Budapest
This was something like yesterday
Budapest is the largest city on the Danube River. Over 40 colleges and cities are located in the city, along with the world’s 2nd largest synagogue. The only thing most of the backpackers get up to during the day is the hot springs. I’m sure the old men in banana hammocks love listening to young adults try and fuck each other while they’re just trying to play chess. The food isn’t much to speak of, being eastern European and all. The nightclubs, however, are smidge sharper. Going from Alberta’s idea of a club to Budapest’s was like going from a childhood of boiled pirogies to a Ukrainian’s dinner table. No wonder I didn’t go out past midnight out west - they never thought to mix ABBA.
Not much to take from Vienna, where I had been previously. I looked around a couple dusty corners and thought the gardens would be a wonderful place to be high in. The too-kind lady in the music shop there thought I was south American, despite my manners, despite my complexion, because I was playing something moderately classical on a nylon string. I guess they say there’s plenty of blue eyes in Argentina. Do they say that? The gentleman in the hostel said that he used to run a bakery delivery service and now he’s backpacking for awhile to take a break and he did 3m a year in revenue and he couldn’t sell the business because apparently selling anything doing less than 15m in revenue in San Francisco is impossible. I told him that was very cool, shortly before diving out of the 3rd-story window I was in, atomizing my skull in an attempt to not be speaking with him. What a completely useless fucking idea. Who sits in a boardroom late at night, tilted on amphetamines, and thinks to themselves ‘you know what the next best thing is? Delivering baked goods.’ Thank god the pioneering spirit of America has brought us to centralizing baked arrangement delivery.
Imagine being in heaven, standing in God’s judgement, and him asking “You…dropped your kids off for school 4 times in seven years because you were bootstrapping an urban food delivery startup?”
I’ll continue speaking about Vienna in this blog post titled Budapest, now:
After some gals taught us (me and some bum from the hostel) how to say ‘go fuck yourself’ in German, pretending they were teaching us how to say ‘I love you,’ some kind strangers asked us not to say that to other people and invited us for some foosball. This bar reeks of cigarette smoke. I think I may puke, which is a thought that lasts precisely up until the moment I decide I am also a social smoker. Being October in Europe, I am likely wearing athletic shorts. Someone screams at me when I spin the foosball thing, which is completely justified. My hostel friend introduced me to the concept of kebabs that night, at 2am, which is still the single best culinary experience of my entire life. Some lady asked in a joking manner if me and some other traveller named Harry were a couple, and we unconvincingly held hands on the tube for the rest of the ride. She told us when she got off that it was indeed unconvincing.
4 days there, maybe, then
Budapest
I got off at the wrong stop and had to walk 3 hours to my hostel, although I was really quite happy to, forcing some sightseeing. I was indignant that I wouldn’t purchase a sim card in my backpacking, so the spotty navigation directed me further in a direction that was technically incorrect, however pleasant. I saw plenty of massage parlours along the way that were not shy about the way that the massage would end, which I was still far too catholic to patronize. I didn’t get to the hostel until it was dark. New enough to strange places to be mimicking EMDR treatment as I stepped into the establishment, the lady at the front desk was kind enough to give me a painfully long tour. Dirty showers. People drinking in the lounge. People drinking in the dining area. A kitchen small enough to make the boy who lived scrunch his nose. 8 bedroom hostel room. The socially useless man staring at the woman changing in the corner of said room.
The more and more you read about the limp power of recollection, the less you have any faith in your past self, which is quite a relief if you’re the kind of person that dwells. Whatever self we remember from whatever amount of time ago is part of a narrative we’ve constructed in order to feel strongly about ourselves in the present. You didn’t really feel that way 2 years ago, but you’d like to pretend in order to justify whatever thing you did in the wake of that moment. You were never ‘really into’ baking. That shoving match you describe as a fight wasn’t even a shoving match. This (now) is circumstance, beautiful or otherwise, and having an opinion other than shoulder-shrugging about it, laughing, or crying, is cranked. I am not a reductionist. You are a reductionist. You are ridiculous people. I wrote down something about a time I spent in another country long ago, not to document, but to look back on; starting from the present ‘documentation,’ on its first day alive, as a work of fiction. Whatever written is banal, whatever pictured is an aesthetic. The little black book that dumb prick writers carry around to document the happenings of the mind and the day are a testament to nothing more than a questionable habit.
The past is more accurately deciphered as a series of dreams, whose meaning or gravity in your life is left completely to your present inclinations. Did I try to grow marigolds in my bathroom before or after my undergraduate degree? Did I ever? Who’s to say. Whatever I say about these events is not a memory, then, but your own black cat.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to say is that I did mushrooms this past weekend.
The beautiful part of hostels is the stench of transience and falsehoods. They will leave, you can leave, you can… do whatever you want, which frees up some of the buttoned-down parts of your psyche. I am a pilot in Barcelona. Jimmy really did get into crypto early. Laura can indeed go nuts on a piano, it’s just that the burden of proof, just like mine and Jimmy’s, is nonexistent. In any case, as long as you’re good for a yuck most people will be happy to invite you to shit. Even if it’s the 3rd spa day in a row. There is one particular hostel called retox, for when you’re done your detox. Clever! Wherever you hostel, discover the binge drinking you never thought was within you and that there are, in fact, other people who are somewhat curious about the world. An Australian girl you will literally carry home several days later introduces the concept of a shoey into my life. Shocking, I know: people who recreationally lick laces occasionally drink too much to stand. The drinking games and amount of drinking Australians do is impressive, considering they had plumbing brought into the country roughly 6 years ago. They have been drinking out of each other’s shoes since 1606 (pre-dutch history is a conspiracy theory) without a functioning toilet. Wild.
