The First Five Years

It was a foggy day when I arrived to Budapest, five years ago today.

Five years ago, the Toronto Blue Jays seemed like a lost team, years away from a playoff appearance. Stephen Harper was Canada's prime minister. Rob Ford was Toronto's mayor, and we only knew about his penchant for racial slurs, drunk driving, and public intoxication, not the crack smoking – we were so innocent then. It was also the year the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the year I moved to the EU 

And it was on this day, five years ago, that I boarded a plane for Budapest, a city I only knew through history books and google images. 

A job at an ad agency working for a tobacco company. An opportunity for some international job experience. A rare chance live and travel in Europe. Those were the reasons I made the move. Just a year, I figured, and I'd be back to the grind in Toronto. 

But I stayed.  

This blog has been a chronicle of my Euro-adventures and my misadventures integrating. That's been the larger story. At some point during my time here – when I got  serious about a lovely Hungarian girl – I stopped being a temporary guest worker and became a resident.  

In some ways, I started integrating not long after I arrived: taking language lessons, trying and loving the food, making friends with some locals. That city, that I only knew through google and books, gradually became home.  

I worked hard for that commitment a little later. Kata had gone to Berlin to work and wait while I searched for a job in Germany. That time was tough. Monthly overnight trains to Berlin. Dozens of job applications, emails, check-ups, follow-ups. All while the ad agency that offered me this opportunity sank. Colleagues were laid off in waves. Goodbye parties became weekly events. 

It was the end of an era for some people, especially the expats, who packed their two allowable checked bags and returned home. It was the end of a chapter for many Hungarian friends, who moved on to new jobs or started their own businesses.  

For me, it was the beginning of something else. I found work in Düsseldorf. Kata followed. I had committed to the idea of staying in Europe months ago, and the concept became very real. We moved in together, bought furniture, and made plans. It's still an adventure, but it's become bigger than myself. A relationship does that: makes you think beyond yourself.  

As I lived the evolving adventure here, life moved on for everyone else. After my first year, I came back for a best friend's wedding. I met their son during my next visit. I streamed another best friend's Vegas wedding over the internet. Other friends bought houses or bright yellow cars. Jobs became careers. Girlfriends became wives. Wives became mothers. We all moved along, maybe not in the same stream, but certainly parallel to each other.   

Putting it all in perspective, I've been lucky. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for a few chance meetings. If I didn't join an ad industry boxing event, I wouldn't have met Joe. If I didn't take a job at an agency some years later, I wouldn't have met a former employee of that agency (Joe), who offered to tell me about any job openings, which led to a job offer, which led to moving to Budapest, which lead to meeting Kata, which led to moving to Germany together, which leads to... And on it goes.

Taking one opportunity leads to another – that's the way life goes.  

It's easy to get nostalgic during a big milestone. I think about the nervous lead-up to that flight to Budapest and the strange, exciting feeling I had driving through the city in the fog to my hotel in the Buda hills. It was something I had never felt before, not even when I was traveling in Asia. It wasn't just about being in a new, strange place, but it was an excitement about where it will lead. And so today I find myself thinking about the next five years, and what opportunities lay ahead for me, and for us.

Berlin

Autobahn-ing to Bavaria

Photo by Katalin Varga

The Road

Driving on the Autobahn is about enjoying the lack of speed limits, but also taking the fullest advantage of them. Traffic slows or stops so often on the famed highways that when you have the chance, you put the pedal to the metal and cover as much distance as possible before traffic comes to a grinding halt once again. 

The speed limit isn't so much a luxury, but an opportunity to recapture lost time. 

After a few hours, you are skilled at making the most efficient use of those windows of no-speed-limit driving. You become adept at looking for the next slowdown during these bouts of high speed. You start to sense danger. You get nervous when you see the flash of a brake light ahead. 

After you're accustomed to the fear of brake lights, and after you've understood that time is lost and gained during those precious minutes when you can drive as fast as you can, then you have understood the Autobahn – it's stop and go stretched into a longer, faster scale. 

The Plan

On Google Maps, the trip from Düsseldorf to the edge of the Alps, seemed simple. Six hours of Autobahn driving, with a few pee breaks, would make it a do-able weekend trip. 

