Familiar Territory with Family

Discovery Walks in familiar places.

The only condition my brother-in-law had to drive his wife, a five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, a four-year-old son, and a one-year-old toddler 1,185km from Budapest to Dusseldorf was to see the North Sea. That was it. His wife, also wanting to dip her toes into the sea, happily conceded.

The actual drive went alright, from what I was told. Two days of driving with a night's rest in Bavaria. No crappy weather. No drama on the autobahn. The kids went into their car seats without kicking, squirming, screaming, or any other drama – they're far more well behaved than I remember me and my brother being on the family road trips.

Although, there was little room for squirming or kicking because the car was rammed full with a playpen, a stroller with three different seat attachments, baby clothes in heavy vacuum-sealed bags for the expected arrival of our own little road-tripper.

They arrived on a Thursday night – Kata's birthday. I worked in Aachen all day Friday, arriving in the evening to a raucous apartment filled with three happy kids who spent the day at the Dusseldorf Aquarium, walking along the Rhine, and being young tourists in the Dorf. They were running from room to room, playing with their umbrellas, and rolling around atop their air mattress. Their long march across the Dorf hasn't seemed to tire them out.

We were back on the road on the weekend, heading to Ghent. The kids, all settled into their car seats had one tablet to share. The baby wasn't going to use it (she has little hands and fell asleep before we left the Dorf), so the other two had to share it. The older sister took it, telling her younger brother she was going to use this tablet, but she had an invisible tablet he can use. She handed him the invisible tablet, which he accepted. I don't now how long that move will last, but I hope she gets a lot of mileage out of it.

The details in Leuven's city hall.

The road were taking was one Kata and I took two years before. We were driving towards Ghent, with a stop in Leuven for a snack. Leuven is a fun place to stop. It's at a point on the highway through Belgium where you think it might be wise to stop before you hit Brussels ring road with its wild combination of reckless drivers, merging lanes, and diplomatic license plates. Leuven's city hall is the real treat. You don't see it until you turn a corner and then you walk right into a gothic building covered with gilded stone and statues.

And Ghent? 

Instagram-able Ghent!

Ghent is great. We had visited in the spring, so there weren't the August crowds in the streets of the old town like there was this time around. The canals, which were still when we visited, were choked with boats. The weather was far more warmer and sunnier. The Flemish summer can be amazing. And yet, the press of people and shoppers and cafe drinkers didn't push in on us. The town was beautiful when we visited in spring of 2016, but it felt livelier now and, in a way, better. I kind of envied the road warriors for seeing it the first time that way.

The umbrellas were the ultimate toy on this trip.

Each place they visited, the kids brought along their colourful kid umbrellas (I think Kata told dreary rainy horror stories to her family in fairer-weathered Hungary). When we arrived at our airbnb in a Belgian hamlet, they took their umbrellas onto the big deck in the back, swung them around and played with them until the sun set behind the neighbouring deer farm.

We awoke the next morning, packed up quickly and began the next leg of our super-quick road trip: Bruges.

Bruge-ing on a Bruges boat in Bruges.

Everything you heard about Bruges from that movie is true, but August is no time to visit. Unlike Ghent, where the streets accommodate the visiting hordes and is made more vibrant by them, Bruges felt like a stone and human vice. The streets were choked with tourists. You could stop and appreciate a medieval building or snap a photo of some pretty facade, but you'd risk being shoved by a ill-tempered tourist trying to eat his waffle and walk and take a selfie at the same time. Not a great place for several small child. But they have boats in Bruges! So everyone piled in and saw Bruges properly.

And what about the North Sea?

That was our first stop in the morning. It was wild and windy at Ostend, so you had to wear a windbreaker instead of a bikini, but we had the beach almost to ourselves. The tide was out too, so we walked a desert-length of beach to reach the sea. Shoes and socks were taken off and the adventurous travelers waded in as the tide rolled in.

Reaching the North Sea.

