We just had to wait for the fuel re-fill to complete, get clearance, and we were off to Budapest, Hungary.
Thankfully, someone noticed a leak in the Hydraulic System.
So we sat on the tarmac for an hour, while a new plane and crew were organised. Then we walked through the rain back to the Luton Terminal, and sat there for another 2 hours.
Vacant seats were sparse. But I found one at the end of a row, sat down and promptly fell asleep. It is a new skill I have recently acquired; the ability to sleep on planes, trains and in airports.
Gone are the days of 14 hour flights LA to Melbourne and eyeballs that feel like someone’s sandpapered them down to the nerve-endings.
Now, when I’m in that vacuum of space-time-continuum in between destinations, and stimulating conversation is non-existent or has just run dry, I turn off, tune out, and drop in to a dreamless sleep.
We waited near 40 minutes for the luggage to appear on the carousel at Budapest Terminal 1. The advertisement on the column holding up the roof of the place said a lot in a strange language I took to be Hungarian. There were images of clear glass bottles containing wildly different colours of some kind of fancy liquor; and one sentence in English which said “Pahlinka, you will not ignore the noble fruit”.
It was a statement that was to prove prophetic for the coming month. Oh, how I wish I had taken heed of this sign, given to me by the universal gremlin that exists only to say “I told you so” once the damage has been done.
The couple next to me were fighting; their brats climbing all over the carousel, taking no heed of their Mother’s warnings. He was English, she was Hungarian. He was unperturbed, she was having a meltdown. She said he lost everything and they couldn’t afford his forgetfulness anymore; his wallet last week, his credit card the week before. He said everyone in the airport could hear she was a whinger, and that she always got like this when they came over to visit her parents.
I decided to exit the situation and empty my bursting bladder, would this luggage never come?
So I opened the door to the men’s room which was situated directly behind the baggage carousel, and there were 4 men, percy-in-hand, merrily pissing into the urinals, now in full view of the 200 plus passengers. There was no two door policy here!
Welcome to Hungary!
I shared a shuttle bus with some Spanish women for the drive into Budapest. Every third bill-board seemed to be advertising a “men’s club” with women so scantily clad that most men not used to this would be putting the car into a ditch. Luckily our driver was used to this, and as he kept his eyes firmly on the road, we passed seamlessly from countryside through suburbs to city.
If I could design a city, like the character in the Leonardo De Caprio movie “Inception”, I think it would be Budapest. Two cities; Buda and Pest, on opposite sides of the River Danube.
Wide, clean streets. Not so many people, not so many cars. A low-rise city with not much above 10 stories high. Neo-Classical, Neo-Gothic, maybe a touch of Art-Deco, but the term “Eclectic” probably sums up the architectural style. The rewards of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were spent here and in Vienna, and, despite two world wars and a communist occupation that lasted 50 years, thankfully most of it still survives.
I arrive at Veres Palne’ Utca, two streets back from the river on the Pest side. I had booked an apartment here, but it was 6.30pm and I was about 5 hours late, due to the Easyjet fiasco.
It had started to rain heavily as I stared at the 15 foot high ornate wooden doors that guarded the entrance to my new home. I buzzed the number I was given; no answer. A guy came to the door from the street, punched some numbers on a key pad, he pushed open the door and I followed him in. At least I was inside now and could camp in a corridor somewhere till morning if need be.
I took the circular stairs to the second floor, as the wire cage lift, looking like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and enclosed by ornate, black iron-work, had a hand-scrawled cardboard sign which said “meghibasodott” which I took to mean it didn’t work.
I reached the door and buzzed again, but no sign of life.
I dumped my gear on the floor, and pondered my next move.
A woman came walking down the stairs.
“Excuse me, do you speak English”
She looked slightly startled and unsure of the situation she had suddenly found herself in.
She looked at me intently, opened her mouth wide, and stuck her right index finger into her mouth. She shook it in there several times, and I realised she was pointing at something.
So I moved a little closer and thought I could see; a tooth filling!
“You have a filling”?
She nodded her head and pointed her now saliva covered pointer up the stairs.
“Dentist”
She nodded her head violently now. We were really communicating now.
“You just came from the Dentist upstairs and you can’t talk”
She nodded again.
“So you do understand English”?
She nodded again and pointed to her tooth and then again up the now darkened stairway.
She had no idea what I was saying.
I nodded and gave her a Thai wai, slightly bowing forward with the palms of my hands together.
I don’t know why.
She seemed to understand and walked off down the stairs.
There was a door across the landing from this one, and I thought I had nothing to lose by buzzing the people there.
I did. The door opened. And there was Maria.
She was waiting for me, confident I would find her there somehow. And she could let me in.
So, I settled in to my new home in Pest. The rain was tearing down. People rattled through garbage bins on the street below that were waiting for the early morning pickup. The small bars that lined the street both sides filled the street with laughter and yelling and general conversation which drifted up through my open windows.
Maria gave me a map, and said she would be back at work here in the morning, with an offer to help me orientate myself in the land of the Maygars.
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