We left after work on a Friday, planning a stop for the night halfway. Then, I figured, it would be an easy drive in the late morning to the Alps. Sunday afternoon would, in my completely inexperienced and totally unprepared mind, offer plenty of time for the six-hour drive home. 

In reality, it was six hours to get halfway there. There was construction, where lanes were reduced and narrowed, so you're inches away from oncoming traffic on one side and inches from the daredevils passing you on the other side – yeah, drivers pass on the inside in a construction zone. 

Then it took us an hour to cover the final 10km. The traffic stopped after we had passed the last exit, so we were stuck, waiting to get to our exit, knowing our beds for the night were so close.

By the time we staggered into our hotel it was almost 1am. We showered and lay in bed, feeling too tired to fall asleep. 

We didn't really get a look at the city we were in – Würzburg – until we awoke the next morning and looked out the window. In the distance, we saw the fortress-like palace on a hill overlooking the city. The sun was shining and it seemed like it was a good day to be on the road. We went downstairs for our first Bavarian breakfast. 

I pity the vegan living in Bavaria, because this region knows how to do bacon, eggs, and dairy. Everything tasted fresh and delicious.  

The bacon tasted like those thick slices of country bacon you get from farmers who care enough about their pigs to name them. The butter was smooth, rich and creamy. It tasted like butter, a taste we forget in this margarine-mongering world. 

There was even a photo of the egg farmer delivering eggs to hotel in front of the scrambled eggs on the breakfast buffet table. She wasn't holding the day's newspaper for Proof of Freshness, but I still couldn't help but appreciate this commitment to serving good food.  

With our bellies full, we resumed the road trip. Again, running into enough slowing or stopped traffic that our arrival was delayed. We arrived late, so we decided to check into our hotel later and proceed straight to our destination: Neuschwanstein Castle. 

Neuschwanstein... what you can't see is all the tourists on the bridge, taking the same photo.

The Castle 

Neuschwanstein Castle was designed by a reclusive Bavarian prince who wanted to use it as a private retreat and hide from the world and his princely responsibilities. An irony, considering it's now one of Germany's biggest tourist attractions.  

A small town at the foot of the castle's hill is built for tourists, and offers carriage rides, souvenirs, and cheap sausages to visitors from all over the world. For those who decide to walk up the hill instead of taking a carriage, they are treated to fresh, pine-scented air and views of the castle as they approach it.  

Neuschwanstein is less castle and more palace. It's filled with over-the-top ornate wood-working, gold trim, fancy furniture, ball rooms, throne rooms, and glorious views of the mountains above and the valleys beneath it. It is a romantic place.  

The castle has been accepting visitors since shortly after Ludwig's mysterious drowning – for over 130 years – so the Bavarians know how to move as many paying customers through as quickly as they can. 

You book a time to get in. You follow a guide into the castle. The guide doesn't speak. You get an audio guide and the human guide waves and hustles you from room to room. As you enter a room, a tour group in front of you is leaving that room. As you leave that room, another tour group enters it. 

Of course, you don't get to see every room, because that would take to much time. The tour concludes after a brisk half hour, then you exit through several gift shops, but not before passing a few balconies with stunning views.

Impromptu Parking Lot Mountain Photo Shoot.

The Alps 

As lovely as the castle is, it doesn't compare to the beautiful mountains that surround it. Neuschwanstein is a fairy tale, but the Alps are mythical.  

As we drove south on Saturday, we were waiting to catch the first glimpse of them. At the top of every hill, we squinted south, but didn't see them. They didn't come into view gradually, but suddenly. As we rounded a bend on the Autobahn, it appeared: a big, granite wall that looks so big that you wonder why couldn't you see them sooner. 

At one point, after we visited the castle, we stopped in a gym parking lot to watch the setting sun glint off the mountain and take a few photos. From the balcony of our hotel room, it was easy just to stand there and stare at them.

Our hotel had a balcony with a beautiful sweep
of the mountains.

The Burg 

Red-roofed Rothenburg ob der Taub was one of the biggest towns in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages. The walled town grew wildly rich from trade passing through its gates.  