Of course, this whole odyssey was never just about the seeing the North Sea. It was also about family time. It was about the first of hopefully many family visits to Dusseldorf from the Hungarian side. It was about sharing the familiar and the new on the road together. And it was also about wiggling some toes in the Sea.

Our DIY Wedding in Denmark

The beige waiting room was like something out of a modern fairy tale.

It's the morning of our wedding and I'm picking wild flowers in a field an island in the Baltic Sea. The flowers are for Kata's floral hair arrangement and my lapel. In less than an hour, we will walk to Aersokobing's town hall and stand before the registrar to be married.

It wasn't an easy journey to this field on Aero island. We took a plane to Amsterdam, another plane to Bilund (of Lego Land fame), then a bus to Vejle, a train to Odense, a local train to Svendborg, and finally a ferry to Aeroskobing.

But the journey began months earlier when we walked into Düsseldorf's city marriage office and saw the couples lined up out of the waiting room, into the hallway, down a flight of stairs and into the lobby. As if that wasn't enough, a newly married couple and their wedding guests were navigating through this snarl of waiting not-so-nearly weds.

We'd later learn that couple, if they were both foreigners like us, would have spent hours talking to bureaucrats in their embassies and the German government, gathering important documents from their homeland, getting them translated and certified, and then waited a year for the honour of pushing their way through a crowded government building to be allowed to the privilege of being married.

We wanted none of that.

One alternative was Denmark, the Las Vegas of Europe, because of the ease of getting married. Especially for a couple of foreigners living in Germany who had neither the time, patience, nor inclination to gather their required papers and wait months for an appointment to find out more papers would be needed before they could get on an eternal waiting list. There's a baby on the way, after all.

We found one of several businesses whose sole purpose is applying for a marriage on your behalf in either Copenhagen or Aero Island. In a matter of weeks, we had an appointment to get married.

We weren't the only couple running to Denmark for a quick and easy town hall wedding. After our comically long journey to Aeroskobing, we saw couples everywhere. Some were mixed race couples – an obvious sign of two people from different countries dodging huge document requirements and embassy visits, like us. We'd see others strolling the old town, the women with noticeable baby bumps, also like us. There was also a young-ish, extremely grumpy couple staying at our hotel, who we'd see later at the town hall just after their wedding, still looking miserable, unlike us.

So, ours was not a unique decision. The staff at the town hall knew the drill. When we arrived to confirm our marriage and get a time for the next day, the elderly lady behind the desk made copies of everything and gave us our appointment quickly and efficiently. A rarity for city government.

The old town of Aeroskobing.

So, the next morning, after picking our flowers, I return to our little cottage in the compound we share with mostly Danish retirees. It starts to rain as we finish getting ready – a few attempts with my tie for me and Kata fixing her hair – and return to the town hall, a little wet, but punctual.

We wait in the little grey, government-issue waiting area and watch one young couple come out, with their parents and a few others, and watch another young couple pace impatiently around the town hall office. Kata gets up to the bathroom, maybe because she's nervous and maybe because she's pregnant, and while she's away they call our name. I wait at the door of the office for Kata to finish up and she rounds the corner directly down the hall from the office. So, I whistle "Here comes the bride..." and Kata walks down the aisle... well the hallway.

There are three elderly ladies in the room. One is the registrar, who will marry us, and the other two are our witnesses, who will, you guessed it, witness the ceremony and snap photos with Kata's phone. The whole thing will last fifteen minutes. After a bit of small talk, the registrar reads a prepared statement, asks us do we, which we do. We put on the rings and we're married. There's a kiss, papers to sign, and a quick toast. Then we're outside in the rain, which we've been told is good luck in Denmark – these marriage office people know their stuff.

When the rain clears up, we spend the afternoon with Kata's nice camera and a tripod, DIY-style, snapping photos around the island's famous beach houses. We eat a steak dinner at a local restaurant. We spend the next two days exploring the island. We mentioned our plan to the registrar, who was surprised because people don't spend any more time here than is necessary to get married. They get in and get out. That is a shame.

