For lunch, I went down to a little quiet restaurant-café called Marvelosa on the main street on the Buda side that runs parallel to the Danube.  While they had a cute menu with a variety of homemade Hungarian-style dishes, I had the daily special: töltött paprika (stuffed peppers).  They were so delicious.  It was one of those throwback moments to childhood when you see grandmothers preparing something so weird looking that you absolutely refuse to eat it until you’re in your twenties and it dawns on you that you’ve truly wasted more than a quarter of your life NOT eating things stuffed with meats and cheeses in creamy reductions.

Along with the peppers, there were some perfect little potatoes, and the desert course was a light watermelon spread drizzled with honey.  In addition, I had a sparkling water.  All of this, with tip, was a little less than 800 forints, which is about 5 US dollars.  Even with as weak as the dollar is and as strong as the Hungarian forint is becoming, it was still an amazing price for a wonderful meal.

In order to get out of the castle, you have to walk down.  Central European castles are on perches for obvious reasons, and even though they have since politely added stairs, the trek down and back up again is a good way to work these off any day:

Which is a good thing, because since I’ve been here I’ve eaten about 35 loaves of bread.  I’m not sure what these things were called, but they were from a stand outside of the grocery store.  They were crusty on the outside, warm and fluffy in the middle, crisped with butter and filled with some kind of herb goat cheese.  O.  M. G.  I haven’t found a reliable cardiologist here yet, but I think if I continue to live in the castle district I can put it off for awhile.

So, as I was saying, one of the faster routes down to the river (Danube) and the main drag is through Fisherman’s Bastion, which is especially cluttered with tourists this time of year.  Yesterday on my way to the store I saw a cute little couple enjoying a rest on the statue of St. Stephen:

In the evening it thunderstormed for over an hour, which is even more amazing when you can reach your hand right out of the window and feel the cool drops.  I don’t know why there are so many screened-in windows in America, but it seems like everywhere in Europe you just unlatch the wooden locks and push the windows open.  Haley posted a great example of this from Paris last week, and I recall it from my time in Italy as well.  It’s peaceful.  It encourages outsideness.  Seriously, America, unscreen yourself.  You’ll be a lot happier.

And yesterday, while I was running in the a.m before the flocks of tourists spilled from their big luxury busses, I saw many such windows open to the morning.  And from one window in particular at the far end of the court by the military museum (which overlooks the Buda hills) I even heard, swooooon, the sounds of someone using a typewriter.  Oh Budapest, I love you.

I think that Sundays have been classically known to be days of rest.  So I thought there wouldn’t be as many tourists today. Like the vacationers at the southern shore, I figured there would be a lull between tour groups coming and going into the city.  Alas, there seemed to be more people than before, though I think more Hungarians, which was quite relieving to actually hear someone speaking the native language.

This afternoon I went to Nyugati Pályaudvar, the main railways station in Budapest.  As I was looking around the station, I couldn’t help but imagine myself somewhere in the near past—my hair fresh from curlers, my leather suitcase snapped into place and inside neatly pressed letters from an old lover or friend.  If you are the kind with a history of Old Country, this place is probably how you imagine the Old Country.

After the train station, I went to Margit Island, which is an island in the middle of the Danube.  It’s used mostly as a recreational site now (there was even an American football match drawing quite a crowd at the entrance stadium—I think the Budapest Cowboys were winning), though many of the sites date back to the Middle Ages.  Pre-16th century, the island was filled with nunneries and cloisters.  Then the Ottomans wars came and the holy folk fled and the churches were mostly destroyed.  In 1908, the whole island was declared a public garden and several of the structures are now UNESCO heritage sites.

After dinner, I went to dinner with some friends at Champs, which is a small, dark sportsbar.  We watched Wimbledon, drank some Hungarian beers, and ate salads.  On the way back to the first district, we stopped at Fisherman’s Bastion and had some ice cream.  I can’t remember the last time I had a cone, but eating it with a view of Parliament isn’t a bad way to be re-introduced.

Yesterday, on THE Fourth of July, I embarked on a great Swedish tradition:  trip to IKEA.

While the signs were as unfamiliar and perplexing as the grocery store, rest assured that the cold, organized comfort of every IKEA still translates.  In the food court, I counted about 80 percent of shoppers eating Swedish meatballs and some kind of Swedish cake.  And of course, to Hungarianize it, almost everyone also had a plate of fries.  And wine, beer, and tea.  Any country that openly encourages drinking wine and beer before 3pm in a superstore that smells like wood, ruler tape, and minimal chic is a country for me.

The first pictures in today’s slideshow are some of the architecture on the way to Ikea—
Most from my district (I).

In the second part of the slideshow, you’ll see shots of A Magyarok Nagy Asztala, which means “The Great Table of the Hungarians”, a festival I stumbled upon in the early afternoon.