Then it run into some bad luck.  

A Catholic army captured it during the 30 Years War. They billeted there, which is a technical way of saying they lived in and pillaged the town at the same time. Not long after the Catholic army left, the plague arrived, killing off a chunk of the surviving population in gross and gory ways that aren't worth describing here. The city got a break for a few hundred years. It sat there on the Taub river forgotten, in a sort of stasis.  

Then the war came in 1945.  

Unlike many German towns and cities, Rothenburg ob der Taub was spared carpet bombing because it had no strategic value – no mines, factories, refineries, or military targets, unless you count the Medieval city walls and cobblestone streets. 

As the Americans approached, the German army got orders to fight to the death. The German commander disobeyed those orders and surrendered the city, sparing it from an artillery barrage and giving us a picturesque Medieval German town to visit. A rarity. 

Rothenburg's old Town Hall.

Unlike many rebuilt old towns in Germany – which look frighteningly alike – Rothenburg's old town is not a standardized cookie-cutter old town. It's a product of its medieval past – glorious and inglorious – not a post-war rebuild. The streets curve and bend for inexplicable reasons. There are pretty buildings that please the eye and functional buildings that aren't so eye-pleasing. It's often the latter that don't get rebuilt from the rubble. And rare is the city with its old walls not only intact, but so diligently maintained that one can walk around the city by walking the wall's battlements. 

With only two hours to spare, we had time for a discovery walk and a pfifferlinge-themed lunch. It wasn't enough time. Rothenburg is not the type of place you'd spend an entire weekend, but it deserves at least an afternoon of strolling and sightseeing.  

But of course, we wouldn't have come to Rothenburg if we weren't making a road trip of our trip to Bavaria.  

Europe is so dense when it comes to historical significance or natural wonders that you just point the car in a direction and drive. The Autobahn, despite its occasional slowdowns, is a fantastic way reach those interesting places.  

A true old town.

Hungary's Heart(land)

On the trail to Fuzer castle.

Every country has a landscape that shapes its mythology. The beating heart of the nation. For Canada, it's the North. The Americans have the West. Hungarians have Hortobagy, our first stop on a road trip with Kata's parents into Hungary's east.

Poets have waxed, well, poetic, about it. It's vast and bare, hot and dry. There are few places to hide from the sun. Wildfires flare up in the summer heat. Sandor Petofi called it the Burning Fields.

Driving into the Hortobagy is like driving into a time capsule. The barns have thatched roofs, with carefully grounded lightning rods to avoid fire. Water is brought up from wells with wooden levers, visible from far off. And some even wear traditional costume.

Driving through it, you notice the landscape itself. The shades of brown that stretch almost as far as the eye can see until the plains turn into hills in the hazy distance. The sunflowers weighed down by the seeds, and the fields of swaying wheat. If you're counting horses through the heat shimmer, you lose count.

But we were only passing through the Burning Fields. We stopped briefly in the town of Hortobagy – long enough to buy a handmade straw hat at the old farmers' market and see the famous Nine Hole Bridge. Then onto the road we went...

The Nine Hole Bridge of Hortobagy. 

Debrecen

For my entire stint in Hungary, the only thing I knew about Debrecen was that they made delicious, spicy sausages there. It wasn't until this trip that I learned its other big export is Resistance.

For some reason, the Reformation ideas resonated with the people of Debrecen, and the city wholeheartedly latched onto the Calvinism in the 1500s. Its university produced Calvinist scholars who traveled all over Europe, spreading the good word of the Reformation and giving the city its nickname: 'The Geneva of Hungary."

Calvinism was huge in Switzerland, but the rest of its followers were scattered in small pockets all over Europe. Debrecen was on the edge of the Roman Catholic/Protestant world – to the south was the Muslim Ottoman Empire and further east was Orthodox Russia. For Calvinism to take hold and become its springboard in the region says something about its people's dedication.

Debrecen University's pretty library.

We visited the Debrecen's university. Aside from a nice museum about medieval life and a beautiful library with artifacts from the university's most famous graduates, they have an old lecture hall. This is no ordinary lecture hall. It was here, in 1848, the Hungarian National Assembly declared independence. Kossuth Lajos would later read the proclamation from the steps of the nearby Great Reformed Church to a cheering crowd.