Aero island is beautiful!

The old town is lovely, with its 200-year-old houses and post offices and stores and restaurants, but a walk away reveals so much more. The Danish islanders grow lovely gardens filled with neat rows of blooming flowers and apple trees. The entire island is covered with long, golden grass that swishes around in a sea breeze that rarely stops.

The place is clean, and not the German-style of clean where it gets dirty and workers clean up the mess at dawn, but clean in a way that it doesn't get dirty because people take care of it. We saw very little litter. Most people rode their bikes. And they smiled and waved as we took our wedding photos on the beach, totally at ease with marriage tourists wandering their shores.

Like any island, the pace is relaxed. We found ourselves getting into that groove. Our only tasks was breakfast and then one errand (registering at the town hall one day, getting married the next, mailing documents another day). The rest of the day was spent visiting the beaches, another town at one end of the island, eating freshly smoked salmon, or cooking in our cottage and watching TV where the English isn't dubbed, but subtitled so we can enjoy it without straining.

Yes, it would have been fine to get in, get married, and get out, but lingering here turned it into a mini-honeymoon with a wedding in the middle of it. We missed our family and friends. We wished our loved ones could have been here for it. But in the end, it was just the two of us, and that's all we needed to make it perfect.

Newly weds.

Hockey Night in the Dorf

Good seats for the face-off

You experience a strange feeling of familiarity when you go to a hockey game in Europe. On one hand, you know this place, the hockey arena, with its smells, sounds, and light chill in the air is comforting for a Canadian.

On the other hand, you’re in Europe. Everything is in German. Fans sing soccer-esque chants you don't know. And there is mulled wine and several varieties of sausage served at the concession.

These two sensations competed with each other when we watched the Dusseldorf EG host the Iserlohn Roosters. 

The old school hockey fans in Canada might cry foul about the Europeans game and its lack of fights and blood and missing teeth. Do not be deterred, the game here is great to watch. 

While Canadians like to think that hockey is their game, and that they play it the best, there is good hockey elsewhere too. In Germany, it’s fast and exciting: The final score was 5-4 for the Dorf. 

The league’s players are career players – some have played in the NHL or one of the other minor leagues, so they bring just enough skill to make the game look good but are able to make the odd error that can turn around a play and make your pulse race. 

It’s also not as nearly as physical as the North American game – even if both teams have a healthy contingent of Canadian players on their rosters. The game is fast, focusing on skating and passing, with few stoppages and plenty of back and forth hockey.

Germany might be a soccer country, but a country of 80 million people also has its niche sports, like hockey, whose fans will not sit silently in its niche. 

And this is the beauty of going to niche sporting event: the fans. There are not a lot of German hockey fans, but the ones that show up are serious. They’re wrapped in their team scarves, wearing jerseys and toques, and bejewelled with countless pins. 

We had seats just a row over from the Roosters’ booster section, which was full of blue-and-white-clad fans who made the drive to the Dorf from Iserlohn. They were on their feet most of the game, singing, chanting, and cheering. 

Those rowdy Rooster fans.

The hockey fandom in Germany seems to be at the grassroots. Most of the boxes in the arena were empty. Hockey here is truly relies on the fans, and not big money or cTV contract dollars or corporate sponsorships. Soccer teams in Dortmund or Cologne attract the big money here, but of course with that comes the casual fans. 

In this way a German hockey game feels more like a minor league game. 

The NHL hockey game is great, awe-inspiring, featuring the best players in the world. It's also remote, distant, and, in cities like Toronto, dispassionate. The cost is also high, so most fans like me watch it from the couch at home.

The minor league hockey game is different. Sure, it doesn't have the monumentality of a pro game, but it's intimate and accessible. This was the hockey I grew up watching live  like my hometown's London Knights and later my university's team, and later, in Toronto, the Marlies. 

