Doing the typical "backpacking" type of travel isn't really our cup of tea, jumping from hostel to hostel and, because of that, hanging out with people of every other possible nationality besides the one you are currently trying to explore in depth. Doesn't really make sense to me, and we were lucky enough in Budapest to be staying with Denes, an incredible host well versed in Hungarian culture, the provision of warm and comfy beds, and all things pork related.
Denes taking a shot of Palinka from the "Don't Mess with Texas" shotglass we brought him.
Our last few days in Budapest were full of exactly the type of travel that we love to do. Hanging with locals, learning about the endless and different perpectives of their culture and history from their perspective (not only the national museum's perspective), and reaching that sometimes elusive level of comfort and familiarity with a people and culture. Now, I'm fully aware that one week is nowhere near enough time to truly delve into a place or people, but we're on the fast track, and I think we did a pretty great job scratching the surface thanks to our hosts (Meetesh and Barbara, Denes, and Benedec, among others). Monday night ended with us hanging out with some of Denes' co-workers at the same make shift bar (basically an open plaza that serves alcohol from a stand) that we went to with Meetesh on our first night. This made for good people watching and quite a bit of Palinka tasting.
We spent Tuesday morning exploring the Hungarian National History Museum, a one stop shop for the official state story of Hungarian history. It included such historical bias as the period placards declaring 1900-1914, the "Happiest Time", A.K.A. "The Time Before We Got Screwed by the Treaty of Trianon and Lost Most of Our Land". That noted, we observed an undeniable pattern in the defensive position that most Hungarians take when talking about their history, and this was even reflected in the museum exhibits. The gist of the WWII exhibit section was essentially "The Time When We Were Forced to Decide Between Being Occupied by the Nazis or Winning Our Trianon Treaty Land Back". Now to be fair, both of those things were slight possibiities, and geographically they were in a pretty shitty place (although they've got nothing on shitty geographic luck during WWII compared to Poland, who resisted occupation on both sides), but still. But despite the defensive WWI and WWII exhibits, they had some excellent exhibits on Hungary during the Middle Ages and an impressive collection of Communist propaganda posters and paraphenelia.
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After the museum we ran a killer fartlek in the pouring rain and rewarded ourself by checking out another famous bath, the Gellart Baths, which proved, despite some pretty cool architecture, to be entirely underwhelming and overpriced. The "hot" pool was tepid at best, and there were not enough pot bellied old men in budgy smugglers (speedos) playing chess in the pool and drinking beer, as there were at Szechenyi to satisfy our curiosity.
We then met up with Denes, who had a sand volleyball tournament in an outlying suburb of Budapest, and we decided to come along and heckle him. Volleyball, both indoor and outdoor, is incredibly popular in Hungary, and Denes and his teammates have been playing together since college (15 years) in a compeitive city league. The highlight of this tournament was the huge pot of goulash being cooked over an open fire by 2 old Hungarian guys. It's the traditional way to cook goulash, and it was mind blowing.
Goulash simmering over an open fire.
We then made our way back to Denes' flat. He had a huge block of pork in his fridge, that I at one point attempted to eat thinking it was some crazy Euro cheese. Shudder. It's basically a block of fat, not much meat, similar to bacon with no real streaks of meat. He introduced us to another typcial Hungarian tradition of eating this chunk o' pork raw with just a piece of bread and raw onion. So after the traditional shot of Palinka (or two) we gorged ourselves on raw bacon for a good hour. I would like to say I felt guilty eating all this pork, but there wasn't a guilty bone in my body, and this brings us to another Hungarian tradition that I am determinded to participate at some point in my life.
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Once a year, duing the frigid Hugarian winter, Denes and a group of his friends drive to the country, to a "pork cutting". They eat lots of good food, take a few man shots of Palinka, and then ceremoniusly kill a pig with their bare hands. At first this sounds like some barbaric dude fest (which apparently it kind of is), yet this intrigues me greatly and makes tons of sense. I don't eat meat because the industry is so messed up, dirty, and far removed from the actual process of how animals should be raised and killed. This is exactly how I want to eat my meat, if I can manage to steel myself from all emotion and harden my heart enough to kill Babe, the star of my favorite movie.
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Maybe someday.
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