by Kyle James
There was another strange thing about this place: the Wi-Fi account was named “We can hear you not having sex.” I couldn’t tell if that was a subtle way of asking guests not to have sex, or telling us that they indeed had the place bugged and were listening to us.
We left the flat, ready to take on the city. As we walked through the promenade streets, sharing the space with horse carriages, Ash and I recapped our drive here. Apparently, our minds were now in sync, because we had had the same epiphany during our transit: we were listening to upbeat, feel-good music and road-tripping through the hilly Polish, Czech, and Austrian countryside on a Friday afternoon with complete strangers in a Mercedes. Life was good. There was no other way to put it. I couldn’t think of anything I would rather have been doing than sweating and writing, cramped in the back of that car. It wasn’t that there weren’t better things; there were always better things. I think part of my problem in Denver was that I was continuously thinking about the grass on the other side when I should have been living in the moment. Besides, we all know Denver’s grass is the best.
In the heart of Stephansplatz, the city center of Vienna, a local café caught our hungry eyes. We wanted to eat authentic Austrian wiener schnitzel. My dad had been using the term wiener schnitzel my entire life in every way but the right way. He is the funniest person on (my) earth, and I could barely keep it together when ordering. I chuckled through the entire meal and took every chance I could find to tell Ash how good my wiener schnitzel was, or how well my wiener schnitzel paired with my potatoes. Vienna had briefly taken me home, and it felt damn good.
7/4/15
Vienna, Austria
It felt weird to glance at my phone and see 7/4 on my screen after the demolition crew outside had woken me up. This was the first Fourth of July holiday I had ever spent outside of the United States. Even in countries where great beer cost less than two dollars or where I was able to legally pee in the street, I was still proud to be an American.
I debated with myself on whether we could have as much fun as our friends back home today, and it wasn’t looking good. They were going to be on boats, drinking beer in the sunshine. Regardless, we set out to enjoy what Vienna had to offer.
Ash found a large outdoor market in central Vienna that had been around since the sixteenth century called the Naschmarkt. We crossed museum lawns and spotted a grid of tents. Desperate for a break from the sun, we were relieved to duck into the commerce canopy.
Ash spotted the jewelry section, so I took a seat on an abandoned crate around the corner. We could be here for a while. While people watching, I noticed three or four New York City shirts and hats in a matter of five minutes. New York City has an unbelievable footprint on the world. This wasn’t just Vienna. Between Yankee hats and I LOVE NY shirts, we had seen the Big Apple represented in every city we had been to.
We got home and handled some loose travel ends. We had to wrap up the planning for our trip to Croatia next. We decided we wanted to spend more time in the islands near Dubrovnik than in Italy. We could either take a nine-hour bus from Zagreb to Dubrovnik for a total of 50 dollars, or take a plane for a total of 175 dollars. The nine hours on a hot, sticky Croatian bus didn’t seem worth saving 125 dollars. We booked the one-hour flight on the prop plane. I was dreading that day already. I hate those small planes where you feel like a Ping-Pong ball floating in class-five rapids. But it beat basking in cigarette smoke, I suppose.
While I booked the plane tickets, Ash’s job was to find us something to do tonight. She found out that the Vienna Film Festival was right around the corner from our place. It was the opening night of the season. The free film showing happened every night for two months during the summer. This was a no-brainer. We set out to be film critics.
We knew we had found the right place when we got within a few hundred yards: the sound of the bustling crowd of festivalgoers was ricocheting off buildings, sending vibrations of excitement throughout the neighborhood. The free admission had attracted a large crowd, and the park space was filled with local food and beer trucks with long lines. At the opposite end from the entrance was a cathedral showcasing an absurdly large screen where the film was to be projected. When the show began, we found seats near the front. Ash and I cuddled up on the asphalt, still warm from the hot day’s sun.
