I landed in Budapest at 2:15 local time, hoping that my tour guide for the day hadn't abandonded me for being 45 minutes late. Things were made worse when for some reason the airport staff forgot to open the door at the end of the tunnel from the plane into the gate, so we were all trapped for about twenty minutes. When we were finally released I rushed to customs, expecting the standard third-degree and body cavity searching, only to be surprised that apparently all it takes to get into Hungary is a desire to get into Hungary. I flashed the officer my passport, and I was in.
In the sea of people waiting for passengers to disembark was a man in a shirt and tie holding aloft a handwritten sign that read "KER". This, I knew, must be Miklos, my guide for the day.
After briefly echanging pleasantries Miklos and I headed over to his taxi, whose meter would be off that day so that I could pay him without the relatively new capitalist government getting its grubby hands on it. I would learn alot about capitalists and their grubby hands today. After only four tries the van got started, and we drove into Budapest, Pest side first.
As it turns out, the two most important words to Miklos are "terrible" and "fantastic", and these two terms can only be used to refer to two distinct time periods. If an event happened before 1993, it was terrible, but if it happened after then it is fantastic. This is true even if Miklos means to say that something recent is terrible. Take, for example, the Prius, about which he said "it has no manual transmission and is much too expensive - fantastic!" Anyways, I can see why he uses those words for those time periods. Most of the sights we sighted had to do with the Hungarians fighting off fascism and Comminism, so anything that had to do with those earlier eras is terrible and the country's new freedom is fantastic (even though he bemoans the fact that now that people have thre freedom to do whatever they want, they no longer want to do anything).
That being said, the sights were terrific. We saw all of the most popular areas, like Heroes Square, the Citadel, and the Palace, as well as many beautiful views of the Danube and the Jewish area. What impressed me so much about the city is the way the the architecture and buildings of the past are integrated seamlessly into the city of the present. I guess that is something that many older European cities will have in common, and I am only impressed by it because my native land is such a baby in comparison, but it was really nice to see a city with some history behind it, and have a guide who (seemed?) to care about it.
After our five-hour long date, Miklos took me back to airport where I waited with an eclectic mix of people for the tiniest plane to ever land in Israel (not really, but I'm used to jumbo-jets with movies and game rooms and outdoor pools). Of course this flight, too, was delayed, but this time because they'd oversold the flight and had to bribe people to give up their seats. Then they found two suspicious bags (the owners were from Amsterdam - I wonder what they were hiding...) that they had to take care of. Once that was done we were off, finally, to Israel.
