romanian, and living with her extended family and friends for a week, I felt very happy and comfortable.
I didn’t take to Bucharest at all. Things I’d read and people I’d spoken to really didn’t give me a very positive feeling towards it. I was harassed at the station by taxi drivers, and after a 21 hour journey I really wasn’t in the mood for dealing with them.
Still, the hotel was nice enough, a proper hotel room (or at least motel) with en suite toilet and shower, after the box I’d been sleeping in in Istanbul, though the location was hardly in the same class. I had the feeling I was in the middle of nowhere, near neither the station nor anywhere of interest, but the receptionist gave me directions to a nice enough restaurant where I had a pizza and a glass of red.
My train left at 2, and I checked out at 11. There just didn’t seem to be anything of interest in the neighbourhood, not a nice café or park. I asked the receptionists how long it would take me to walk into the centre. Answer: an hour. They offered to get a taxi for me (in fact there was a mix up and one actually started to ring for one), but to get a taxi into the centre, then presumably another one back to collect my case, then a third to go back to the station… it was all too complicated.
I left the Wardrobe and took the backpack, which was actually pretty heavy. There were trams going past, so I jumped on one, then found there was no way of buying a ticket. I’ve unintentionally fare-dodged like this in several places now! I stayed on for a couple of stops till we reached a cross-roads that had a vaguely pretty looking church down one of the roads at right angles, so I started walking in that direction.
What I was looking for was just somewhere nice to explore and sit for a while, a park or maybe a café where I would feel comfortable getting the laptop out – with wifi would be ideal, but I’m not that demanding. It wasn’t to be, but I did have a somewhat sticky walk, a coffee and then back to the hotel and taxi to the station.
When I got on the train, I found that I’d somehow inadvertently got a first class seat – there must have been a mix-up at the ticket office, I guess I thought she’d been asking if I wanted one ticket rather than two, or one way rather than return, when she’d been asking for first or second class. Still – unlike that time in Italy when I bought a first class ticket and couldn’t find any advantage in it at all – this did give me a power socket (though no wifi), so I plugged in the laptop and wrote through the two and a half hour journey to Constanta, (my competition entry for ‘I am Intrepid’).
I got hounded by taxi drivers at the railway station again, and then got outrageously ripped off and dropped outside a grim looking communist-era concrete block with graffiti on the door, weeds growing up through the pavement and a ‘sea view’ overlooking the docks (and I don’t mean a twee little fishing harbour).

  

I called the contact number I’d got written in my notebook along with the address I’d shown the taxi driver and explained who I was.

Did you get my email?’ said a voice on the other end. ‘What time will you be arriving?’

‘I’m here now’ I said. ‘Outside’.
‘What, in the square? By the museum? Give me about twenty minutes and I’ll be there’.
I looked at the building behind me, slightly more attractive than the others. It could be a museum. I sat down on a nearby concrete block to wait. I counted the floors of the building – five – and hoped my flat wasn’t on the top. At least it was daylight. I shuddered to think what it would be like sitting there in the dark.
A van pulled up that looked from the name on the outside like the road van of a mobile disco or band, and half a dozen or so young men got out. They went to a door a couple of doors down from the address and went inside, then came out carrying what looked like mattresses and loading them into the van. At first I couldn’t fathom what the connection might by until it occurred to me that they could be taking them to use as sound insulation for a rehearsal space.
I don’t know how long I sat there, but at last a youngish man with long dark hair in a ponytail arrived and introduced himself as Radu. He picked up the Wardrobe and led the way into the apartment block, which I hadn’t realised was open, and up to the first floor. No lift. After having been caught out a couple of times, I always put: ‘Ground floor preferred’ in the special requirements on my bookings, but not everywhere has ground floor rooms.
‘I was hoping it wouldn’t be the fourth floor’ I said.
‘I have got somewhere on the fourth floor as well’ he said, ‘but I noticed you’d asked for ground floor. I’m sorry this is the best I have’. As he’d carried my bag, it didn’t really matter to me anyway.
He unlocked the door and ushered me inside.
The apartment was lovely, pretty tiled floor, nicely furnished with a big double bed, sofas, table and four chairs, bathroom, and a full kitchen, absolutely spotless. He gave me the password for the wifi and asked me when I’d be wanting to check out so he could schedule to come over.
‘I’ll need to check the train times for Tulcea and let you know’ I said.
‘For Tulcea, it’s better to go by bus. I’ll find out the bus times for you and email them to you and then you can tell me when you want me to come and do the check-out’. He picked up a map from a pile on the coffee table, marked on it where we were and where I had to catch the bus to get to the bus station, and told me the bus number. He couldn’t be more helpful.
When he’d gone, I went out to explore. Across the other side of the square there was a restaurant, and behind it what looked like it could be the sea. From the map he’d given me I could see that I was on a peninsula, with the docks on one side, but on the other side there was a path and some steps leading down to a marina, and beach. The sun shone and the waves sparkled prettily, and the sea wasn’t black at all, just the usual greeny-blue.