This morning, as I walked around Buda Castle to plot out my running path, I ran into about a zillion tourists all flocking toward some food, wine, and palinka festival!  It was kind of a renaissance festival but with cuter costumes, faster whips, and better food and drinks.  And only a few people who weren’t actually working there were dressed in costume so hallelujah.

Anyway, I met my friends there and we walked around, waited out a thunderstorm in the Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár (the national library), and had several shots of pálinka.  I think we had peach, cherry, and my favorite, pear.  It burned a little going down, though there couldn’t have been a more perfect accompaniment to the setting sun burning away the storm clouds above the hills.

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I’m not exactly sure how I should start writing about the last two days (or is it three days?—I’m still a little confused with the time change).  But since airplanes and airports and baggage claims and for some reason not going through customs nor anyone asking to see my passport are such boring introductions, I’ll just start at the place where G parked her car on the sidewalk.

It’s seemingly quite normal here.  After we left a little delivery truck took the space, and it was nearly three times the size of G’s car.

The streets are narrow and in my neighborhood, the Castle District, they are also stone.  So if people didn’t swing onto a sidewalk now and again no one would be able to park or drive down the roads.

Here is an example.  And this car, the Trabant (originally manufactured in East Germany but exported to most of the communist bloc back in the day), is a real auto treasure of Hungary.  Especially the green ones.

Yesterday I was at the Vásárcsarnok and the big grocery store there SPAR, by the Batthány tér metro station.  It’s a bit overwhelming to realize that you have no idea what the labels say nor can you really take a good guess since the language is so unfamiliar.  But, I didn’t get too discouraged.  I did see another American girl who walked up to a young Hungarian man and said:

Girl:  Hi, do you speak English?

Guy:  Yes.

Girl:  Okay great.  Do you know where the tortillas are?

He didn’t.  But, it can’t hurt but try and ask where the comforts of home aisle is.

The truth is that I’m still suffering a bit from the jet lag, so instead of writing too much, I’ll let the pictures I took last day and night from the neighborhood tell the story of my first days.  It’s remarkably beautiful here.  All joking aside about Hungarian stereotypes, horses, folk dresses, Jesuska decorating the Christmas tree… it’s really so beautiful here.  And it’s not just the architecture, which from the pictures you can see is stunning, and probably the first thing to hit Americans as being distinctively different from home.

It’s the way the light edges the stone and the colors of the homes on the hills setting in prismatic hues.  Of course all around there are people with cameras and big telephoto lenses, but it’s seems almost impossible to capture I think.  Anyway, here is almost what I’ve seen the past few days:

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In the middle of a South Carolina lightning storm, the last thing I should be thinking about is Budapest, Hungary.  But nothing can escape being wrapped around light and heat here, especially not thoughts of new homes (or flying through summer storm systems to get there).

But there is a stillness here tonight.  Everyone has turned away the lights and let the moon and stars and lightning pull up the shadows of the ocean.  It might only exist on the southern shore, though I am particularly biased in these feelings.  I’ve always wondered where it comes from here– the weather, the tides, or maybe the easiness of most of the people.

I’m not from the south, nor the shore or the southern mountains.  I was as a Yankee in Georgia for a year, though my blood certainly gets closer than I do:  my Hungarian relatives having arrived in West Virginia from Budapest over a century ago.

But even here as my time in America seems to be blinking out, I haven’t learned enough about my Magyar past yet, except how to spell and pronounce some names correctly.  Though in fairness, the 1200 10pt-font pages of the HISTORY OF MAGYARORSZÁG wasn’t exactly best comprehended between sips of Mexican Margaritas at Pool Bar Jim’s.  Anyway, I should be able to come to it some on the plane tomorrow.

What do I know?  I’m not sure.  What do I even know about America, really?  Honestly, the very first thing that came to my mind now was the gal that bounced down the beach this morning in a Confederate flag bikini.  OO Rah, America.

I know that Hungarians aren’t really fond of dryers, think baby Jesus decorates the tree and wraps the presents on Christmas morning, and who every August parade St. Stephen’s bony hand around the capital.  But something tells me there’s a little bit more to learn about a country that seems to have a large amount of people who in spite of being tide pools for grand emotions, seem also to really enjoy their lives.

Thank you for sticking with me and Penzilla for the past five years and I hope that you will find something interesting at Budajest as well.  I promise not to turn the majority of my posts into post-pálinka American-in-Budapest revelations.

Tomorrow I’ll be on an airplane back to Hungary, the opposite (and slightly higher and faster) journey my family made a century ago.  They sent themselves over as coal miners to build up America and the modest hopes of their families.  I’m returning as a writer who can hopefully add something to their story.  So even though this site will be more about Buda than Jes, how’s that for the American dream?