These smaller arenas were full of families, students, fans, and people who don’t leave at the second intermission to beat traffic. And while the passion that draws Canadians to watch every level of competitive hockey seems unique to us, it's not – that hockey passion is in other places as well (for example, I worked with a Hungarian hockey fan in Budapest).

In Germany, you go to a Dusseldorf EG because you love the team or the sport, so the enthusiasm is electric in a place like this. That passion is also likely more powerful because you're a hockey fan in a soccer country, so you might as be passionate and a little eccentric.

There’s not a lot of things I miss from home, mostly stuff that can't be bought: Family, friends, the comfort of familiar surroundings. But there are some small comforts that help assuage the homesickness for a little while. Hockey, as niche as it might be in Germany or Hungary or anywhere, is one of those things.

Mulled wine and hockey. Mmmmmmm....

Best Beer Bragging Rights

Who has Europe's best cheese? Ask a Frenchman, Italian, or a Dane about their cheese and watch the bloodbath begin. 

The best chocolate? Belgium, the Swiss, and the Dutch are too peaceful for a blood bath, but a Chocolate-Off might ensue.

Few topics bring out exceptionalism quite like the debate over who has the best beer, which I find strange. I come from a country that doesn't brag about having the best beer, just beer that's better than anything the Americans can brew.

After four years of painstaking research and over-sampling in bars and patios all over Europe (it was difficult, but I did it for you dearest reader), I have made a list in an attempt to untangle Europe's finest beer nations... in no particular order.


Germany
Germany has great factories, cars, public transit, and decent sausages, but their breweries are hamstrung by the country's Beer Law, which stipulates making beer with only hops, water, and barley. 

There are great tasting wheat beers and pilsners, and solid locals brews like Kölsch and Altbier. But! Germany has no stouts or frothy ales, no fruity beers, if that's your thing, or limited run seasonal craft beers.

So, the beer here is great, but Germany doesn't quite have the best beer, but it has the best beer laws, which is a wonderfully German thing to be good at.


Belgium 
Some might be angry at Belgium for holding up the Canada-E.U. free trade deal, but remember they have the best beers. 

Trappist beers, the dark beers, the strong beers that make you wobble on the way to the bathroom, fruity beers. They do everything and they do it proper, and not just proper-tasting, but also in proper fancy glasses. 

In a way, I'm sad about the successful free trade talks. Failed talks would have meant less beer for export to Canada and more beer for me here.

Fancy Boy Glasses in Antwerp!

France
There are no French beers. If a Frenchman wants a beer, he'll drink wine. If a tourist at a bar wants a beer, he is served a Stella Artois – from French part of Belgium, at least – and ignored the rest of the night. Or so I've heard.


Netherlands
The Dutch have a great business model: Make Heineken, and sell it all over the world for a ridiculous profit and go laughing to the bar to order a round of delicious Belgian beers.


Ireland
Guinness. It tastes like beer and coffee combined. Yay for Irish Beer Coffee! 


Czech Republic
Those crazy Czechs drink more beer per capita than anyone else. And it shows, because they have some good beers... and good beer bellies because you need somewhere to rest your beer.


Slovakia
The Slovak beer is almost as good as the Czech beer. But they're a mountain people, so they have local-made hard liquors. I tried some on a hike through Tatra. It warms your toes, face, and brain, and made me feel ike a lightweight. Don't mess the Slovaks' mountain juice.


Hungary
Another wine country, although it's underrated. Their beer is good. Not as good as the Czechs, but better than the Slovaks. My advice? If you're in Hungary, get the beer if you want, it's good, but drink the wine, drink the fröccs, hell, drink the palinka in responsible quantities – or irresponsible quantities if you want a good and/or bad story.

Poland
That beer before liquor rule applies to Poland as well.


