Smederevo, Serbia – Budapest, Hungary 2017

Smederevo

After the second night in Smederevo, I parted with my kind hosts who treated me like family.

The day was Friday, the 13^th and I was a little worried that things could go wrong. I needed to get by bus from Smederevo to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and from there to take the train to Budapest, the capital of Hungary. There was a chance to miss the connection in Belgrade and I did not have the train ticket. What if all tickets to Budapest had been sold out?

Two roads go from Smederevo to Belgrade. One is a faster motorway; the other is a more picturesque road along the bank of the Danube via the city of Grocka. I chose the latter. The bus left Smederevo at 9 am; one hour later we were still traveling and the train’s departure time was 11.35 am.

Eating grapes before going to bed caused issues at night. I did not get much sleep. Somehow I forgot my first aid kit at home. It was the first time in my life when I went on a trip without that kit. I hoped that there would enough time in Belgrade to pop into a pharmacy and to buy some medication.

The bus was in Belgrade at 10.30 am. I ran from the bus station to the train station. They are close to each other, but still require a few minutes to get from one to the other. Thankfully, the tickets to Budapest for the departing train were available. I had a quick coffee and a sandwich in a café at the station thinking that I would get more food on the train, exchanged the remaining Serbian dinars to Hungarian forints and skipped searching for a pharmacy. My train was about to depart.

I probably got one of the last tickets for that train because it was full.

Most passengers traveled only to the border. They left the train at the last Serbian station. After passport control on both sides of the border, the train was inspected by a Hungarian customs officer. Dressed in overalls and armed with a flashlight and a screwdriver he looked more like a technician. The officer checked under the seats, unscrewed a ceiling panel and shone his flashlight into the opening. Nothing was hidden there. The train was allowed to proceed.

After the bare fields in Serbia, Hungary looked green. The trees only started to change the foliage color to yellow and red. Small farmsteads with flocks of sheep appeared by the road and quickly vanished into the distance.

The train ride was 8.5-hours and no food was available. I ate 2 apples and a chocolate bar that I happened to have with me. This was not enough and I was starving.

At 8.10 pm we were in Budapest. I walked to my hotel, going into a wrong direction only once which was an achievement for me. The hotel was a charming old building with antique furniture; my room on the last floor had two skylights in the slanted ceiling.

Overtired and hungry, I could not sleep. Next morning lightheaded from the lack of sleep and food, I ate copious amounts of bread with the famous Hungarian salami for breakfast, rested in my room and felt better.

My reservation at Inn Side Hotel Kalvin House was for one night only. I found a room at a different hotel for the second night in Budapest, carried my backpack to the next “home away from home” and went to see the city.

Budapest is magnificent. There has been so much said and written about it that I am not going to describe its grand buildings or to post its picture-perfect views. Well, maybe just a couple of photos to prove that I was there.

I could not get to any of the museums. All tickets to the Parliament were sold out for the day. The synagogue, largest in Europe and second largest in the world, was closed to visitors because it was a Jewish holiday. I could only admire the majestic complex from the outside.

I roamed around the city, found out how to get to my next destination, Lake Balaton and returned to Nova Aparthotel where I was going to spend the night. It turned out to be an actual apartment in a regular residential building fully equipped with everything that one would need to live in it including a washing machine. It was probably too much for a one-night stay. I bought something to eat from a small supermarket and served myself dinner in the kitchen.

The apartment itself was great. It was too warm in it and I opened both balcony doors. My Hungarian neighbors smoked on their balconies and instead of fresh air, I got tobacco smoke in the rooms. I closed the balcony doors. Someone else smoked on the landing outside of my entrance door and more smoke came from that direction. I closed the bedroom door too, tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Eventually, all smokers went to bed, I opened the doors again, cool fresh air filled the rooms and I fell asleep.

In the morning on the way to the railway station I made another attempt to see the synagogue. The line to the ticket office was long and the synagogue had not been open yet. I had no time to wait in that line.

I’ll finish this post about Budapest with these interesting murals in the old city. There were more of them, but I’ll post just these three.

In the late 60s the school in the Soviet Union that I went to received several letters from a school in Budapest. They were in Russian which was a mandatory subject in Hungary at that time. In these letters, Hungarian boys and girls expressed a wish to correspond with Soviet children and provided their names and addresses. The letters were distributed among classes in the school and our class got one. I cannot describe how excited we all were. It was our first communication with the world outside of the Soviet Union.

My penpal friend’s name was Judit. It sounded very foreign, so different from the names I was used to. I wanted to write to her, to ask about Hungary – the country that I never dreamed of seeing, but the words did not come. I carried Judit’s address with me in the schoolbag, often looked at it and could not start writing. At 12 years old, I did not know how to express myself.  My classmates already wrote to their penpal friends and some even got replies. There were rumors that a girl in our school got a parcel from Hungary with a present, a nice blouse. How jealous I was! Not because she got something material, although I did not mind a present from Hungary. Imported goods were hard to come by in the Soviet Union. The important thing was that the girl found the right words to talk to her Hungarian friend and I could not.

After weeks of suffering, I managed to put together a short letter, just a few lines in which I asked Judit to tell me about herself and Budapest. That was all I could come up with.

Judit wrote back fast enough. In perfectly correct and bookish Russian she described Budapest, its two parts Buda and Pest, the Danube and wrote a little about her interests. A passport-size photograph fell out of the envelope. I marveled at Judit’s lovely face and her neat handwriting. The letter made me feel as if I had won a lottery. I showed her letter to anyone who was willing to look at it.

The second letter to Judit was even harder to write. She sent me her photo which meant that I needed to send her mine. The problem was that I had few photos of myself and all of them looked ugly, too embarrassing to send to a pretty girl like Judit. We could not be friends; I was not worth her friendship. I cannot recall now if I enclosed my photo or not, but I do remember how awkward my letter was, how false the words sounded. I had nothing to say to that nice Hungarian girl except for common banalities. As I was sealing the letter I knew that was the end of our correspondence. Of course, Judit never wrote again.

Since then I moved houses many times and I moved countries twice. Many of my possessions got lost or left behind including photographs. Somehow Judit’s photo survived. I am sure she forgot about that little episode in her life when a silly Soviet girl wrote to her, but I did not. Visiting Budapest, the city that I never thought would be possible for me to see, brought these memories back.

Lake Balaton