A Week in Budapest - Part II

    On Thursday and Friday we took short excursions to the countryside around Budapest.  First, on Thursday we went to the famous Danube Bend.  The Danube runs primarily east-west for nearly 2000 miles from the Black Hills in Germany to the Black Sea.  But just north of Budapest, the river makes a u-turn and then a sharp turn to the south so that it is running north-south when it divides Buda and Pest.  On a hill overlooking the Bend is Visegrad, a Medieval citadel with an incredible view of the river and the town on the far side.

    On the way to Visegrad we stopped to look at several Roman ruins including an amphitheater larger than the Colosseum. And of course there was an aqueduct.  The Romans needed their water and they loved the hot springs in Hungary.  When I listed everyone who had overrun Hungary, I think I forgot to mention the ancient Romans since that was so long ago.  Like Hadrian’s wall in England, there is a distinct line of demarcation in Hungary - the far extent of the Roman incursion.

    In the afternoon we drove to the huge basilica at Esztergom, the largest church and the tallest building in Hungary.  Like the castle at Visegrad, the basilica is on a hill overlooking the Danube.  Esztergom is the site of the coronation of King Steven, the first king of Hungary, in 1000, and the basement "houses" the crypts of several archbishops including Jozsef Mindszenty, famous for his opposition to both Nazi and Communist rule.  Gabe first took us across the Danube to see full on the commanding presence of the cathedral.  Across the river was Slovakia so we got a bonus half hour in a country I have never before visited. 

    When we returned to Budapest, we took a short, evening cruise on the Danube because Gabe assured us that it was the best way to appreciate how beautiful the city is.  As usual, he did not steer us wrong.

    On Friday we drove to Lake Balaton, the Lake Tahoe of Hungary.  It is huge - over fifty miles long - peaceful, and quite lovely.  Gabe assured us that everyone who lives in Budapest has a second home at Lake Balaton.  At the lake, we took a ferry ride to the Tihany Peninsula to visit the Benedectine Abbey there.

    The Tihany Abbey is another monument to lost Hungarian sovereignty.  There are three stories that dominate Hungary’s fate in the twentieth century.  Most recent was the Soviet Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1990.  Before that was World War II with Hungary’s shameful alliance with Germany, participation in the Holocaust, and then invasion by the Germans anyway.  Hitler decided that Budapest was strategically important and ordered that it never surrender but fight to the last man.  The Soviet Union “liberated” Budapest after pretty much destroying it in a siege that lasted longer than any other in the war except Stalingrad.  (It does seem like reading Hungary’s history is like reading the newspaper today about the Ukraine.)

    But the greatest source of Hungary’s national misery was the Treaty of Trianon which was part of the Paris Treaties of 1919 at the end of World War I.  Hungary lost two thirds of its land to Romania, the Czechoslovak Republic, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria.  It also lost its access to the sea and became a much smaller, land-locked country.  King Charles, who had been emperor of Austria and king of Hungary before the Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared after the Great War, came back to Hungary in 1921 to resume rule over his kingdom.  At Tihany Abbey, he and his pregnant wife were politely interred in a room while his fate was decided.  After five days, they were equally politely escorted onto a ship to Madeira, never to set foot in Hungary again.  His eldest son, Crown Prince Otto, grew up stateless with no passport and was finally allowed to return to Austria after he formally gave up all claims to the Hapsburg throne in 1961.

    On Friday night we had a special treat:  a concert for two pianos performed by Lucas and Andrew Jussen, two incredibly cute, talented, and young brothers from the Netherlands.  They are 26 and 29 years old.

    On Saturday we finally made it back to the Buda side of the river.  On Tuesday we had walked briefly through the Castle District and visited the historic Gothic Matthias Church. Today, after visiting the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts in Pest, we returned to Buda to enter the

Castle itself which is now the Hungarian National Gallery. Then it was back to Pest and the famous Opera House.

    David had grown up listening to his grandmother’s description of the fabulous Opera House in Budapest and really wanted to see it, but it was closed to tours.  So he bought a ticket to the ballet on Wednesday night that he had no interest in seeing just so he could walk into the theater and then leave.  Then we got lucky … sort of.  This week the Opera House opened for tours again, Gabe got us tickets for Saturday afternoon, and David blew off the ballet.  We got to the tour and saw … the lobby, the staircase, the balconies, and the lounges, but the orchestra was rehearsing and the theater was closed!  We asked the guide if we could just peek in and he told us that the rule is that you cannot go in during rehearsal, wink, wink.  We got the hint and lingered behind the tour and into the private boxes so we could see the inside.  Beautiful.  And David was happy.

    On Saturday night we went to another incredible concert, this time at the modern Mupa Theater.  Before the orchestra began to play, a choir sang one song beautifully and unaccompanied.  After the song they all took their places in the orchestra!  I know they are all professional musicians but who knew that an entire orchestra could sing as well as they played.

