Minutes after checking into our hotel in Budapest, we asked the lady at the desk how to get to the center of town. She gave us a map and showed us where to catch the tram at the bottom of the street.
We found the stop and noticed that the trams were packed and came rather quickly. There was a small machine which supplied tickets for 95 Forints (about 30¢). Our guidebook warned us that the tickets needed to be validated to ride public transit so to watch what the locals do when they board. We followed everyone onto the car, but nobody did anything.
We stood around confused as the tram started moving, and within
seconds a woman in a uniform with a red armband was coming through
the car saying "tickets, please" in Hungarian. All the people on the
bus showed her their monthly passes. I was thinking that she would
validate our tickets for us, but when I showed her the tickets, she
shook her head and told us, "Your tickets not perforated." She
pointed to a fist-sized 
red box near the
door that had been concealed by a standing passenger. We tried to
explain that we didn't speak Hungarian well, so she produced a
document that said, in English, "you have been found without a
validated ticket. Please pay a 1,300 Forint fine to this officer who
will give you a receipt."
The fine was only $4, but it was a big chunk of our cash as we had only exchanged a small amount of money at the airport. We tried to explain that we had only been in the country for a few minutes, and didn't know how the public transit system worked, but soon four of them surrounded us demanding we pay the fine. A Hungarian lady started arguing loudly in our defense, but the transit cops refused to let us slide. Thinking they were going to kick us off the tram if we didn't pay the fine, we got off at the next stop, but the four of them followed us off and surrounded us. I produced 3,000 Forints from my wallet and they gave us change and receipts.
We got back on the tram and went to the machine near the door to validate our tickets, but it seemed to do nothing when the tickets were inserted. A helpful passenger showed us that you had to pull the plastic slot forward to punch the tickets, something we never would have figured out on our own.
We were a bit concerned about being able to find vegetarian food in Eastern Europe, and restaurants that served Hungarian cuisine had mainly meat-based entrees. Italian and Chinese restaurants, however, were plentiful and all had meatless dishes. Almost immediately after the tram incident, we found a little pizza place where the food was great, and our large pizza and two large beers came to a total of $4. Most restaurants in Budapest weren't quite so cheap, usually ranging around $10 for two people. The most expensive meal we ate, which was a trendy four-star restaurant we would never even consider in the United States, came to only $27 for two (including wine). We were a bit reluctant to eat at the Fatal Restaurant, however...
After our pizza, we set out for Gellert Hill looking for the famous Gellert Spa, which is supposed to be a great place to sit and soak after a long flight. We never did find the spa--apparently we were looking for it on the wrong side of Gellert Hill. As we approached the top of the steep hill, I was so hot from all the climbing that steam was actually rising out of my hair into the cold air. Seeing nothing spa-like up ahead, we gave up and headed back down the hill. Near the bottom we saw a policeman and another man charging up some stairs we had gone around. When we got a little further down, we saw a shirtless man kneeling on a traffic island wailing and beating his fists on the ground. After the long flight and the already strange day, this was just too much, so we headed back to the hotel.
After our experience with the tram on Wednesday, we were quite careful about validating our tickets when riding public transit. Thursday, on the metro to buy train tickets to Prague for Saturday night, we had another unpleasant surprise from the transit authority.
Transferring from one line to another, we were once again confronted by a woman in uniform with a red armband who asked for our tickets. We confidently handed them to her, and she told us (in Hungarian and broken English) that we would have to pay a fine because we had used the tickets twice. It seems that in Budapest, unlike most cities, you need a new ticket to transfer lines on the subway!
We protested that we had more tickets, and hadn't actually boarded the train, but she would have none of it and demanded to see our passports. Rather than risking those, I pulled out my wallet and paid another 2,600 Forints. She helpfully explained that the receipt for the fine acted as a ticket so we wouldn't have to go back up the escalator to validate two more tickets. We now thoroughly regretted not buying the "Budapest Card," which our travel book dismissed as not being a good deal. It includes rides on all public transit, but as we only had two more days in the city, it was no longer an option.
When we purchased some tickets from a newsstand instead of the machine, we noticed that these had "single use ticket" and rules printed on them in English. The tickets from the machines, however, said nothing on the front or the back.
When I e-mailed Yugoslavian mail artist Predrag "Pedja" Popovic about our trip to Hungary, he said he would come to meet us in Budapest--I had been corresponding with him for several years now and was quite interested in meeting him. We arranged to meet in front of Gerbeaud, one of the most famous pastry shops in central Europe.
