Eastern Europe retroblog: back to Budapest

Kate enjoyed her freshly squeezed orange juice at a sidewalk café.

You know that stage in every trip when you realize you are 100% ready to be home again? Hopefully you don't reach that point any more than a day or two before your scheduled departure date; but in our case we'd been traveling for five weeks and Kate had been missing her right arm for nearly two [we'd said goodbye to Elliot in Sarajevo], so I think we reached it as soon as we got back to Budapest.

I started writing about some of the minorly unpleasant things that happened over those last couple of days, but I think I'll just show you some nice pictures and be done with it!

Exterior and interior shots of the Great Synagogue (Kate took the latter); a pretty fountain sculpture in a city park; a wonderfully atmospheric old shopping arcade; me at the same sidewalk café, having the most delicious coffee (with honey!) ever.

And that concludes my Eastern Europe retroblog. We're going to Peru for three weeks next month, so there'll be plenty more travel photos coming soon!

Eastern Europe retroblog: Budapest

Kate and Elliot and I went backpacking through Eastern Europe in May and June 2007. We wanted to combine travel with some sort of service project, and while that part didn't turn out exactly as we'd hoped (more on that in the Bosnia installment), we still had an amazing time. Just looking back over the photos is thawing out my toes (more snow tomorrow, says the weatherman, and these days the weatherman is always right), so I think I'll start retroblogging a bit before the three- year mark.

(Three years! How did that happen?!)

We did Budapest for a few days, then Romania—Sighişoara, Braşov and Rasnov, hiked in the Piatra Craiului mountains, back to Braşov, Sinaia, and to Bucharest to meet my Romanian publisher—then a night train to Belgrade, one night in Kotor in Montenegro; then Dubrovnik, Split, and Hvar Island in Croatia; then a night each in Mostar and Sarajevo, where we split up—Elliot had to go home, so he took a train back to Budapest, and Kate and I went on to Brčko (still in Bosnia) to volunteer at a summer camp for ten days.

There aren't as many descriptive journal passages on this trip; I was focused on taking notes for stories and working on rough drafts of answers for a Mary Modern Q&A, because the book was coming out two weeks after we got home. I also read even more than I usually do when traveling—three Angela Carter novels, The Pesthouse, and a bunch of other good books. I copied this little gem from Wise Children (one of my very favorite novels) onto the first page of a new journal:

“It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.”

(So true, it hurts.)


(Kate going for attempted drowning #2 at the Gellert baths.)

I have to say, apart from the baths Budapest wasn't my favorite stop—we had a weird hostel experience, and all the supposedly quaint and old-fashioned bars and cafes the guidebook recommended turned out to be tourist traps.

Of course, the middle-aged men in speedos at the Szechenyi baths made up for all that...

And here are a few shots from Castle Hill (the painting is a detail of Klára Zách I, on display at the Hungarian National Gallery; better view on Wikipedia):



Elliot: “It’s not that I’m being contrarian. It’s just that I’m right.”

Outside the opera house—we did the tour, which was worthwhile. (I have a thing for sphinxes. I don't know why, except that they're awesome.)

Next installment: Sighişoara, Romania (my favorite!)