Portugal
They drink their beer out of little bottles. Why? Because then you drink it quickly before it gets warm. This is important because their beer is nice cold, and mucky when it's warm. The Portuguese have also perfected the Buy-Two-Beers-at-a-Time Move to match the average drinking speed there.


United Kingdom
We make fun of their warm beer because we just don't understand. Then you're there and you're all confused by the beers with the strange names in the pub and in you point all confused at one of the taps and then you drink it and it's room temperature and you pause because you're realize you're an ignoramus and it's actually pretty good. 


Bulgaria, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia
They have their own national beers and they're all good. But I can't chose which one is best because they're all good and indistinguishable from one another and I don't want to take any sides and– oh my god, it's like a metaphor!

Beer.

Watching the Euro in Europe

In its simplicity, soccer can be a beautiful, entertaining sport. 

It can also become a tremendously boring sport when you add layers of national leagues and divisions with friendlies and the exhibition games and qualifiers as they do in European professional soccer.

But once every couple of years, the haze of confusion and boredom lifts for a few weeks and I'm able to sit back and enjoy simple, fun soccer again. Sometimes, I even call it football during these lovely tournament times.

It's a bit easier to get emotionally invested in a few national teams, rather than cities with millionaire mercenaries from all over the world. There are no friendlies or exhibition games, every game matters and you can feel the immediacy in the play. They're playing for home, after all.

Yes, the Euro brings the sport of soccerball back its simple beauty, even to this ignorant North American with his hockey and baseball.


More teams, more fun

The tournament widened from 16 teams to 24 teams, so the enthusiasm level across the continent was incredibly high for this year's Euro. 

There are two opposing arguments over this. One side claims this diluted the tournament's talent pool – I heard this from two people, one Portuguese and one German, both accustomed to Euro appearances.

On the other side of the argument, this new format allowed national teams to make their first appearance – either their first ever or their first in a long time – on the international soccer stage. Hungary, Albania, Iceland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all brought a unique energy to the tournament.

Maybe it wasn't pretty for those soccer aficionados, but it definitely made the game more exciting while those teams were playing.



Germany is Europe's America

I was able to get this feel around those teams' enthusiasm largely because I live in Germany. This is one of Europe's new settler countries, where more and more people are from somewhere else.

Italians, Hungarians, Portuguese, French, Turkey – almost every nation represented has a few nationals (except for Iceland, I suppose) living in Germany. They crowd the bars, cheer in the streets, and adorn their German-made cars with their national flags.

When Portugal won on Sunday night, there was shouting and honking and celebrations up and down the busy street near our flat. Being from Toronto, this is standard stuff for an international soccer tournament – especially if you live close to Little Portugal, Little Italy, or Roncesvalles – but it's nice to see in an increasingly multicultural Germany. 


Soccer Mad Portugal 

We were in Lisbon last week and it was difficult not to notice a rise in the usual soccer passion whenever Portugal was scheduled to play that day. 

You would pass a cafe with a TV out front and it's replaying earlier matches from the tournament, usually one that Portugal won. Kids were kicking balls in the street. Adults were kicking balls in the street, while trying not to spill their beer. 

When the semi-final game started, we were just finishing dinner and awaiting the bill. After a longer than usual wait for the dinner's reckoning, we looked around and saw every waiter huddled around the computer screen with rapt attention. I don't think they were studying our bill.

When the final started between Portugal and France, we were in the air returning to Germany. We landed thinking it was over. Almost every male on the plane fumbled for their phone, deactivated flight mode, and rushed to the exit when they realized the game was well into overtime.



Ode to Gabor Kiraly and the Sweatpants

I am also a grey sweat pant aficionado, yet I don't think I have celebrated the Gabor Kiraly enough in this space. 

This is a goalkeeper who wears sweatpants because they are more comfortable than the standard long socks. He kept Hungary in a couple of games, which is clear proof that comfort affects performance. It might be a good reason to start wearing my sweat pantaloons to the office.

Comfortably watching the match.