The lecture hall has a new coat of paint, but mostly it is as it was then. Assembly members would have sat in the same wooden pews. There was a raised pulpit up front, where Kossuth would have read the declaration.

To reach the library and the lecture hall, you climb a flight of ancient, thick wooden stairs. They're worn smooth, but still sturdy enough that they don't give way or groan under someone's weight – quality oak from the forests we'd be hiking the next day. As we climbed the stairs, Kata said, "These are original! Can you believe that Petofi Sandor and Kossuth Lajos walked on these same stairs?" We were walking in the footsteps of Hungary's heroes.

The Great Reformed Church in Debrecen.

Füzer

Our final destination was a hunting lodge in Füzer, a region of sloping, forested mountains close to the Slovak border.

After a good night's sleep – the lodge's bar closed early – we struck out on the planned 23km hike. The route would take us up several mountains, through scenic woodland, past the great castle of Füzer.

Hungarian castles are not Cinderella castles. Most have seen action. Many were built to resist another Mongol invasion after the nearly apocalyptic first Mongol invasion in 1241. The Mongols defeated the Hungarian army and destroyed the capital, pillaged the countryside, ravaged the population, and destroyed every city or town that wasn't protected by a stone fortress.

Anticipating a second invasion, the Hungarians set to work building stone castles that couldn't be breached by a horde of Mongol horsemen. They might pillage and burn the countryside, but they couldn't stay long with a garrison of troops in a castle that could attack them from the rear.

The strategy worked against the second Mongol invasion. With all the food stored in the vaults of the impregnable castles, the Mongols starved. Facing guerrilla attacks from the castle's garrisons, they fled in disarray.

Most those Hungarian castles couldn't resist the gigantic siege cannons the Ottoman Turks dragged with them through the Balkans. One after another, castle after castle fell to the Turks as they marched into Hungary, driving towards Vienna.

Füzer held out against the Turks, along with a handful of others like Eger, and have passed into national myth. But it was the Austrians who destroyed it. Getting tired of putting down Hungarian revolutions, they planted explosives in every castle, demolishing them to leave no stronghold behind for Hungarian rebels.

It is a not-so heroic end for castles that stood against so much, so I understand the government's recent desire to rebuild the castles. I also understand the romantic desire to leave the ruins behind as a more somber reminder of the past. But I have to say, there is something raw and awe-inspiring about visiting a castle ruin in Hungary.

Fuzer castle has been carefully restored,
 right down to the toilets.

Füzer was one of the rebuilt castles chosen, and they've done a lovely job of it. The chapel, living quarters, a disconcertingly large amount of toilets, four storage vaults – for wine, beer,  bacon, and then everything else – among other rooms are carefully restored.

Füzer was a short stop at the hike. Much of the day was spent humping mountains and going off the beaten path in the forests beyond Füzer.

The trail skirted the border between Hungary and Slovakia, a silly border that is just shy of a hundred years old – very young in mountain and forest years. As we hiked along the path, we flitted from Hungary to Slovakia and back again as lumberjacks and hunters must have done for centuries before the Allies plopped a border there in 1920.

We also stopped at the Hungarian Language Museum.
I looked at the pictures there.

Tokaj

After an evening of sleep and recovery from the hike – despite staying up later, since we ordered extra beer before the hotel bar closed – we stopped at Tokaj, one of Hungary's top-notch wine growing regions.

The Romantic English poets, like Byron, loved this region's wine. Louis XIV declared it, "the King of Wines and the Wine of Kings." For centuries, it was one of Europe's favourite wines. Today, after being held behind an Iron Curtain for two generations, wine from Tokaj is rightfully getting its reputation back.

And yet, despite a great visit to a wine cellar, where we sampled three varying grades wine from dry to semi-sweet to sweet, and then a final a dry, furmint version, the only photo I took was of this public toilet. A toilet Kata designed as a young industrial design student.

Still, I recommend visiting Tokaj for the fine wine, and the finely designed public toilets.

The proud designer and her public toilet.