I didn’t know much about Pink Floyd beyond their hits, but this documentary was making me a fan. It was called Delicate Sound of Thunder, and the music put us in a trance of happiness. The mosquitoes were starting to get to us, though, and the heat had not subsided as much as we had wished when the sun went down.
Ash had fallen asleep within seconds of our arrival back at the flat. I always had to wind down a bit more, so I lay on our room’s floor, reflecting on the day. I just couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be with this woman. She had really pushed us to take this trip, and there was no way I would be here without her. Every time she brought up traveling the world while we were in Denver, I came up with four or five reasons why we shouldn’t. As I thought back to those excuses, none of them would have been worth missing this. I finally joined Ash in bed, kissed her pink forehead softly, and rigorously scratched one of my many mosquito bites. She rolled over in her sleep and groaned at me for moving too much. If only she knew how sweet I was being to her, in my head.
I tried not to wake her, but these mosquito bites were killing me. They covered my sunburned skin like volcanoes. Talk about maximizing my chances of developing diseases. I had potential malaria deposits covering my pre-melanoma skin. Then it hit me: I was lying in bed, drunk, sunburned, and covered in mosquito bites. We had had a traditional American Fourth of July after all.
7/5/15
Vienna, Austria
Somehow I had convinced Ash to go to Vienna’s Natural History Museum today. She isn’t a big museum person, and frankly, neither am I. History is one of my favorite subjects, though, and the appearance of the museum sealed the deal for us. We entered a building that very closely resembled the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The neoclassic architecture of the building itself was worth the ten-dollar admission price.
The rest of the museum was interesting, but it felt like a worse version of a zoo. So with all the laundry we had been putting off, we decided to pack it in for the night.
Immediately after stuffing our clothes into the makeshift washer, we had the conversation we had every single day. I asked Ash, “What do you want to eat for dinner?” to which she always replied, “I don’t care. Whatever you think.”
This conversation only occurred because neither of us wanted to admit what we really wanted. We could say, Let’s just go get Italian, and not beat around the bush. But there we were, every day, circling the bush, beating away.
After the routine script, we inhaled our diavola pizza with spicy pepperoni and plate of spaghetti Bolognese. We ended our trip in the Austrian capital the same way we started it: eating downtown in awe at the architectural perfection of the buildings. The shopping in Stephansplatz was too unrealistic for us to financially entertain. We couldn’t afford anything from the designer stores, but it was still fun to pretend we could and walk through the upscale neighborhoods of Vienna, so rich with history, looking through windows as if we were deciding what to buy. Even if I had the money to buy articles of clothing that cost thousands of dollars, I don’t think I would. Neither would Ash. But I am sure that is what everyone thinks until they can afford them.
7/6/15
Vienna, Austria → Budapest, Hungary
Ash and I were traveling by way of the Euroline bus to Budapest. Euroline was no FlixBus, but it felt like a Lamborghini compared to the Polish piece of shit we’d taken to Kraków. It was only a three-hour drive, so I chose to write rather than nap. By the time we left the station, Ash was on dream number four.
With no Wi-Fi and no music on my phone, I had limited options for drowning out the noise around me. Ash had one album on her phone, Taylor Swift’s 1989. I “Shook It Off” and “Bad Blo
oded” all the way to Budapest.
We arrived in Hungary rather hungry. You can imagine how long I have been waiting to use that stupid joke. We could only afford croissants and coffee this morning in the very pricey Vienna—fifteen euros at that. We were excited to be in the land of forints and out of the euro zone. It was only one dollar for both of us to take the metro to our stop in downtown Budapest.
The first thing I noticed when entering the train car was the change in scenery from Vienna. The metro train looked like it was going to fall apart any second as we careened underground. Our train rattled to our stop, and we left the hunk of metal happy to be in one piece.
When we emerged from the metro and onto the street level, we were welcomed by an oven-like humidity. My first thought was that Budapest was … rustic. It was also very apparent that Budapest definitely didn’t have the money that Vienna did. Perhaps this was the result of the post-Soviet years as the country emerged from half a century of totalitarian rule.