    And that was our incredible week in Budapest.  Gabe left on Saturday night and the Salems left early on Sunday morning, but the Sambergs stayed for half the day, so we went on our own to one of the more unusual sites that I have seen:  the Hospital in the Rock.  It turns out that the hills on the Buda side are laced with natural limestone caves.  In 1939 the authorities decided to link the caves and create an emergency hospital underground.  Designed to hold 60 patients, it had hundreds when it opened in 1944, with patients doubled up in beds and in the hallways.  The hospital has operating rooms and sterilizing equipment, but during the siege of Budapest, eventually food and water supplies were cut off.  Amazingly,  the medical staff kept on, doing whatever they could.  Later, in the 1960’s, the cave system was converted to a nuclear fallout shelter that, in retrospect, was very naively thought out.  It could hold only 60 people and had enough water for only two weeks.  Not very helpful if there really had been an atomic bomb strike.  So the second half of the tour was on the horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and nuclear wars.

    After the Sambergs left, I had half a day to continue exploring Budapest.  I visited the home/museum of a stained glass artist, Miksa Roth, and the Hungarian National Museum.  On that last day, Marcee and I also finally had a chance to wonder through some Hungarian shops, and shared a chimney cake, a delicious Hungarian treat.  A perfect dessert for an interesting week so soaked in history and misery.

A Week In Budapest - Part I

     More than two years after my last trip abroad, I had the opportunity to take a one week trip to Budapest with Marcee and Mark Samberg, David and Laurie Salem, and their wonderful guide from previous trips, Gabe.   Snce I arrived a day early, on Sunday I took two quick walking tours to orient myself to the city.  The first tour met at the main cathedral of Budapest:  St. Stephen's.

This St. Stephen is not the first Christian martyr who was tortured in gruesome ways.  Rather, he was the first Christian Hungarian king, so as Gabe told us later when we went into the basilica, it is less a church and more a monument to Hungarian nationhood.

In Liberty Park we visited the fascinating monument that Victor Orban had put up in the middle of the night and the counter monument which is all the papers encased in plastic and hanging on the string in front of the monument.  In fifteen different languages, the counter monument explains why Orban's view of Hungary's role in WWII is wrong.  The counter monument cannot be removed because of freedom of speech laws.  More on why Orban's view is wrong later.

   
    The other signature buildings in Budapest are the Parliament on the Pest side of the Danube and the Castle on the Buda side.  The most significant feature of Hungary's geography is that it is completely flat on the Pest (eastern side) and mountainous on the Buda (western side).  When the hordes of Mongols and Huns arrived from Asia, they could ride their horses no further than Pest, while Buda maintained more of a European identity.  So while the flat plains allow Hungary to produce enough food, over the century, the Hungarians were overrun by everyone.  The Huns, the Turks, the Russians, the Austrians, the Romanians.  Everyone took a shot at poor Hungary.

The tour of the Jewish quarter with Gabe's fellow guide Agnes on Monday was fascinating.  Three incredible and incredibly different synagogues survive including the Dohany Street synagogue which is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, seating 3,000.  This is not a synagogue.  It is a church, complete with an organ.

    Then we went to the Rombach synagogue.  This is not a synagogue.  It is a mosque, complete with geometric designs on the walls.

    Finally the Kazinczy Street synagogue which looks like a synagogue inside.  It fact, it looks like the one that I attended as a child.  All three synagogues have balconies for the women.  Hungary developed its own reformed movement which it called Neologue (Latin for new law).  Despite the organ, the movement was not nearly as liberal as the German Reform movement, and kept much of traditional orthodox practice including separate seating for women.

    Prior to the Holocaust, Hungary had a thriving Jewish community of over 600,000 people.  I believe that Gabe said it was the second largest community in Europe after Poland.  Hungary allied itself with Germany in large part because Germany promised to restore to Hungary the lands it had lost after being on the losing side in WWI.  Present day Hungary is only one third the size of pre-WWI Hungary.  Despite fighting with the Germans against the Russians, and despite having passed repressive anti-Jewish laws similar to the Nuremberg laws, Hungary refused to transport its Jews to the East, which of course was a euphamism for the extermination camps.  When Hungary realized in 1944 that Germany was going to lose the war, they tried to switch sides, and Germany then invaded Hungary and took over.  In the last year of the war, Hungary was the site of the fastest and deadliest deportation of Jews.  Fully one third of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews.

    The dispute about the Orban memorial has to do with the culpability of Hungary in the Holocaust.  Yes, the deportations did not occur until Germany took over, but although Adolph Eichmann came to Hungary himself, he had a staff of only twenty.  The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews took place with the active participation of the Hungarian authorities and police.  The Orban memorial assigns complete culpability to the Germans for the Hungarian holocaust, while the counter-memorials acknowledge, and to the extent that they can, apologize for, the role of Hungarians.  

