I’ve really enjoyed my every-other-day, five kilometer jog around downtown Budapest. There is very little that I miss on my morning jog. The route above is the one I did this morning, probably the last one that I will do before we leave. Here are the highlights of the jog:
A. Home, at University Square.
B. The Elizabeth Bridge (I go under it)
C. The Castle. I don’t get close to it, but can see it from three different angles as I jog.
D. The Duna Korzo, or the Danube Embankment. Full of hotels, statues, cafes and such.
E. The Chain Bridge.
F. The Gresham Palace, now the Four Seasons Hotel.
G. Parliament.
H. Imre Nagy Memorial
I. US Embassy, fronted by the Soviet War Memorial.
J. Saint Stephen Basilica
K. Vaci Utca. Budapest’s Boardwalk, with cafes, shops, and lots of tourists.
Igor and Julia, friends from Moscow, came to visit us for three days this week. We toured the city with the kids (Julia hadn’t been in Budapest before), found some good restaurants and generally just had a great time.
And with their visit over, now is the time to wrap up our Budapest adventure. Gabi starts packing us to move to Great-Grandma’s house tomorrow. That will leave the apartment clear for us to clean it up and do final packing to return to the US.
In the wake of the new lawsuit against Scrabulous on Facebook, I tried to use the official Scrabble version for Facebook. I got this:
In case you can’t read it, it says: “HUNGARY. We’re sorry but this version of SCRABBLE is only for the US and Canada. If you are outside the US or Canada, please search for your local application of the game.” There is no local application, and it wouldn’t let me play with my normal opponents in the US.
Well, one thing is for certain. If Scrabulous gets taken down, I’ll be using Facebook a lot less in the near future.
We’ve been planning on getting an iPhone for Gabi immediately on returning to the US. It looks like we might have to wait awhile. According to the iPhone availability tool, there is exactly one store in all of California that has an iPhone currently in stock (near San Francisco). Most of the rest of the country is sold out. Wow. Looks like they really hit a nerve with the price reduction.
On Saturday, we went to visit Peter and Moni and their three kids. After an extended lunch, we went walking to see planes landing and taking off from a near-by airfield.
After a couple of pictures with airplanes, I asked the folks at the office if we could fly. “Of course!” They directed us to the ground controller on the other side of the airfield. Off we go!
Peter’s 13 year old son, Attila, and I decided to fly. Below is a video of our combined flights.
More photos are available here and here. The full, uncut version of the video is here.
It’s funny how I associate Starbucks with high culture. The company just released the full list of 600 stores they are closing in the US. I was sure that Temecula, now hit hard by the real estate collapse, would see several of its ten locations close. All ten will remain open.
Not so lucky are those communities a bit further out in the Inland Empire. Hemet will see all of their stores close. San Diego was particularly hard hit.
And in my home town of New Castle, Indiana, the sole Starbucks in town will also close. Sorry to niece Nicky who works there.
The full list of closings is available here (PDF format).
It’s funny how I associate Starbucks with high culture. The company just released the full list of 600 stores they are closing in the US. I was sure that Temecula, now hit hard by the real estate collapse, would see several of its ten locations close. All ten will remain open.
Not so lucky are those communities a bit further out in the Inland Empire. Hemet will see all of their stores close. San Diego was particularly hard hit.
And in my home town of New Castle, Indiana, the sole Starbucks in town will also close. Sorry to niece Nicky who works there.
The full list of closings is available here (PDF format).
Lake Balaton rests in a warm, revered part of the hearts of every Hungarian I have ever met. It is a large lake, about 60 miles long and 5 miles across two hours driving distance from Budapest. It is here that everyone runs to escape the summer heat and humidity, and spend one, two or three weeks by the water. The lake bans private motor boats, so sailboats flit joyfully between each other like butterflies. Everyone enjoys memories of family vacations, learning to swim, and first loves from here.