I checked the e-mail our host, Ceci, had sent me with a PDF attached titled Check-In Instructions. I had glanced at it briefly on the bus but only skimmed to the point of lockbox. We walked half a mile through the grimy streets of Budapest, dodging homeless people and pee-covered walls, and arrived, unbearably hot, at our address. I opened the PDF and got to the step of the lockbox. The only problem was there was no code in the instructions to the lockbox. This was literally the most important piece of information in this scenario: the code to get in.
This is where traveling gets tough. Being hot, sweaty, and grumpy are all manageable conditions with an air-conditioned Airbnb light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. But once that light disappears, the mood hits the fan. We didn’t have Wi-Fi to get the code from our host, so we had to walk to the closest restaurant that offered Internet. The café around the corner had the three essential w’s of traveling: Wi-Fi, water, and WC [water closet, or as we call it in the US, bathroom). A ham sandwich, two beers, and a mojito later, Ceci responded nonchalantly with the code, as if it were normal for her to forget the only piece of check-in material we needed. Our annoyed mood was lightened when the bill arrived and it was seven dollars, generous tip included.
With the code cracked, we entered one of the quirkiest apartments yet: a small studio with fifteen-foot ceilings. There was a set of stairs leading from the living room to a loft over the living space. The kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom were crammed into about 250 square feet. This is what Europe starts to feel like the more you travel around. Everyone does more with less. I was still pretty salty that we’d had issues getting into the apartment, but the box of chocolates Ceci had left on the table made Ash forgive her instantly. Providing chocolate to get out of the doghouse? Touché, Ceci. Touché.
7/7/15
Budapest, Hungary
I woke up from the deepest sleep in weeks. I know this because when I stirred, I had no idea where I was. It wasn’t just the unfamiliar ceiling; I had no idea what city or country I was in. It took my brain a few cities to come up with Budapest. We had woken up in thirteen different cities over the last thirty days. I felt like a fugitive. Thankfully, we would be in Budapest for six days. We needed some stability to gear up for month two of this journey.
One thing that had been stable for the last couple of weeks was Ash’s obsession with eating toast for breakfast. Toast with jelly and butter to be exact. It wasn’t the healthiest thing we could eat for breakfast, but it was one of the cheapest. I am not much of a sweets guy. But if she cooked it, I was eating it. We ate two massive pieces of toast from a loaf we had grabbed from a market the day before. This was an awful decision before our first bathing-suit sightings.
“I look okay, right?” Ash asked while turning and tilting her head to see her backside in the full-length mirror.
“Yeah, of course, baby,” I responded honestly.
I could tell she wasn’t really concerned with my opinion, as she was twirling like a ballerina to see all angles of herself.
“Those two pieces of toast are just sitting right in my stomach. I don’t want to go,” Ash said as she left the mirror’s crosshairs. I convinced her that nobody in Budapest cared what we looked like, and if it meant anything to her, I thought she was beautiful. Besides, we weren’t going to look any different between here and the baths. That’s like brushing your teeth before going to the dentist. Those cavities aren’t going to disappear.
Budapest is known as the “City of Baths,” and it is the only capital city in the world sitting on healing, thermal hot springs. There are fifteen public thermal baths in the city proper. Our first thermal experience was going to be at the Gellért Baths. It was one of the least crowded bathhouses. This was important to us, because we wanted to get our bearings on this whole thermal bathing thing. I didn’t know whether to expect naked people casually walking around in robes, or a water park with people frantically moving from body of water to body of water.
The hardest part of entering the bath was avoiding looking like amateurs, but when we entered the tranquil building, we felt lost. The fee was only fifteen dollars for a day pass to all the baths, saunas, and steam rooms. That would probably get you a bowl of strawberries at an American spa.
I followed Ash into the glass-domed room hosting an Olympic-size indoor pool with a smaller hot tub area at the end. It was such a peaceful and tranquil room, with people sporting swimming caps and soaking up the calcium, magnesium, sulphate-chloride, and hydrogen-and-carbonate-rich waters. You know … basically all the minerals instrumental in healing our joints.