We met and ended up going to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, where we talked about life in Yugoslavia and the United States, and exchanged some things we had brought for each other. He was worried about being able to converse in English, but we were quite impressed with his ability to speak the language fluently. After dinner we headed back to Gerbeaud for some pastries and beer, where the always-helpful staff took a photo for us (left-right: Pedja, Mary, Ken).
We learned many interesting things about Yugoslavia from Pedja--he is a doctor who works for the health department, and told us about the dreadful condition of the healthcare system in his country. Doctors will only treat people who can afford to pay them a bribe, in a system that is supposed to be free for everyone. Even the quality of emergency treatment depends on how much cash you can slip the doctor at the hospital. He said that part of his job is to try to stop the corruption--certainly no easy task in a country which, he told me later, was rated second in the world in terms of corruption.
Now thoroughly convinced that all public transit in Budapest was little more than a trap to squeeze money out of tourists who didn't buy the Budapest Card, we were extremely careful about everything. We carried around ten tickets, and punched a new one whenever we transferred. We were on edge Friday morning as we attempted to ride to a large flea market on the outskirts of town called Ecseri Piac.
With help from the nice woman at our hotel, we set out for the flea market with directions written on a piece of paper. We rode the tram to Boráros, then boarded bus number 54 for the long ride out to Ecseri. I showed the driver the piece of paper and asked him to let us know when we arrived, and he yelled when we arrived at the stop.
The flea market was excellent even though we didn't buy anything. There was furniture, jewelry, decorations, stamps, obsolete coins, and even one man selling nothing but antique phonographs. We only had an hour to look around because we hadn't realized how far from the center of town this place was, and we were meeting Pedja in front of Gerbeaud at noon.
At 11:00 we made our way to the bus stop in time to see a 54 bus arriving, and we boarded it and stamped our tickets. We rode for a while before we both noticed that Boráros, where we had boarded the other bus, was not listed in the stops which this bus would be making. At one point, everyone got off the bus and a new group of people boarded. I tried to ask the driver if we would be going to Boráros, showing him my piece of paper, and he nodded and rang the bell to say he would let us know.
As we passed stop after unfamiliar stop, we noticed that there were two different signs for the 54 bus--one was in black and the other was in red with a box around it. Apparently we were on the wrong bus.
He rang the bell as we arrived back at the flea market--he had misunderstood what I was asking him. We ran across the bridge over the highway in time to see the correct 54 bus leaving. It was 11:45 before we finally got on the right bus, and we ended up being 30 minutes late for our meeting with Pedja. Fortunately he had gone into the pastry shop and sat at a table with a view of the square and yelled out the door when he saw us.
After getting coffee at Gerbeaud, we headed out for some more sightseeing and then on to Artpool to meet Julia and György. Artpool is an art research center and archive, and a mecca for mail artists. They showed us some of their publications, and then Julia told us what I had read about on the Artpool website--they had been carefully watched by the secret police during the communist years. György produced a 5-inch-thick file of documents that they had requested after the fall of communism--there was a complete copy of the Artpool mailing list, reports about mail they had sent and received, and memos about people they were friends with. In the early 1980s, Artpool staged an art show that government agents attended. The police documents about these works of art were recently shown in a re-creation of the exhibit, alongside of the works about which they were written.
Life behind the iron curtain was hardly ideal for artists who were judged to be "anti-communist"--almost all of their mail was intercepted or opened by the police. There were constant problems with trying to have shows outside the official system: the government blacklisted them and harassed them constantly. For years, they literally starved for their art.
While Julia was talking, György would disappear for a few minutes and suddenly appear with publications and stamp sheets for Pedja and me. When I asked how they perforated the stamp sheets, György took us into the bathroom to see the antique perforation machine, which had been a gift from Cavellini.
György enthusiastically demonstrated the Artpool website--even though I had spent some time at this website, I hadn't known about many of the features. He explained (through Julia, who spoke excellent English) how all the works by particular artists were linked together, and how everything was cross-referenced within the website. He showed us nearly-hidden things that could be clicked to explore whole new areas of the site. It was great to see all the hidden features demonstrated by the webmaster.
They took us down the street to see the Exhibition Space which was between shows, but many of the things which we had discussed were still on display, such as the secret police documents, stamp sheets and originals from their art projects. Finally, we bid them farewell after making a commemorative piece of mail art.