In the communist era, official worker residences dotted the coastline. Once every couple of years, workers would get the chance to take their families to the lake for a week of swimming, fishing, eating and drinking. In the modern era, there are still a few holdovers from the past, but large parts of the lake’s development look more like Germany than the Black Sea. Groups of friends and family rent houses, spend weeks in the area seeing friends from all parts of Hungary encamped around the lake.
The average depth of the entire lake is just 10 feet. Most of the south shore is walkable out to a kilometer from shore. This makes for near-perfect beach and swimming fun for 3 to 5 year olds, of which we have two.
On Monday, we took a car ferry to the central peninsula on the north coast. The town of Tihany is simply beautiful.
It was here that we stumbled onto the Rege cafe (Rege Cukrászda), which is tied with Nepenthe in Big Sur, California for my favorite cafe/restaurant locations in the world.
I’m not generally interested in sweets, but my Black Forest Chocolate cake (lower right) was absolutely special.
The music video below has the song “The Balaton Summer”, which is a haunting tune that fully encapsulates the feeling of this place. It’s sung by one of Gabi’s favorite singers, and I knew it from her Hungarian iTunes collection. If we return for a summer in Hungary again in 2010, we will almost certainly take a house somewhere in Balaton and have at least a little Sunfish to go sailing on.
The Hotel Ezüstpart is not the worst hotel I have ever stayed in. That place will forever be the government hotel in Yakutsk (northern Siberia, Russia) that I visited late in the spring of 1993. That hotel had limited heat, no food, no drinks and no other guests. We ate the two large salamis thoughtfully packed by my assistant before we flew away to Vladivostok the next day. There is a long story behind this, which I will tell some other time.
The Hotel Ezüstpart has some good things going for it. It is located right on the Silver Beach in Siófok (see the view from our balcony below). Siófok is the official summer capital of Hungary, where lots of people go for their extended summer holidays. See my next post on Lake Balaton in general.
There were, however, some things that just did not work at the hotel.
The hotel was clearly built during the communist era out of pre-fabricated parts, like the ugly panel apartments that dot Eastern Europe. These parts more-or-less fit together in the final building.
There was no coffee available for breakfast in the cafeteria, only chicory. I got used to this coffee substitute when I was living in Russia and had no other option. I remember stumbling on a can of Yuban coffee at a shopping center in Vladivostok at the time and thinking it was a gift from paradise.
Real coffee is available in a small, closed shoplet next to the cafeteria. The only problem is that this is the only place where smoking was allowed in the hotel – and there are clouds of smoked tobacco so thick they show up on local weather radar – so it’s extremely unpleasant to take your coffee there.
No Internet access of any sort available, no ice cubes for drinks anywhere and a host of other problems more associated with older, communist era establishments than with anything modern.
Since it is located on the beach, there are frequent loud parties going on. Monday night, the Russian dance party at the hotel 100 meters away was so loud, we could not hear our TV show in the room even with the speakers located less than two feet away from us.
Now let me discuss the room.
Pictured above is the entire room for all five members of our family. For the Steussy’s reading this blog, it is smaller than the utility room at 601.
The lights would work every now and then. The shower nozzle had been “fixed” with duct tape and frequently leaked throughout the room.
The balcony, while picturesque, is rusted with gratings spaced rather far apart. We were pretty sure Dan-dan would not fall through the cracks to his death six stories below, but we weren’t sure about Camilla. Aaron never left his crib to crawl freely around the room, as he surely could fit through the bars.
All of this might have been OK if we were roughing it at a campsite somewhere, saving money for our children’s college education, etc. But, at $129 per night, we weren’t exactly saving anything.
For reference, here is a partial list of hotels we have stayed at for less than $150 a night in the last few years:
Hilton New York, Manhattan
Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas
Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas
We came home two days early and collapsed in our apartment in Budapest, which suddenly seemed very large and luxurious. When we got back, we sat on the sofa, kids watched TV, I played Scrabble, Gabi helped me. We stayed there for quite some time, very happily.
