Ramblings

Hungary has some excellent food, especially if you like hearty food full of sausage, potatoes and paprika. It’s the kind of food that kind of sits in your stomach like a rock and you don’t have to eat again until the next day. A lot of times my meals would be served in a frying pan and my waiter would caution me, “Be careful! It’s hot! That’s the pan we cooked your food in.” I often wondered if they even had plates in that country.

Anyway, I was eating my pan of food and talking to the owner of the restaurant. The place was almost empty, they were closing up, and they clearly didn’t get too many itinerant foreigners in their restaurant. He wanted to know how he could move to New York and open up a Hungarian restaurant, a topic I will probably never be able to give reliable advice about. I told him I didn’t know much about it, but that people in the states would love Hungarian food. Lots of pork, great desserts, wine that gets you dancing on a table with a lampshade on your head after a glass and a half. I would eat at his restaurant everyday if I could. And I would, but I have no idea what the name of his restaurant was, or even a basic idea of where it was located in Budapest.

He asked me what I was doing that night, and I said I was probably going to wander around until I got lost and tired and then go back to the place where I was staying.

“Do you like art? There is a gallery nearby. They are having a display and party tonight. You could go.”

“I do like art,” which is very true. I like art quite a bit. “What’s it like?”

“I don’t know how to explain it in English. Some strange videos. Shit like that.”

It sounded right up my alley. “They will have lots of wine, also, of course,” he added. I was sold. I asked him how to get there and he drew me a map on a piece of butcher paper.

It took me about an hour to walk there. I kept getting lost because the map was written in Hungarian cursive and was nearly impossible to read, but eventually I found the gallery. I checked my coat, got a goblet full of wine, and started walking around. The gallery was exhibiting the works of John Wood and Paul Harrison, two English video artists. Wood and Harrison make videos of, among other things, chairs falling down and exploding Styrofoam. A lot of their art consists of short vignettes and sight-gags where the punch line is that a broom or a bucket of paint will fall over.

I was watching one video of theirs—”piece of paper”—where a man keeps a piece of paper stuck to a wall using a leaf blower, but when he turns off the engine the paper falls onto the floor. And it’s funny—at least I thought it was funny—but I guess you would have to see it.

Anyway, I met Hermann at this gallery. Hermann was a little younger than me and was from East Germany. He was in Budapest on a vacation from school, and had a lot of really big hair, all teased out and voluminous like Garth from Wayne’s World. It looked terrible on him. Really bad.

Hermann was a funny guy and was an exchange student in Canada for two years when he was in high school. He had nearly perfect, accent-less English, except that he would occasionally say things like willage or wodka or wideo, which is always hilarious the first time you hear it.

He said that living in Canada was terrible at first because he was placed with a religious family who refused to let him leave the house except for school. When he refused to join them at church, they locked him in their unheated basement in the middle of winter for over 24 hours. A pipe ended up bursting that night, and all of the water froze into a quarter-inch thick sheet of ice.

“I think it’s possible I could have died that night,” he told me about the whole experience. “You know, it gets very cold in Canada.”

The next Monday at school he asked the principal of his school for a new host family, but there wasn’t one immediately available so he had to live with the principal for a couple of days. “It was kind of weird,” he said.

His English wasn’t very good when he first moved to Canada either, so a lot of his classmates would tell him incorrect definitions to words as a joke, and Hermann was too trusting to look it up on his own. Later, when Hermann had to give a speech to his class about what living in Germany was like, he used the word kinky 30 or 40 times because he thought it meant interesting.

“It was so embarrassing. The teacher didn’t even say anything about it specifically. She just said I should use the dictionary more often.”

Eventually Hermann and I got tired of John Wood and Paul Harrison. The last video we watched was of the two of them, their legs strapped together, trying to escape from a machine firing dodgeballs.

Hermann asked what I was up to for the rest of the night, and I told him what I had been planning before I’d heard about the gallery. He suggested we try to find a party he had heard about, which he said was close. We left the gallery and walked to the subway station, which was only a couple of blocks away.

“Where is this place?” I asked, thinking we would be taking the train somewhere.

“I think it’s in this subway station somewhere. I’ll ask this lady,” he said. A party in the subway station? Great, I thought. A hobo party. I was skeptical.