Saturday was our last day in Budapest, and despite the problems with public transit, we were quite sad to be leaving. We visited Heroes' Square, the grand monument to 1000 years of Hungarian history. Either it was being renovated, or it was the site of a new Christo piece, but the whole colonnade was wrapped in blue plastic and scaffolding.
Behind the square is a huge city park which features a castle, an ice skating rink, a great flea market and the beautiful Museum of Agriculture. Budapest has much to offer for sightseers, most notably Castle Hill which has a huge palace, a beautiful Gothic cathedral and some great museums. There's also an enormous pedestrian mall in the center of the city which is great for strolling at night (I suppose during the warmer months it's loaded with outdoor cafés). The views along the Danube are amazing too, especially the heavily-spired parliament building.
Later, we met Pedja again on Margit island in the Danube. We walked around the park on the island for a while before heading to dinner and then saying goodbye, hoping perhaps someday he would be able to visit us in the United States.
After our experiences with Hungarian mass transit, we were nervous about the train to Prague. With help from the ever-pleasant woman at our hotel, we took a taxi to the train station and waited. It was quite cold in the station, and like most train stations, it was filled with scam artists and the homeless. Our train was 30 minutes late in arriving from Bucharest, and we struck up a conversation with a Korean law professor and his family who were also travelling to Prague.
When the train finally arrived, we were overjoyed to find our sleeping car to be spacious and comfortable. There were two small beds, a sink which converted to a desk, and a mirror. The door locked, which is always helpful when you're going to be sleeping because European trains are notorious for theft. Apparently we were two of only a handful of people in the whole car, so the helpful conductor was available to answer my many annoying questions.
Interestingly, all of the signs in this Czech train were in five languages, none of which were English. Fortunately I already knew the rule about not using the train toilet in a station (when you flush, it just goes onto the tracks) because the warning sign was completely incomprehensible to me.
Once we were moving, however, things took a strangely familiar twist as a group of four uniformed men walked through the car saying things in Hungarian. I was heading for the bathroom, so I didn't pay much attention to them. As I was about to wash my hands, two of them started to pound on the bathroom door asking for my passport. Luckily I had it with me, and I handed it over, half expecting them to make me pay some sort of fine. They examined it and me before stamping an exit stamp for Hungary, then on the way back to our room I was confronted with two more men (these were Slovakian officials) who stepped into an empty room, examined me and my passport, entered some information into a small computer, looked at me again, then gave the passport a stamp. This was repeated at about 2 AM when we crossed a second border from Slovakia into the Czech Republic.
As we moved north, I noticed that it was raining and becoming somewhat colder. Overall, the train ride was quite pleasant, and I think I even managed to sleep for a few minutes despite the problems I usually have sleeping on any form of transportation.
We were excited to return to Prague after our brief visit a few years ago. Prague is simply the most beautiful city we've ever visited. Our second arrival, unfortunately, was not as pleasant as we had hoped.
We arrived at the Prague train station at 5:30 Sunday morning, not exactly the best time to arrive in any city. Our guidebook said that there were many room-finding services in the train station and people offering to rent private rooms, but unfortunately none of the services opened until after 6:00 and the room renters were nowhere to be found. The only people who were at the train station were dozens of beggars, alcoholics and homeless men, who harassed us for handouts (we had no Czech money anyway) and purchased beer from the snack bar. We formed a little circle with the Korean family, watched our bags and waited.
Finally a room-finding service opened up and we asked the man for the cheapest place in the center of town. In Budapest, the room finding service at the airport found us that great hotel close to the center of town for $30 a night, but according to this man, the prices were much higher in Prague. Most hotels in the center of town were over $100 a night ($60 far from the center, without a private bathroom). Knowing Prague, I realized that this was much more than we needed to spend, so we headed for another room-finding service that had just opened.
On the way in, a well-dressed man stopped us and asked us if we needed a room--this is what we had been hoping for, someone who rents rooms in their house. He was asking only $18 for the whole second floor of his building, including a full kitchen. We went with him to the place to take a look at it, chatting with him on the way. It was a bit out of the center of town, but when we arrived we were blown away by the place--the bedroom was huge and had a couch, a huge bed, and lots of furniture for our stuff, and we had our own set of keys so we could come and go whenever we wanted.
He said we would have the place to ourselves until the next night when another guy would be staying in the other bedroom (when that guy arrived the next day, he gave us a huge plate of homemade apple crepes!)
After unpacking, we headed back to the center of town to walk around. The Prague public transit system is excellent--clean, easy to use, clearly marked, fast and we didn't get hassled by transit police once. Of course, it wouldn't have mattered because in Prague you can ride for 60 minutes on any form of public transit with the same 25¢ ticket.