Moving to a new strange place

I almost didn’t come out to Budapest. It took the sage advice of two buddies to convince me to come out. Six months, I figured, I’ll see how it goes.

Twenty-two months later I am leaving Budapest with a mix of feelings. I’m excited about the next adventure in a strange place. I’m sad to leave an incredible city where I’ve made great friends.

Thankfully the sadness is softened by the fact that I’m only going to Germany. I will come back, which is good because I don't like goodbyes and I really enjoyed discovering this city.

Coming here was indeed the right decision. 

See you all again soon!

A love letter to hardcore from Budapest

Bane in Budapest. There's nothing quite like it.
Photo by Arnold Torma

After a few months I moved to Toronto, I took my friend Dan to my first hardcore concert in the city. Raised Fist was in town and this was a big deal for me since they couldn’t get past the border for a Montreal show when I was living there.  I wasn’t going to miss this chance to these Swedes tear a place down in Canada, even if all my friends were seeing them in London and I was stuck in Toronto.

Midway through the set I turned to Dan and apologized. The band had played a few of their hits, and they were really giving it all, but the people in the half-filled venue were unmoved. They leaned, they talked and they drank their beers, ignoring the background music.

I wanted to tell Dan hardcore shows aren’t like this. I wanted to tell him about floor punching at friends’ shows and a lead singer who did flips off the wall of London’s Embassy Hotel. I wanted to tell him about getting knocked down by a windmilling fist in a mosh pit only to be quickly hoisted back up by everyone in the pit. I wanted to tell him that hardcore punk is not like this.

Getting in hardcore then was a matter of being around at the right time and place. For a few years London experienced an explosion of punk rock anger (there’s a lot of angst in London). Eventually it attracted everyone else and mutated into something more mainstream and less poignant. Nonetheless, as many bands died away, other band members started their own side projects, carrying the hardcore torch along, even if it was a smaller torch.

To be in that scene, in your teens and early 20s, had a profound impact on the music I was listening to. We’d go watch friends’ bands, which also opened up a world of bigger bands, some of which we saw see live and others we’d discover on a friend’s car stereo.

I’ve never grown out of loving that music. That love is so elemental, I can’t really explain why. You have to love it to know what I’m talking about. You play old albums and look forward to seeing those old bands and the newer (also younger) bands live.

As my London friends and I trickled up to Toronto, we got to know the bands in the area (Fucked Up, the Cursed, Haymaker, to name a few) and got to see the energy and devotion of the city’s scene. My initial dismay at Raised Fist soon evaporated. Before I left that city and its scene for Hungary, one of my concerns was missing out on live shows. There was no need for panic.

Budapest enjoys a devoted following for hardcore. I don’t know if it’s the anger and frustration floating below the pretty facade of the city (if so, Budapest has a lot in common with little, post-industrial London) or if it’s simply disaffection with the consumer culture /climb-the-corporate-ladder mentality of the big city (like Toronto), but they love hardcore and punk there..

This is fed by bands occasionally making stops here, and they are rewarded with incredible crowd enthusiasm. Last week, a few friends and I went to a hardcore festival to see, among others, Bane.

The band is a Budapest favourite. They’ve played here twice in the two years I’ve been here. They turned down the large stage and opted for the smaller one. That tight, sweaty little room exploded when they came on. I haven’t seen energy like that since the London hardcore days.

When we saw Sick of it All play an outdoor show in the rainstorm – we were soaked from hoodie to toe – a big crowd still showed up. Some were under umbrellas, others huddled along the edges, close to the covered bar, but most were in front of the stage with in the pissing rain.

For the last song, Us vs Them, the band invited the crowd onstage. Kata, who told me over and over again that this isn’t her kind of music was impressed. She had never seen a band do that.

As a side note, hardcore is usually something you keep discreet at the workplace. You listen to it with earphones and try not to wear objectionable t-shirts, like the Oxbaker one with the elephant stomping the guy's head. I work with two guys here who are also into the hardcore. We share music, go to shows, wear the t-shirts – this has never happened since I started working grown-up jobs in offices.