Hermann walked over to the little booth in the subway station where a little old woman worked, selling tickets for the train.

“Excuse me, do you speak English?” he asked. Hermann was a smart guy and spoke a few languages, but Hungarian is an impossible language that no educated person would ever bother to learn. I felt a lot less inferior being in a country where even other Europeans had to ask other Europeans to speak English.

The woman didn’t even look at him and shook her head.

In German Hermann asked is she spoke German. She responded by slamming the window shut in his face.

Hermann was a little angry about that. “I swear Hungarians are the crankiest people on Earth.”

“I can knock on the window and ask her if she knows how to speak Korean,” I offered.

“No, I know it’s somewhere around here,” said Hermann, clearly missing my poor attempt at humor. “We just need to try all of these doors.”

Hermann started looking around the station and trying the handles on the doors, most of which bore that incomprehensible Hungarian script tagging the door as a maintenance room, or so I imagined. I really had no idea what these doors said. I’d seen enough bilingual signs around the city to realize that Hungarian and English, even though the share the same characters, don’t look even remotely similar.

Eventually Hermann found what he was looking for—an unmarked door down an obscure hallway out of sight from the grumpy ticket booth lady. He jiggled the handle a bit, and when it didn’t budge, he pulled a switchblade out of his pocket, jammed it between the doorjamb and the door, backed up a few feet, lowered his shoulder, and slammed into the door—popping open the lock and gaining us access to a set of stairs leading further down into the station.

Man, I thought. The things you can learn at a high school in Winnipeg. I wish I could pick locks. Once the door was open we could hear the sounds of music and people laughing coming up the stairway.

“I think we found it,” he told me, being completely casual about his latest B&E. “Let’s check it out.”

We followed the stairs downstairs, and you could feel the bass coming through the old brick walls. There was graffiti everywhere written with weird Suderland text, some old beer cans lying around, a couple of old posters for shows on the walls.

At the bottom of the stairs was another door, but it was easily opened without the help of a sharp object. We had clearly come in through the service entrance, and we were standing in a storage room that was full of cases of beer and bags of trash. We exited and found our way out to the dance floor.

It was a weird place, beyond the fact that we were in a dance club located underneath a subway station. The walls and floor were made of this old, gothic, rust colored brick. I thought that maybe we were in a genuine tomb, that there were actual corpses buried mere feet away from me on all sides. The techno music was loud and kept echoing against the walls, which was kind of desensitizing and making me dizzy, and the lyrics were awful, absolutely terrible. A man with a deep voice kept repeating, “I like is dance/You is the dance me/We must make is the dance.”

Everyone was wearing sunglasses.

“The people here are very eurotrash,” said Hermann, looking around. “Especially that guy.”

A guy was sitting in the corner, wearing what looked to me to be a shirt made out of actual chain mail. He was sporting a classic euro-mullet and big aviator glasses, a pair of impossibly tight jeans that weren’t very flattering, and an even less flattering mustache. He was kind of making out with this girl who wasn’t wearing a shirt, but she was mostly pushing him away so she could make out with this other girl, who also wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was trying to get both of them to turn their attention to him, but it clearly wasn’t working the way he probably wanted it to. You have to give him some credit for trying though. You can’t win if you don’t play.

I was thinking the same thing as Hermann, but hadn’t said anything. I didn’t want to offend Hermann, who I thought might secretly be eurotrash, or at least harbor a secret desire to be eurotrash. He had mentioned earlier that he listened to Günter and the Sunshine Girls, seemingly without irony, which I didn’t think was possible. And his haircut. Man, that haircut. It was totally terrible and 80s, worse than a mullet.

“Where did you bring me?” I asked Hermann. “Is this some sort of sex club?”

“No,” said Hermann, shaking his head. “Come on, man! This is Europe! We’re not Americans here.”

Hermann started looking around the club a little bit more. “We could probably get some ecstasy though,” he suggested.

It was tempting, but probably a bad idea. I was, after all, trying to be at least marginally responsible and safe. And I didn’t even know where I was in this city. All I knew was that I was in some sort of underground liar that was probably on the verge of collapse. The last thing I probably needed to do was trip balls.

Budapest is great though, really, you should try it….93,234 out of 100,000.