Brasov - Day 1

A new experience, traveling on an overnight train. We booked two seats in a 6 passenger compartment (we weren't sure how that was going to be if there ended up to be 6 of us there, but a private compartment was pretty expensive, so we took our chances that the train wouldn't be full. We were right, who wants to travel to Brasov in the middle of winter unless they live there or they are crazy travelers.  We ended up with our own private compartment. In fact, by the time we got to Brasov we were the only ones in our car. Here we are when we first got on the train:

and here is a photo showing one whole side of the compartment.

You can see the very top bunk where we ended up putting our suitcases. I would not want to sleep there - about 12" between the bed and the ceiling.  Then you see where the headrest is and the mirror - that whole piece folds down to make a middle bed, and then the back of the seat folds down into the lower bed. And it's that way on both sides. So if there were 6 people in that compartment, we would have all been really really good friends by the end of the trip.

It was suggested that we eat lots of garlic before riding through Transylvania at night, but we didn't, and also didn't see any vampires. At about 10 p.m. we stopped at the Hungarian border for the border police to look at our passports and stamp them, then less than 30 minutes later we stopped in Romania and repeated the process.  When you enter or leave the EU you get a stamp on your passport - upper left is a ring of stars (EU) with the initial of the country, on the upper right is an icon of a train or plane (or maybe a car) showing how you entered or left, and bottom left has an arrow showing if you were coming or going. Except for when we arrived in Paris at the beginning of our trip, no other country checked our passports until now. Not sure why they did this time. 

I loved sleeping on the train...the motion kind of rocks you to sleep. The beds weren't like my bed at home, but not too bad. I don't know what a tall person would do though. I had just enough room to stretch all the way and I'm 5'6" so a taller person might not be so comfy.  It was a 14 hour trip from Budapest to Brasov, and we slept through a good bit of it. We kept saying we wish we could get on a train and go back to Memphis. Fourteen hours on an airplane cramped in a tiny narrow seat with no leg room as opposed to fourteen hours in a train compartment where we can stand up, walk to the dining car, lie down and sleep, have plenty of room to sprawl.  I guess we need to win the lottery so we can charter a private jet whenever we travel.

We woke up to snow - pretty new snow, still falling and very pretty to look at.

We got to the hotel at 9:30 and checkin wasn't until noon, but they said come back in an hour. They ended up giving us an apartment - the best room we've had our whole trip. I wish we were staying in this room 4-5 nights!! Or that we could have taken this room along with us the whole time. Although we have had great rooms, except for Budapest which was a bit small. And dark (they needed more lights).

Thru the left archway is the bedroom with the bathroom beyond it, and the kitchen thru the archway on the right.

And here we are in another neat medieval town. 

 

This is the town hall. They used to burn witches in this square.

When we get lost and need to find our hotel, we just look for this street.  Mike, they put an "i" in your name where there shouldn't ought to be one, but close enough - it keeps us from being lost!!

That's a castle up on the hill.

These kids were so cute. Instead of a stroller or a little red wagon, the little boy was being pulled around town on a sled.

In this square tonight there was a big political gathering. Apparently there have been riots in several locations in Romania in the last few days protesting austerity measures. In Bucharest there have been  riots with tear gas. Of course that's where we are headed on Monday so we can catch our plane Tuesday.  We've always heard when you are traveling and see a political demonstration, especially when there are many police around as well, it's best to walk in the other direction. Which we did tonight.

 This is the Orthodox Cathedral

Scattered around the town are some really big hills - right in the middle of the town. This is one of them. There is a chair lift that goes up there, maybe we will do that tomorrow.

Tonight we ate hamburgers in an Irish pub. Armando's been dying for a hamburger.  Me, I'm still dying for a big hot mug of American coffee. Not these little tiny cups of hot strong bitter coffee. But that will have to wait a few more days.

Can anyone tell me why, no matter where you are in the world, all the graffiti looks exactly the same?

