Kat and I awakened before sunrise on Halloween, 2024.  This scary day marked the beginning of our first visit to Europe.  We enjoyed a breakfast of yogurt, berries, and Red Mill granola with our daily coffee.  We arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport before 3:00 p.m. and began our long journey with our short flight to D.C.  First came a lot of walking with wistful glances at immobile moving sidewalks.  In the five years since our last flight things had changed for the better.  Security screeners knew about metal knees and ostomy pouches. Other things were not so different; our flight was over two hours late. In D.C. gate personnel were shouting “Elder?” and we barely made it aboard as the very last passengers before takeoff for Munich. There we made a connection to Budapest.  We rode a cab in Budapest and arrived at our hotel as the sun set on November 1.  Elapsed time from campground wake up to check-in at Hotel International: on Danube Promenade: 28 hours. Sleep? Zero. 

We’d done our homework weeks before on how to find the Viking Cruise departure terminal: walk to the Promenade, turn left, proceed to Elisabeth Bridge.  No Viking longships in sight!  Backtrack and walk a half mile past our starting point to the other Viking terminal.  It was a beautiful, chilly morning with many faster pedestrians for company.  Kat spotted a river cruiser tied up at the dock “Oh yes!”  It was the Egil, our big riverboat for the next week. The cruise business scales down in autumn and they operate only one terminal. 

Onboard lunch was good and dinner superb, marred only by a mandatory, hurry up, go get your  life jacket and report back to the dining room for our safety meeting.  Our voyage began the second evening after a daylight bus tour with a few hours afoot in Budapest.  Our guide, Laszlo, told us of the long history of assorted Euro/Asia conquerors ruling Hungary. First, 400 years of Romans who were kicked out by Attila the Hun and his Magyars.  They enforced their punishment laden brand of government for about a thousand years.  Then came the Habsburgs, maybe 500 years of monarchy and riches for them and The Church, subsistence for commoners.  The Turks (Ottoman Empire) ran the show and tore down buildings they found offensive over 150 years or so. Laszlo skipped over the Germans in the first half of the 20^th century, and USSR for most of the second half. Those highly unpleasant eras are better left unspoken. 

Budapest seemed old in a shopworn way.  There were some buildings which were at last receiving treatment for wounds suffered in WW II or in the Hungarian uprising against USSR in 1956.  Laszlo could only speak with sadness about the long history of his people with tales of his opera singer mother in law, of Casanova, and a few upbeat jokes along the way.  I asked a few shipmates who had had different guides “What word or phrase would you use to characterize Budapest?”  The answers were along the lines of sadness, history of repression, hardship, and sorrow.  I’m left with a memory of a taxi driver with decent English not interested in talk, a hotel concierge so busy with his personal phone call he made me stand at his desk ten minutes to hear him interrupt it with “If you need a taxi go out front.  If you need medical care dial ___.  And sad Laszlo.  Even the men paid to hand out advertisements for hotels, food, and drink beneath a tent proclaiming Tourist Information could not be bothered for such info.  Something is wrong here, very wrong, but I could not put my finger on it. 

Nearly a month later I read this opinion piece in the New York Times, written by Richard Holbrooke’s journalist wife Kati Marton explaining some of the recent pain and suffering come to visit Hungary.  It is behind a pay wall, so I’ll summarize it below.

Hungary worked its way out of the Great Depression in the 1930’s by doing business with Germany and Italy.  This pulled them into the Axis Powers in WW II.  120 to 140 thousand Hungarian soldiers were killed, twice that number wounded along with tens of thousands of civilian deaths. 

We noticed this everywhere in Budapest: a never-ending melancholy, a furtiveness in actions, and a lot of looking over shoulders.  I didn’t know a lot of international politics then, but I learned they have a had a government led by dictator for life Viktor Orban for maybe 15 years.  He had been a lively progressive elected in a landslide, then brought public policies of repression.  Orban is no better than the Huns or Turks; but he does have better weapons. 

The people of Austria and our German ports of call feel more like New Yorkers or big city Texans.  They walk quickly, smile a lot, and will answer questions from dumb Americans cheerfully.  I like those two Teutonic nations.  They are well educated, really appreciate their democracies, and are curiously respectful of the goings on in the USA. 

That’s my biggest takeaway.  Free people enjoy life quite a bit more in stable, functional democracies than those under repressive governments.

899 words is too many.  I promise the next post will be upbeat!

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