All of this is to say that there’s a genuine love in Budapest for an angry, niche genre of music. It's unexpected, but it is an immense relief for me. Expats seem to sacrifice a lot of their interests when they move somewhere, hardcore would have been a tough one for me to let go of.

Turning 32 in Hungary

The summer before I left Toronto I turned 30. 

The build up to that age was somewhat stressful, even for a man. It's one of those ages that society has decided that you should have your shit figured out.

On my 30th birthday, I went to a hardcore punk concert to see Refused, a band I have loved since I was 18. The next day I started work at a new ad agency.

I don't know if I will ever have my shit figured out – I quit that sweet job to move to Budapest and make ads for Big Tobacco – but I was closer to having myself figured out. 

The older I get, the more I know that getting my shit together has less to do with having a house or a bunch of kids and more to do with being comfortable with myself.

This summer I turned 32. After a weekend in one of Hungary's wine growing regions with Kata, we shared a birthday dinner at home before we joined a few friends at a Sick of it All concert – yes, another hardcore punk concert.

It's only an ideal birthday for a handful of people – even Kata was surprised at the prospect of watching aged punk rockers on my birthday – but it was me, it was fun, it was perfect for my birthday.

Badacsony! Wine! Heat!

Birthday dessert

The older I get, the less good I am at these cell phone photo thingys.

Friends in faraway places

The customs guy looked at my passport and back at me. “You’re from Canada, on your way home from Stockholm?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Home, as in Canada?”

“No, home to Budapest.”

He scrunched his brow. “So, what is the purpose of your,” he looked down at my customs form, “one-day visit to the UK?”

“I’m visiting a hometown friend.”

He looked at my passport again. “London?”

“Yes, London, Canada. We’re hanging out here in the bigger London.”

He waved me through after a few more routine questions and that prompted more routine answers from me. The second leg of my journey began.

Beautiful Stockholm at night.

Beautiful Stockholm in the day.

The journey ultimately kicked off a few days earlier, with my arrival to Stockholm. Alek – of past bro-mantic adventures in Rome and Vienna – was already there. He was looking around town, getting chummy with the hotel staff, finding bars – important groundwork.

Our timing could not have been better. It was the first spring weekend in city. Swedes, like Canadians on the first day of great spring weather, had donned their short sleeves and skirts, took to their bikes, flocked to the bar patios, and stubbornly stayed out as long as they could before the post-sunset hypothermia set in.

The vibes in Stockholm were amazing. The city, already beautiful in its own right, was made friendly and cheerful by this sunny, blue-skied weather. We hit the patios, visited museums, wandered the streets and the waterfront, and went clubbing. We saw a shipwrecked ship in a museum (the Vasa), ate salmon, and decided Stockholm was a damn fine place.

That is an old timey Swedish warship inside a museum.

The visit finished quicker than it should have and Alek and I parted ways. He went north for where his flight would take him back to family in Warsaw. I went south, way out of the city to an airport that would take me to London.

Good weather, good beer, good times, good friends.

I boarded the plane to meet my confused customs official at Stanstead and Nina, my London buddy from another London.

This might sound like the lunatic-y long way around to Budapest, but it was only a little more expensive to catch a later flight in Stockholm for London, crash on a couch, and take a flight the next day to Budapest. Otherwise, I would have to catch an earlier direct flight to Budapest from Sweden.

I couldn’t turn down an opportunity like that!

This was the second time I passed through London and saw Nina. The first London visit was over a year ago.

The night I arrived we hit the bars of East London, stayed until the lights came on in the bar and the Underground closed.

We turned down the chance to ride London’s new rentable Boris Bikes on the treacherous streets of London with some friends, opting for a long, winding double-decker bus ride home.

Nina and a new friend at the British Museum.