Budapest, Day 5

On our last day in Budapest we had to check out of the hotel at 10:00, so we left our bags in the hotel and went to the National History Museum, on the recommendation of Fred, one of our fellow Turkey travelers from last year. It is a really well done museum, from prehistory until 1989. One exhibit showed films of the 1956 uprising and the destruction the Soviets caused.  Obviously we didn't take this picture, with the green leaves on the trees. It was raining and cold and we didn't get around to walking across the street for a photo.

   

Then we stumbled on a quilt store. When Armando went to take the picture, the store clerk nearly had a heart attack  - NO!  NO PHOTOS!  All these designs are copyrighted!!! But Armando had already taken the photo.  She had fabrics, DMC threads, yarn, embroidery stuff, a little of everything for crafting. I didn't see any fabric I wanted to buy. The calico I looked at was selling for about $14.00 / yard.  We also saw a gas station, and calculated that gas here costs about $7/gallon.  And we complain about $3.

After the museum, our feet were tired, it was raining, so we just decided to hang out in the hotel lobby until train time.  You were going to get this edition of the blog on Friday, but in the lobby I couldn't pick up the free WiFi signal we were getting in our room. And the desk clerk wouldn't sell me an hour of time, only 24 hours for 5 euro. So you got a reprieve.


More about Hungary's political situation. My niece Ingrid sent this information:  "The religion thing is scary, but only the tip of the iceberg. Hungary's democratically elected center-right governing party has legally rewritten the country's consitution so they can't be voted out of power, ever. There's no one piece of legislation that you can point to as being obviously wrong, but when you combine them, you get a practically unbreakable death grip on the government."


From December: A NY Times article  and a blog
And an update.


My sister wrote that she had heard on NPR that "the EU is threatening to expel Hungary because their leader seems to be changing laws and trying to make himself into a dictator, and they are insisting that he preserve the democratic government to remain a member. Maybe the motorcade you saw was a delegation from the EU come to tell him be better back off or else."


The guide in the parliament simply said of the new constitution that when they have elections next year that it will be interesting because there will only be 200 seats to fill instead of 350 or so. But she said, we are a small country, maybe we only need 200 representatives. Of course she works inside the parliament and probably has to be careful what she says.


And according to Rick Steves guide book what led up to the current situation is this:
The transition in 1989 from communism to capitalism was rocky - people wanted freedom to travel and pursue the interests that democracy allowed, but they weren't prepared for the sudden reduction of government services.  Hungary joined the EU in 2004. The Hungarian Socialist Party that took control of parliament in 2002 stubbornly maintained and even extended some social programs, prompting experts to worry that the mounting public debt would bankrupt the country.

In 2006 the prime minister gave a secret speech to the party's leaders after the Hungarian Socialist Party won re-election. The intent of the speech was to give his colleagues a wake-up call. But his method - ranting on about how badly they had fouled up (and using very colorful language) - was not such a good idea. Especially since, of course, someone at the meeting secretly recorded it, and soon Hungarians turned on their TVs to hear their prime minister detailing the ways he and his party had driven their country to the brink of ruin, and then shamelessly lied about it to stay in power: "We have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have... We did not actually do anything for four years. Nothing...We lied morning, noon and night."

Immediately there were demonstrations and calls for his resignation, but he didn't step down until 2009, clearing the way for the current bunch.

Are all politicians idiots or does it just seem that way?

Budapest, Day 4

We walked back near the Parliament today to take some pictures - when we were there the other day our camera froze up - literally!! - for about 20 minutes.

On October 23, 1956 the Hungarian uprising began.  By nightfall, 200,000 people filled the square behind the Parliament, calling for Imre Nagy, the one communist leader they believed could bring change.

A statue of Nagy, forever watching over the Parliament.

 He appeared and gave a speech urging the protesters to be patient. But some of them marched to the National Radio building and tried to take it over, while others marched to City Park and cut the statue of Stalin off at the knees, toppling the statue.  On October 24 Budapesters woke up to find the Red Army troops had moved into their city.  Nagy again pleaded for patience and cool heads. On October 25 a huge crowd once again gathered in the big square behind the Parliament.