The smaller hot tub area seemed like a good place to start. I sat down against the wall, and the one-hundred-degree water covered my skin in bubbles. The water made my skin tingle, almost as if it were carbonated. We sat under a small waterfall spilling out of a stone gargoyle’s mouth and basked in the mineral water for an hour or so before heading to the outside area.
Immediately upon emerging outside, we found a large bathing area that dually served as a wave pool. Every ten minutes, a wave would emerge and send a wall of water scurrying through the crowd of mostly kids. I think this is Gellért’s day-care system. Although waves were fun, I preferred them in the ocean. I didn’t need to convince Ash to stay out of the wave pool. She wanted to relax and lie out, but there were limited chairs available. Luckily for Ash, I consider myself to be a chair hawk. It’s not about finding open chairs; it’s about finding people who are beginning the exit process.
Once we found chairs and lay down, I made it about seven minutes before my boredom won the fight and led me to finally walk into the steam room. I went through a cleansing cycle, one I had read about online. The cycle consisted of heat, cold, rest, and repeat. I sat in the 131-degree sauna and roasted like a Christmas ham for ten minutes, jumped into the freezing tub to cool off, and once my nipples were hard enough to carve a pumpkin, I rested on my chair before repeating the cycle.
Our day at the bath was filled with relaxation, meditation, and healing. On the way home, we ate at a traditional Hungarian restaurant: platters of goulash and chicken wrapped in dough. Definitely a gut-buster, but it was important for us to squeeze traditional meals into our Italian agenda. Then we stumbled upon one of Budapest’s bucket list destinations, a ruin pub.
The sound of music too funky to be found in a regular bar and the energy of weirdness pulled us into a trippy area that looked straight out of a Pixar movie. Ruin pubs are strange bars created from the ruins of old buildings. The place was called Szimpla Kert. There were flying pigs with angel wings in the air, a trabant with a garden growing in it as a table, various rooms for music, a theater, and numerous bars around the canopied courtyard. I could not imagine a weirder place to be than sitting in the trabant, drinking our two-dollar beers and being cooled off by a mist that blew out of a gnome’s mouth. Budapest had both ruined and healed us on our first day. Oh, glorious Hungary.
7/8/15
Budapest, Hungary
We geared back up for anot
her day at the baths, but we complained about our carb-filled stomachs once again. It feels good as humans to have excuses. “We look fat only because we just ate a bunch of bread” was an easier pill to swallow than “We look fat because aside from walking, we haven’t exercised in a month.”
Today we were headed to the Széchenyi Baths, the largest and most famous thermal bath in all of Europe. This was the Madison Square Garden of bathhouses.
We confidently entered the Széchenyi Bathhouse. Frankly, we were underwhelmed. Although much bigger than Gellért’s indoor baths, the inside baths were under serious construction and in need of a proper restoration. It wasn’t until we made it outside that I realized what all the hype was about: the outside bath grounds looked like the landscape of the ancient Ottoman empire. There were three large pools in a massive courtyard. We didn’t even know where to begin bathing. It was the moment of overwhelming awe equivalent to walking into a Chuck E. Cheese’s as a kid.
We did what any kid would do: we went directly to the closest pool and submerged ourselves in thermal waters, engulfing our skin in minerals. It was just cool enough not to make us sweat, yet warm enough that we could soak in it comfortably all day without getting a chill. We decided to embark on my new favorite hobby: the roast/freeze therapy.
The sauna was four times as large as the one at Gellért, and it was definitely the hottest thing my body had ever endured. We stepped into a long room of humans sweating in silence. After only two minutes of sitting on the wooden benches, the hair on my head was so hot, I could barely touch it. We stayed as long as we could stand it, but it felt like my skin was melting. It was rather embarrassing to be the last people to enter the room, and the first to leave.
