Budapest's Rising River

The rising Danube River just a block from my flat.

The day before the Danube River overwhelmed the roads along its banks, I went for a run along it. The river was lapping onto the road, which was closed earlier to auto traffic.

With the waves and most of the city out for an evening stroll along the banks, it felt more like a lake than a river threatening to flood.

The next day, the water rose and flooded the road. Evacuations in Prague and a bursting dam in Magdeburg were all over the news. North of Budapest, in the countryside, the Danube spread into villages, damaged summer homes and forced residents to evacuate. In the city, the stone walls along the river and the new sand bag barriers kept the river from city.

The river was not due to peek until the weekend, so people, including myself, came to the river, watched the water rush past and snapped a few photos for the facebook.

Over the weekend, a few friends and I went for a small road trip an hour west of Budapest. There were no floods, but there was rain. When we returned, I was certain the river had risen, but the other road trippers were sure that it had not.

The flood reached has since reached its peak. I did not need stocks of canned food, hip waders or snorkels. Now the water level has not decreased much yet, but it isn't expected to go anywhere but downstream.

Florence, Madrid and why I’m here

One of the few photos I took in Florence

I am sitting on a bench in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, in front of Michaelangelo’s David. In front of David is the guy with the toughest job in all of Florence: He asks tourists not to take photos of one of the world’s most popular sculptures.

A tourist raises their phone, all straight-armed, to take a photo, the photo enforcer scuttles over, wagging his finger. As he returns to his position, another tourist raises their phone, and he wags his finger at them.

His effort is wasted because most of the tourists get their shot and then leave. It is museum night here, all the city’s museums have reopened in the evening with free admission and there are other masterpieces to photograph. So they sneak in their photo of David and, with barely a second glance, they move on.

So the No Photo Guy does his duty, while I just sit there, dumbfounded by the magnificence of David. Even Michelangelo’s incomplete sculptures from Julius II’s tomb stopped me in my track – stone figures forever struggling out of their marble block bonds. It’s too perfect not to linger. Florence is so beautiful I forget to take a photo. 

Nope! Not the real David, this is a replicant.

For three days in Florence, I lingered as much as I could. 

In university, I was jealous of friends who returned from summer break with stories of European backpacking adventures. Off they went, visiting this city, seeing that, train traveling here, partying there, hoping they won’t catch the Clap along the way and on and on.

While they were colouring in the countries they visited on maps, I was stuck toiling in factories and drinking on London patios over the summer, which, at the time, didn’t seem as rich as a summer experience as theirs.

If University Marshall had made it to Europe, there would have been similar stories of debauchery and awe as he staggered through Europe’s great cities. He would have been the idiot taking a photo of David before rushing to the closest backpacker bar.

But it didn’t happen that way - University Marshall never made that trip.

Now I wake up nine years later and I’m living in Europe. I don’t know if there’s an improper way to experience Europe, but the opportunity to live and work here is a rarity where I come from. Snapping a photo of David and then moving on without stopping to appreciate it is not how I intend to get the most out of my time here.

As colleagues in Budapest banter about their next trip or the summer’s travel plans, I remind myself that I won’t be able to do everything I want to do with the time I have here. I’m not going to be able to ramble through every great city, I can’t visit every museum and I can’t drink in every bar. So whatever I have the time for, I will make the most of time.

Visiting places like Florence and Madrid,
are better with local friends.

I haven’t missed much. I lingered and enjoyed the places that I have visited – of course, having friends in strange places help make the trips far richer. I spent Christmas with old friends and made new friends in Dresden. Canadian Londoners reunited in London, England. I have a friend in Spain. We met. We drank and ate my way through all over Madrid’s tapas and taverns. I did this while sightseeing with a new East Bloc buddy during the day.

I walk away from all of this thinking that I could have seen more. Then I remember: It’s not how much you see that matters, it’s how much you experience. And we all do it differently.

Me? There is no real checklist. I can’t tell you with any certainty what I’m doing. I’m making it up a lot of it as I go along. But so far it’s been a blast.

Socialism's Leftovers

All that's left of Josef Stalin's monument? His boots.

Up in the hills of Buda there is a train operated by children.

Well, they’re not operating the trains themselves, the're operating the train line. There are 11-year-olds are up there, selling tickets, collecting tickets, working the signals, conducting conductor duties and shouting what I’m sure is “All aboard” in Hungarian.

The railway winds its way through the woods and high up into the hills, beginning near a Budapest tram lines’ last stop and terminating atop one of Buda’s higher hills.

There are old socialist-style murals and posters all over the first station. It feels like one of those Soviet programs for children to teach them elemental socialist values about the importance of a hard day’s work in the service of the state. Think of the Young Pioneers, which were the Soviet Union’s version of boy scouts, only these kids get trains.

Being conducted by the little  people of the Children's Railway

The train kids perform their duties and take them seriously in the way kids do when you give them a sharp-looking uniform and an important job. It’s a beautiful ride too. You travel through the Buda’s forests, make brief stops at old and, with the rainy weather, deserted train stations until the last stop. 

But it despite the family friendly atmosphere and the fact these kids were born well after the Berlin Wall fell, the Children's Railway still feels very East Bloc.

Engels, Marx and me

It’s an interesting holdover from the Hungary’s communist days. There are vestiges of Hungary’s socialist era, but while much has been swept away, I’ve become interested in what has remained, and why. So when I first heard about Memento Park, I knew  I had to visit, and bring my photog-friend Marcin along.

Marcin grew up in communist Poland before moving to Canada and his love for communist iconography is well known among our group of friends: He received a Mao Tse Tung garden gnome as a housewarming gift.

Memento Park is where socialist Hungary’s grander garden gnomes have been laid to rest when they were removed after communism fell. All the tributes to the Soviet ‘liberators ’ and Hungary’s socialist heroes came here to be seen, rather than destroyed.

The designer of the park said: “This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.”

It's a noble gesture, considering so much the era's documents remain unstudied and so much of the collective memory goes unshared. 

By laying all of these grand pieces of propaganda to bear, there is a chance for discussion about it, but the potential for jocular poses with the statues. We did both, which is what democracy is for: the serious and the silly.