Shots rang out, Hungarian and Soviet soldiers opening fire on the mostly unarmed crowds from the rooftops you can see in the pictures above, at least 70 were killed and 100 injured.  Read "The Bridge at Andau" by James Michener.

Fighting went on for 10 days, and at one point it looked like the Soviets might let Nagy institute some reforms, but on November 4 he was arrested and never heard from again. By the end of the uprising, 2500 Hungarians and 700 Soviets were dead. More than 15,000 were arrested, at least 200 were executed.   After this uprising, the Soviets were no longer able to claim that people behind the Iron Curtain were happily living there.

Do you recognize this guy? 

President Ronald Reagan. He is at one entry to the square where the American Embassy is, but with the Hungarian Parliament in the background. Of course he is a very popular person around here since he was president when the Iron Curtain fell.

Then we went to the Dohany Street Synagogue, the biggest synagogue in Europe, second biggest in the world after one in NYC.

The reason it sort of looks like a church is because the architect was a Christian who built churches and so he went with what he knew.  It was built around 1850 and during WWII the Nazis used it for a while as headquarters.

Hungary was an ally of Germany during WWII so they weren't occupied until later when they finally balked at sending more and more troops and money. Germany invaded them in 1944, and in just one year, managed to exterminate 600,000 Hungarian Jews. Most were sent to Auschwitz, many were executed in Budapest, sometimes lining them up along the Danube and shooting them so their bodies fell into the river. We never did find this monument - it's somewhere near Parliament.

  The remaining Jews were forced into the ghetto, an area of one tenth square mile, containing 70,000 people. Many people died of starvation and illness. This cemetary behind the synagogue is a mass grave for the people who died in the ghetto. 

Our guide gave us some interesting information, though I'm sure it was colored with her political views. Apparently the current conservative party in power rewrote the constitution a year or so ago, (we learned some of this during the Parliament tour as well). The new constitution lowers the number of representatives in congress from 350 or so to 200. And they put in a sentence into the constitution declaring that Hungary is a Christian nation. I can see where that would make the Jews a little nervous. She said the current crop are ignorant idiots. Not because they are conservative but because they are stupid. They go to University and as soon as they get out they go into politics and never have a real job and have no clue about anything. Sounds awfully familiar to me.

 She said the state helps to support religions.  During the last census there was a place to indicate what religion you were but it was voluntary whether to answer. Most Jews chose not to answer, so now the synagogues get very little help since according to the census there aren't many Jews.  She also said that in the schools in Hungary they teach about the holocost, but they don't teach about how the Hungarian Fascist Party was a willing participant. They blame it all on the Germans.  I can certainly see why Jews might not want to stand up and be counted, given the history, and the wording in the new constitution.

One in 3 people who died at Auschwitz were Hungarian, one in 10 who died in the Holocost were Hungarian. Again in this museum we saw yellow stars that the Jews were forced to wear and it gives you chills.


This is the Tree of Life Memorial that was funded by Tony Curtis who is a Hungarian Jew. The weeping willow signifies mourning, and each leaf has the name of a holocost victim, but if you look again it is also in the shape of an upside down menorah.

Then we just walked around awhile - here are some street scenes.

A lot of the sidewalks have people lanes and bike lanes.

Everywhere we have been, we have seen McDonalds and Starbucks ALL OVER THE PLACE!! and a lot of Burger Kings and TGI Fridays. And a KFC.  What wonderful things we export!

After a rest we decided to tour the Opera. I showed you photos of the outside yesterday.  Gold leaf all over the place, more of those rugs with 100,000 knots, more artificial marble (you can tell the difference because if you touch real marble it stays cold, while the artificial stuff will warm up from your hand).   I've never been a big opera fan, and never been to one, but maybe next time we come to Europe we ought to go just for the experience. 

 

And of course, I can't go all day without a lion!!

 And then outside the Opera house we found a lion more to Armando's liking.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there will probably be no blog tomorrow.  We are leaving at 5:30 p.m. on an overnight train to Brasov, Romania, so unless the train has WiFi, we'll be back Saturday!