  

On Wednesday we visited the excellent Holocaust Museum which, like the counter-memorials, explained in great detail the sad sequence of events and responsibility.  Then we went to the promenade along the Danube and the site of one of the most unique and touching Holocaust Memorials that I have ever seen.  Sculptures of pairs of shoes are lined up where, after the deportations stopped, Jews were lined up, removed their shoes and were shot, falling into the Danube.  To save bullets, several people were tied together and only one was shot.

    In the afternoon, we visited the Soviet Statue Park.  After the fall of Communism, people removed all of the large statues that the Soviets had placed prominently around the city, and placed them in a park outside the city.  All except the massive statue of Lenin.  During the uprising in 1956, people had tried to topple the statue but it was too big.  And it was too hard to remove from the plinth.  So they cut it off at the top of boots, and then tore the body apart.

And our late afternoon activity:  when in Rome ...

When in Budapest, enjoy a soak in one of the many hot spring fed baths, the fabulously ornate Szechenyi Baths.

More Chinglish

Starting once again with the extreme politeness of Chinese signs.  Not "Do not enter," but ...

This one warns you about everything.

These two signs were at the Museum to Mao's long march, and again, they get in everything.  I believe that "No Scribbling" means "don't write on the walls but I'm not sure why there is an emphasis on quietness.

How many ways can they politely tell you that the floor is wet?

One of my favorite signs was on the escalator at the Hong Kong airport.  It said "Don't look only at cell phone."  Very apt as everyone here has a cell phone and everyone is always looking at them.  Also, at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

Lijiang has canals running through it, so besides warning you about slippery floors, they very helpfully tell you not to fall into a canal.  The local tribe is the Naxi and they want the water kept clean.

A sign on the boat railing as I was cruising down the Li River looking at the karst scenery also warned about falling in the water.

Now, this is the reason for all of those warnings.  Of course.

This sign tells you where to return your audio guide, but the next two mystified me.  I never did figure out what they were talking about.

Another polite way to tell you not to walk on the fence.  Kind of like "No Spanning."

On the way down to Tiger Leaping Gorge and back up, there were very conveniently placed places to rest.

And I loved the name of this bus touring company in Lhasa.

On a slightly indelicate topic ...  Most Chinese prefer squat toilets;  western toilets are called potty toilets or handicapped toilets - appropriate since all westerners are handicapped in China.  Also, in most places, you put the toilet paper in the trash, not the toilet.  But I think this sign (in Tibetan as well as Chinese and English) has the order wrong.

And since Chinese people prefer squat toilets, you have to warn them not to squat on western toilets.

I saw one t-shirt that said "Pill out all the stops" and another inscrutably said "Be Current underway."  Huh?  But how many typos can you get into one sign?

And this was my favorite English language t-shirt of all.

And the one thing I can read in any language.

Hong Kong protests

I started my day with a ride on the famous Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor.  I am staying on the Kowloon side so I went to Hong Kong Island to ride the last double decker trolley in the world.  Central Hong Kong is primarily a business center, so I expected it to be quiet on a Sunday, but it was packed with people.  On every sidewalk and overhead walkway, groups of people, almost all women, were sitting.  They were eating, putting makeup on each other, playing cards.  I really could not figure out why there were there.

Finally I saw a lot of people in a plaza.  Someone was talking on a loudspeaker and there were signs hanging on the fence.

I'm still not sure, but I know that Hong Kong has a huge income disparity and affordable housing crisis.  The Filipino Migrant Workers Union sign leads me to believe that this is another Hong Kong protest that we don't read about - migrant workers wanting humane living conditions.

Another of the weekly big protests was planned for Sunday afternoon and one enterprising tour company ran a Protest Tour.  According to their website:

The Hong Kong extradition bill protest has undoubtedly attracted a lot of attention from around the world. However, retracting the bill is only a Red Herring and now the focus is more on the Five Demands.

Why is that and what are the five demands? And what’s the reason why we had this problem to begin with? Let’s answer all these questions by going near the protest! We will select the date/time where it will most likely be a peaceful protest so we can watch it from a safe distance. You will have the chance to interact with people in the scene and find out the answers yourselves!

In this tour, we will be OBSERVING the earlier part of the protest which is most likely to be rational and peaceful. Please note that you are responsible for your own safety when you join this tour.

The guide was fifteen minutes late and I thought I was going to have to follow the protest without the answer to all those questions, but he finally got there.  The Metro and Star Ferry had been packed.  While waiting for him, I saw hundreds of people arriving every minute, wearing black clothes and face masks.  I tried and I did wear black pants, but my darkest clean shirt was royal blue so I didn't quite blend in.