The next day we had brunch, hit the British Museum, saw mummies, Greek ruins and Assyrian antiquities, before rushing to the train that would take me to the airport for my flight back to Budapest.

The London visit was brief, just one day. Throughout the trip, I spent 6.5 hours in the air. I pushed through 4 different airports. I read a whole book while waiting, queuing, taxiing and flying. Why?

Seeing friends from home is a bit like visiting home, even if you’re in a strange place, it's a rare, priceless feeling.

Seeing old stuff with old friends at the British Museum.

In Praise of Discovery Walks

Bloody Fields. There's no blood, but they got new foot paths.

At one of my old Toronto advertising agencies, an art director and I would go to the pub down the street with our notebooks when we got stuck with a problem in the afternoon.

After a pint or two, we would usually have a few good ideas in our notebooks (along with a few loopy ideas) and return to the office with a bit of a glow, from the beer and the productivity. This art director enjoyed his drink, so on slower days, he'd insist on "one more drink" and we’d miss a chunk of the afternoon.

The perils of the afternoon beers.

Later, at the same office but with a new, more consistent art director, a creative conundrum would take us out of the office as well. Instead of dark pubs or tempting patios we'd go for a walk through one of Toronto’s ravine paths near the office, which the city conveniently called Discovery Walks on its trail signs. The name stuck.

The ideas from those might not have been as loopy as the beer-y ideas, but they were good. The fresh air, chirping birds, and even the occasional deer sighting, was calming.

I still get in my workday Discovery Walks, in a different city on a different continent. Tobacco advertising can seem like a long, stressful grind that never seems to end, so I am thankful this office is blessed with a park on either end of its quiet street.

Even with an art director-to-copywriter ratio of 13:2, few art directors venture away from the comforting glow of their screens – the sole two exceptions being a bespectacled Spaniard and Kata.

The closest park is Városmajor. It is your basic city park with playgrounds, trees, kids, old ladies walking arm-in-arm, and old men playing chess. It's a good place for a ten-minute escape from creative conundrums. It’s also pretty, but not as exciting as the one on the other end of the street, Vérmező, or Bloody Fields.

Bloody Fields gets its bad ass name for being the place where leaders of a Jacobins movement executed in the late 1700s. At this time, politicians of that particular stripe were behind the French Revolution. Hungary being an absolutist monarchy with a comfortably entrenched nobility, the Jacobins were executed pretty quickly, in front of a crowd, so no one got any bright ideas.

Oh, just down the street is another park where György Dózsa was executed. He led a peasant uprising against the king and the nobility, which, like so many Hungarian uprisings, looked like it could have succeeded before failing. He was captured, tied to a blazing hot iron throne and given a hot crown. As he cooked, his followers were brought out and made to eat his burning flesh before he died.

The City of Budapest could have followed the tradition of Bloody Fields and given this park an equally cool name, like the Broiling Hot Death Seat Park, but instead they settled with György Dózsa Square. Missed opportunity, if you ask me.

Anyway, this is the sort of cool stuff you learn when you’re a history nerd on a Discovery Walk.

My favourite Discovery Walk is a longer one up the hill behind our office, Little Swabian Hill (Swabians were what German settlers were called before Germany existed). It’s a longer walk, but it's more rewarding. It's also a little arduous, since it's a steep hill, but once you're at the top of the hill you realize it's worth the effort.

It’s also part Nature Walk up there – since there are birds, bees, and lizards, but no deer, sadly. You get a great panorama of the Buda side of the city, there are trails in forest around the top, and  even a few interesting leftovers from the German occupation.

Budapest has its fair share of dark bars that, I'm sure, contribute to loopy ideas during creative blocks. But it's comforting to know that I can still maintain the healthy creative habits that keep me sane – no matter how far from home I am.

You never know what you will find on a Discovery Walk.

Up, up, up, you're almost at the top!

It's pretty when you get to the top.

Little Swabian Hill has a Big Swabian View.