Realistically her drink was likely spiked, but it didn’t make much of a difference to me being the person leaving at the exact moment she needed to go back to the hostel. At one point (before the carrying) she fell onto the sidewalk. In order to convince her to finish our journey, I did have to concede how comfortable the concrete probably felt. Gentle salesman I am. I think her name was Emma. Hi Emma. The next day, or maybe the day before, I left my wet laundry in the washing machine before leaving the hostel to see Father John Misty (god of course he did, you scream). It would have been worth the cost of redoing my laundry but I’m not sure it was worth the massive amount of resentment it generated by holding up a washing machine for the better part of 6 hours.
Some backpackers you meet are careful to not out themselves as such. There is never any geographical context in their descriptions of past events. They don’t give insufferable diatribes regarding normalcy. Their life at home is their life. They are an insurance agent, firstly, personally, and only circumstantially abroad.
One man, Steven, flew an Airbus A400 around the middle east for 7 years, before meeting me in Prague. He spoke fervently and exclusively about flying. Josh, an incredible chef from Australia, gave his Rolex half a sentence, his home another 3, and spent the remainder of the 2 nights I had him speaking about food. Steven, a phd attending Lund (Sweden’s university town), was…a rugby player. Sophie finished her undergraduate degree in philosophy, but could not go on at length about any particular thing in the field. Not that you have to be able to, but you would think after 4 years something would have come up - but that was not her and not who she was, because she spoke about what she was. She was Danish, and then a woman, and then a traveller. Her boyfriend Sunni was a student, and then a younger brother trying to be more like his older. The Americans from Pheonix have American manners. The Americans from Denver were either perma-baked or had figured out how to smuggle edibles over. Aamer was concerned with the merits of Astroworld. Jimmy is a coward and does not look good in blue.
These things all breathe in and out, into each other, mixing and crashing and making an awful amount of noise, and there is no respite. There is only the next, whatever room you fall into, people discussing themselves while pretending to discuss other things
Something about the dancing.
The jacket you paid 200$ for is already pilling in the front. Sara picks at the stragglers and asks if she can take your day journal. Sure, you can take my day journal. People making swipes at each other while travelling is a nauseating picture. The way the edges drift and fall into the centre of the photo. Couples get very sweet discussing the way they met, with the frayed bits of their story being shaved off, collected, and worked back into some sort of rhyme. Sometimes they admit the happenstance. Sometimes the linear nature is more for the audience’s benefit than theirs. Having different return tickets certainly escalates the stakes. I have a reminder from Easyjet, in the form of a hotel discount code, that my time is finite - in a rare occurrence, the consequences of the choices occur in a timeframe that breathes down your neck.
James ‘will not’ follow the girl from Poland back to Lublin. He has a situationship in Portland, ongoing for 3 years now, expecting him home with a full heart soon. Him and Amelia have been travelling together for 2 weeks now, fucking and speaking as if time will make some concession on that account. Both of them will take their grievances to the same mutual friend, who will make nothing in the way of emotionally abrasive commentary. Everyone drinks every night in the present atmosphere, but James will drink until he pukes or is punched for 8 nights in a row. James does not have the constitution to be the one punching. He falls into a river on the 8th night, after which I ask him if maybe God’s house is the best place for him to spend Sunday. Him and I will giggle through Mass. James asked me why he’s doing this to himself, and I went on some long monologue about curling, during which I made sure to clarify how dominant Canadians were.
Our men’s team has something in the neighbourhood of 55 medals, followed - not closely - by the swedes, at 36. ‘The Old Bear’ Kevin Martin runs a clinic priced at 675$ that runs late August (in Edmonton) every year, if you happen to be a curler looking to really get past that hump. You’ve got to wonder what the locker room talk among a group of olympic curlers looks like. Does Kev plagiarize Larry Bird and ask ‘who here is coming in second?’ Do they need to shower? Maybe they all just strip and take a group wash for the camaraderie of it all. Can someone send me an email pertaining to the curling equivalent of Micheal Jordan’s flu game? Can you explain this to me in basketball terms?
Most of this is lost on James, but he decided sometime in between the bread and the wine to ask his job if they will let him work remotely for awhile, until he makes up his mind. When I send him film photos that include Amelia in 2 months, he does not respond. I can’t be sure whether this was a case of a mistaken email address, unwelcome photos, or because I screamed at him about ice sports in a place of worship. In my very long list of people I should like to speak to, his girlfriend in Portland is on there twice. What a bar fight, eh?
The Swedish girl and I shopped for oranges the last day she was there, and talked about all the tattoos we didn’t have. Kevin and I went for brunch at that one place with the fresh orange juice. I think it would be easiest to just sleep with a stranger tonight, as opposed to checking into a different hostel. If I can somehow stay fully clothed throughout the night, I can leave incredibly quickly at 4am.
I’m not sure what was tangible about the time spent, but we need a new day journal. I would recommend Budapest. Thank you.