After exchanging our remaining Hungarian money and some traveler's checks, we tried to find a nice place for lunch.
Reading the menu outside, we noticed that they had some vegetarian dishes and the prices weren't too bad, so we decided to give Hotel Europa a shot for lunch. Once in the lobby, however, we were in for a surprise--the place was astonishing, with mosaic tiled floors, flowing Art Nouveau decoration and beautiful stained glass windows. The tuxedoed waiter behind the bar was really nice to us despite our ragged appearance after riding the train all night. He even opened the restaurant 30 minutes early for us.
While we were waiting for our food, we found the Hotel Europa listed in our travel guide, not as a restaurant or hotel, but as a tourist attraction because it's so beautiful. Throughout our meal, small groups of tourists would wander into the dining room, look around, snap a photo despite the sign telling you not to, then leave. In the meantime, our food was exquisite and the service was excellent as we were the only people there. In the end, this world-class meal ended up costing a total of $20.
Overall, Prague was much more vegetarian-friendly than most cities. Almost all restaurants had a selection of vegetarian entrees, and a few places served nothing but vegetarian food. One place called "Bona Vita" had a menu with two sides--meat dishes across from the same dishes made entirely with soy. I had an unbelievable "fake steak" there which was so realistic that I had to check with the waitress to make sure it wasn't made from a cow. That amazing meal cost only $7 for both of us. Prague even boasts an excellent and popular vegan (no dairy, eggs or animal-derived products) cafeteria called "Country Life" right in the middle of the top tourist area.
We were disturbed, however, by the increased presence of American restaurants. In Prague (as well as Budapest) there were now more McDonald's everywhere, as well as Burger King, Taco Bell and KFC. Prague even has a TGI Friday's.
Of course, Prague was just as magical as we remembered it, except now many layers of grime have been removed from the ancient buildings. Every structure in Prague is magnificent--ornate sculptures and frescoes adorn many building facades, as well as the Charles Bridge. Medieval, modern, baroque and Art Nouveau architecture all exist side by side here. We also had the unexpected benefit of being able to see Prague during the beginning of the Christmas season, and the old town square was festooned with all manner of decorations including a giant tree. Small shops were set up in the square to look like a Christmas village, selling all sorts of gifts. There was even a live animal manger and pony rides for children.
The first time we came to Prague, we had hoped to meet up with mail artist Ivan Preissler, but unfortunately we were only in the city for about 12 hours. This time, after many trials to figure out how the phones worked, we called him and arranged a meeting.
He apologized for his English, noting that he had not studied it in some time (he had learned it in secret during communist times), and we felt bad that we hadn't attempted to learn any Czech. We learned a little Hungarian, but decided that two languages would be too much for one trip. We sensed his frustration at trying to communicate in a language that was difficult for him, and it was also somewhat frustrating for us to try to understand what he was attempting to tell us. He is a brilliant person, with a vast understanding of art, history and philosophy, but he lacked the vocabulary to effectively convey his complex ideas to us.
Later we met him to go to some art openings, but unfortunately the first one was postponed for a week. He took us to a second show, a photography exhibit in a cool basement gallery, and explained how the art scene in Prague had changed for the worse in the last few years. The recent increase in tourism in the city has caused prices to skyrocket for small galleries, so now the only art that can get shown is work that will make money. He said he is sad to see the Prague he has known slipping away because of market pressures. For us it is still an incredibly cheap place, but for the Czechs it is quite expensive now compared to how it was only a few years ago.
We headed across the Charles Bridge to go to another opening, only to find that it was invitation only. Some Czech ladies were standing around and started asking me questions I couldn't understand. Ivan started talking to them and seemed to be relieved to not have to strain to translate his thoughts into English for a change. He told us about another opening which was far from where we were, but instead we decided to go back to the our room as it was getting late.
Spending only 50¢ each, we made it from our room across town to the airport in a little more than an hour thanks to Prague's wonderful public transit system. Once our plane finally left the ground, we said goodbye to Eastern Europe. Flying back to New York, one can't help but think about how much these people have been through in the last 50 years, and how dramatically everything has changed over the last decade. From Yugoslavia, which had "gone to hell" as Pedja put it, to Hungary which enjoys great freedom but also great poverty, to the Prague, which is being transformed into a Western city by tourism, and not everyone is happy to see it change. We were expecting an interesting vacation, but we got much more than we had expected.
