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Couchsurfing is the future, folks. Get on board.
My first couchsurfing experience was in Hungary, where I stayed with two fantastic women: Judit, in Pecs, and Irina, in Zalaegerszeg. They are best friends, and taught me the meaning of hospitality.
When I arrived in Pecs on the train, Judit was at work but arranged for another couchsurfer, Plazzi, to pick me up at the station. He made me crepes.
When I arrived at Judit’s house, that has a stunning view of the whole city, she had prepared for me traditional Hungarian food, and invited me to a jazz concert. The next day she showed me around her town – stunning, but in the midst of a major facelift because it will be Europe’s Cultural Capital in 2010 and has been infused with EU money.
Then Judit drove me to a small village famous for its vineyards so we could do a wine tasting. She took me to a sculpture park filled with bizzare works made from the marble of the surrounding hills. She made another Hungarian feast, and invited Plazzi and his friend, and we drank more wine and I soaked up the conversation, and thought about how damn lucky I was.
In Zalaegerszeg, Irina greeted me with equal enthusiasm. She taught me more about Hungarian food, about literature, about the language. She drove me to a castle, and to Lake Balaton (the largest in Europe). She suggested itineraries for my stay there, looked up train and bus times, made me breakfast and did my laundry. We ate and drank beer and laughed and laughed and laughed.
When I signed up for couchsurfing I didn’t quite get what it was all about – I thought it’d be a good way to save some money and get a bit of local insight to the places I visited. What I’m learning is that this system can be a way of life, it can create community, and it adds a whole new dimension to travel. I love to stay in hostels and meet other travelers, but staying with local people so enhances the experience and deepens your understanding of a place, that it’s hard to want to travel any other way.
I set out early from my hostel to catch my train south. I came to an intersection, that I’d been to several times before, where you had to cross under the street. I went down the stairs on one side, navigated the square underneath, came back out to the sidewalk, and continued on.
About 15 minutes later I started to wonder why I hadn’t reached the station yet. I couldn’t even see it. I looked up at the street sign.
Hang on, that’s not the street I should be on.
Shit. I got out my map. Turns out, somehow, I’d take the wrong set of stairs up from the underground passageway, which had spit me out onto the wrong street going the wrong direction. This was more frustrating because all I had to do was go STRAIGHT. Gawd.
I trudged back 15 minutes, set myself in the right direction, and by the time I got to the station after an extra half hour of lugging my backpack around Budapest, I was tired. And sweaty.
I got into the station and glanced up at the board with the train destinations. Beside the one that said ‘Pecs’ was the number 10. I took that to mean platform 10, and headed off to find it. It was far. When I got there there was a small two-car red local train, whose sign did not say ‘Pecs’. I asked a Hungarian man standing beside it.
‘Pecs?’ It’s pronouced paich, and I was saying it wrong.
‘Pecs?’ said the man, correctly. He shook his head, waved his hand to indicate I needed to go several tracks over.
I wandered back towards the station entrance, asked someone in a day-glo yellow vest – ‘Pecs?’. I was pronouncing it worse as time went on. This time, the man held up ten fingers, then three.
‘Track 13? Thank you’.
I went to track 13. There was no train there and no destination listed on the sign beside it. I asked someone else. Again.
‘Pecs?’
This time the yellow vest just shrugged his shoulders. I checked my watch; my train was supposed to leave in 10 minutes. I hoofed it all the way back to the station entrance to look at the board again.
It said Pecs, alright, and ‘10′ beside it. But as I looked closer, I saw that above the ‘10′ it said ‘Minutes delayed’, not ‘Track number’. The track wasn’t even listed yet.
Damn it.
When the track number did come up it did in fact say 13, and I did get on the train, back aching and cursing my impatience. And, eventually, I learned how to say ‘Pecs’.
In Budapest, the weather changed. While I’d had summer-like conditions in Vienna, when I arrived in Hungary it rained, and it got cold. I spent my first day wandering around in the dreary weather, until I discovered – Huzzah! – that my peeps from Prague were also in Budapest. I took some beer to their hostel to celebrate, and moved into their hostel a day later.
The crew is Hylton (South African), Becs (Australian), and Adam, Mitch, and Jarod (from Manitoba, Alberta, and BC, respectively). We stayed out of the cold dampness by doing the Lebowski challenge, which consists of watching The Big Lebowski, and taking a drink everytime someone says ‘dude’. It’s hard.
I did make it around Budapest despite the rain, and then a sunny afternoon but with cold, cold wind. It’s a beautiful city.
What’s best about it, though, are the Turkish baths. We went to the Szechenyi ones; a sprawling yellow building with an open courtyard and warm mineral baths in the middle, with old men playing chess in the pool and occasionally yelling at each other (good-naturedly, I mean). Inside the building is a labrynith of smaller baths and saunas of various temperatures, and we spent hours going from one to another. The biggest challenge was going to the 90 degree sauna, then dropping yourself into a 16 degree pool. I disliked it. One sauna smelled of citris fruits, another like peppermint, one had changing-coloured lights. The outside pool had a section that pulled you around in a circle, then sprayed jets up from the bottom. Standard dress code for men of all ages and shapes = black speedos. Don’t leave home without them.
(The baths were hard to photograph at night)
Other things about Budapest!
1. At the grocery store, weigh your produce yourself. If you can’t tell the clerk how much your bananas weigh, she won’t sell them to you.
2. The ‘pizza’ croissant things at the grocery store, that you buy as a quick and cheap lunch, have peas and carrots in them. Yuck.
3. If there’s no crosswalk, it’s because you have to go through the passageway under the street.
4. Dogs wear clothes a lot.
5. The subway makes fantastic Nintendo-like noises that remind you of Duck Hunt. I giggled at every stop.
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