After the guide explained the reasons for the protest ... I am more confused than ever.  It is very different than what we read in the newspaper and does not fully make sense to me.  I thought the proposed law that started the protests was to allow extradition to China.  According to the guide, however, the incident that precipitated the proposed law was when a Hong Kong couple went to Taiwan.  The man killed the woman in Taiwan and returned to Hong Kong.  Taiwan (not People's Republic of China) wanted the man extradited back to Taiwan, but Hong Kong had no extradition treaty with Taiwan.  So the proposed law was to allow extradition to countries where there was no existing extradition agreement.  Kind of sounds reasonable to me that this man should be extradited to Taiwan.  But here is where it gets fuzzy.  First, Hong Kong could not make an agreement with Taiwan because China does not recognize Taiwan as a separate country.  And second, someone (who?) figured out that China could use the new law to extradite Hong Kong residents, and no one likes the Chinese judicial system.

It seems rather unbelievable to me that the extradition of a murderer to Taiwan could precipitate a crisis between Hong Kong and China.  I kept asking, and the guide explained it to me five times, but I still feel like I am missing something.  The key, however, is that the extradition law no longer matters.  Hong Kong has now withdrawn the proposed law, but it is too late.  Now the people are upset that the government of Hong Kong ignored the peaceful demonstrations of one million and then two million (out of seven million) Hong Kong natives.  Now the issue has morphed into a demand for universal voting.  As it turns out, the leader of Hong Kong is selected by 1,200 electors who are themselves elected by about 100,000.  And with the huge income disparity in Hong Kong, the few with the power to vote are either very rich or pro-China.  As explained to me by the guide and a few natives in my group, the vast majority of the protesters do not want or expect independence or democracy.  They just want the ability to vote and they want to feel that their government is listening to them.  Concept.

That was all the "touring" and "guiding" that we got.  Then we joined the protest which was a very peaceful walk from the southern tip of Kowloon up the main street for two or three miles.  The protest was "illegal" because the government had denied the request for permission to march.  Also, one of the leaders of the protest movement had been attacked a few days ago with a hammer by unknown assailants and was still in the hospital.  The guide told us to tuck in our shirts because police had been joining the marchers with their weapons under their untucked shirts.  Tucking in your shirt showed you were a protester.  When we got past the endpoint of the planned march, the guide told us the police could intervene and it was time to leave.  He would not take any money for the "tour."

I found a place to sit and read and watched as people kept marching on for at least another hour or two.  Periodically someone would start shouting or running, but most people were just strolling.  It became increasingly clear to me, however, that certain protesters were looking for a fight.  Dressed all in black with full masks, they started carrying sticks and were breaking up sidewalks to get pieces of rock.  They also were carrying gas masks.

After a while, one of them came over to me where I was sitting and said, Madam, you should leave; the police are coming.  I got up to see what was going on and the protesters were throwing the sticks and rocks and anything else they could find into the streets to create barricades.

Sure enough, the police showed up in tank like vehicles and drove right through the "barricades."  I saw smoke and thought it was tear gas, but it was protesters burning something in the streets.  The police used fire hoses with blue coloring on the protesters.  Apparently they use the blue color to identify them later.

As the police were marching up the street, they unfurled a sign that said:  Warning tear smoke.  Everyone who was not wearing a gas mask (including me) decided that this would be a good time to leave.

The Metro stations in the area were closed, so my food tour that night was cancelled.  Most of the shops and restaurants were shuttered anyway, including the ubiquitous 7-11s on every block.  In Hong Kong, the 7-11s are owned by one of the two biggest local corporations.  Fortunately, the Circle-Ks were still open and selling Coke Zero.

With the Metro closed, I had to walk back to my hotel.  At 8 at night, there were still protesters and police everywhere.  (The protest had started at 1:30.)  I have to say, however, that these were the nicest protesters.  Besides telling me politely to leave (and calling me Madam) they were cleaning sidewalks from the blue water and directing traffic around the barricades.

So I have very mixed feelings.  I read the New York Times article on the protest when I got back to my hotel and I'm not sure we were at the same protest.  Actually, I was at two different protests.  The first was a very peaceful march by hundreds of thousands (a million again?)  Hong Kong residents.  My guide and the two natives in my group were representative, as were the throngs of people, young and old, who strolled up the street.  The New York Times barely mentioned this protest.

Rather, the Times article emphasized the barricades and tear gas and the fatalism of the protesters who were not sure they would come back alive and unharmed.  The article also said that the protest has no leaders.  I would disagree.  This was too well organized.  The protesters knew where and when to move beyond a peaceful walk.  Helping clean streets and directing traffic?  That was spontaneous?  And to the extent that things did get somewhat violent at the end, I think that was the intent of the protesters, not the police.  It seemed to me that the police were trying hard not to get into a fight.

It is so easy to read the paper in the United States and say, I stand with Hong Kong.  I'm not sure what that means.