A Syrian soul singer in Budapest

When we got back from Naples, I learned that a friend of mine was coming to Europe. “I’ll be in Berlin at this time and Budapest at this time,” he said.

“So why not stop at Prague? It’s in the middle,” I said.

“I’m going by plane.”

Damnit Wizzair and your ridiculously cheap flights! So then, it was up to me to choose one. I was in Berlin most recently, and I was closer to the folk that he was seeing in Budapest, so Budapest it would be.

Budapest is about an 8-hour train ride from Prague. It’s a comfortable train, easy to book online, has wifi and all that jazz. The only thing it doesn’t have is a food car.

In typical Czech fashion, there’s just some dude that roams up and down with random bits of food. Sometimes sandwiches, sometimes five-year-old Bickers Bars. Seriously weird off-brand stuff that probably haven’t been made since Communist times. Buying water from those guys is also a wonder, as when you get the bottle of water, you get the slight feeling that it was filled up at the toilet of the last station. Just a vague feeling though. I’m sure its fine.

Always best to go with the beer.

The beer is likely to have been sold quickly and cycled through, so it should be safe.

I met my friend Andy at the Budapest station, and since my other friends didn’t have a spot left for me to stay, I got an apartment across the street with AirBnB. So far so good, except that I forgot my phone and tablet charger… there’s always something! It’s okay, it’s just a couple of days and I’ve got an extra phone battery. At least this time I remembered my camera chip and charger, not like when I was in Naples.

a statue outside my airbnb

The first time I had been to Budapest was for a two-week stint waiting for my Russian visa that never came. It was half-crumbling ruin and half-construction site with only the very center of the city being a presentable place for tourism and life. The coolest part of town was the old Jewish ghetto, which was a giant morass of old buildings that were once bankers’ palaces (by Jewish ghetto here I don’t mean it in the World War II sense, but rather in the historical sense of concentrated Jewish neighborhood, as the ghettos in World War II weren’t usually in such nice places).

some shots around the ghetto

Holocaust memorial outside a synagogue

random building in the ghetto district

and just a cool building somewhere

The bankers’ palaces though were old remnants of their former glory, long empty, and the interiors had been gutted and turned into gigantic dive bars. The bars, called ruin bars, would often have a couple of kitschy items, like a giant Cupid or some neon lights, to give it atmosphere, but that was otherwise it. And as this was back before the tourism wave came to Budapest, they were all kind of empty, a little bit seedy, and very cool feeling. I wanted to revisit that, obviously.

a street uptown

The first night though, we had other plans. Obviously, when you’re in Budapest, you’ve got to go to some weird concert of a Syrian wedding singer. We went to that, held at Durer Kert, which definitely maintains the feel of a ruin bar, and maybe it is one, I’m not actually that sure of the technical definition. It’s a live music venue in an old university building, where the old lecture halls have all been turned into their individual clubs. Each hall hosts their own band, where you’ll have to pay an individual entry most nights. You’ll get both local acts here and international acts, and the other interior bars and garden are free for the roaming. There’s also no single type of music played here. We were at a Syrian wedding singer concert, but that same night there was also a hardcore punk and a death metal concert, along with who knows what else.

a romantic scene in one of the bars

yalla yalla in the house!

I’ll be honest, though the Syrian wedding singer guy, Omar Souleyman, was kind of awesome. A weird Arab techno something vibe going on. Even his name is pretty hilarious, as it’s usually Anglicized as “Suleiman” but here he’s purposefully put some soul into it, man.

The next day, Andy and I just wandered around the town aimlessly, hitting a few bars along the way. We started off along one of the main squares, the Oktagon, and then zig-zagging around Kiraly street.

We finally ended up at the riverside, then at Kalvin Ter, and had some ethnic Hungarian Vietnamese food. We then met up with our friends again after their daily routine was finished, and made our way for a few drinking sites.

outside Painter's Palace

The first was a little art hole, called the Painter’s Palace, where there was a little artist’s market. I met an artist there doing some amazing calligraphy. I’ll talk more on that next week.

Then we hit the Jewish ghetto again, aiming specifically for some ruin bars.

near Kalvin Tor

We went to Szimpla Kert, whose tradition is the one really that started the ruin bar thing back in 2001 in its first iteration. It’s now on Kazinczy street, and forms a fantastically bizarre complex of different rooms from different eras, a jungle-esque upper corridor, and a large courtyard garden that features outdoor films and a table from an old Trabant car. The place was absolutely packed, but we were able to find a place in the courtyard. Not ideal for the winter, but it stayed surprisingly warm, filled with outdoor heaters as it was.

in the courtyard of Szimpla

also in the courtyard, not watching movies

another bar in Szimpla

We decided to change scenes and went to Fogas haz, which is also Instant. They were once separate places, but later merged, or something. I’m not sure. But here I was able to pronounce the death of ruin pubs. There was a security line with a face control, then an enforced coat check place, and so on. And we were finally inside. They had some live music going on, which was good, but nothing we were interested in (it was progressive rock, which I’m not too keen on these days now that I’m an older gentleman and such). We finally found a neat little back room filled with weird art that looked like a coffee shop to an art gallery, or at least somewhere proper to plan a revolution.

the main room at Fogas haz

However, what really killed the mood, was some lady charging for the restroom. It wasn’t the typical old lady in the bathroom who kind of guilts you into throwing a coin at her, but rather the old lady had set up a barricade on the outside, complete with a big burly guy to shake you down for an investment in her sanitation business.

plotting revolution in a backroom

I ask her how much, “500 forints!” she yells back. That seems a bit much, that’s like 4 beers or something--at some point these wacked out inflated currencies are like Monopoly funny money--but I really have to pee, so I throw the coin into her tray. Later, when walking out, I looked around and noticed a sign that said something like 100 forints. Real mafia thing happening with the toilets, I tell you. But then I noticed another group of people coming in, a dude wearing a giant penis, and his mates chanting out British football songs. A stag party. Ah, I see now. The Brits haven’t just ruined Prague, but Budapest too. Here’s to a hard Brexit!

one of the bars at Fogas had some weird pics

including a Put in

After all of us got gypped at the loo, we decided to move on to where there might be a free place to pee. A more low key spot with superior beers, Uncle Ogre. A much quieter spot, completely lacking in the British football chants, and serving much better than the regular swill at the ruin bars. It was a good way to end the night/trip.

#budapest #bars

The Amalfi Coast: Village Cliffhangers

It’s a tragedy for someone to go to Naples and not see the Amalfi Coast. If you’ve got at least three days in Naples, then you must see the Amalfi Coast, considering how easy it is to get there, especially if you’ve a regional Arte Card, which gives you free access to transit all the way across Campania, and that includes everything to, from, and in the Amalfi Coast.

Getting there

We woke up in the morning and went over to the train station, which was conveniently next to the hotel. We jumped onto the L2 metro. This is where maps are confusing. They show the L2 as ending at Gianturco, but actually it goes on to Salerno. It’s a super comfortable metro/train car, and many of the cars are double deckers, so if you’re lucky enough, go up. The metro is really an endless series of surprises. Remember in my last blog, where we went on a tour of the underground aquifer 60 meters below the city? Imagine then, when they built the metro, I suppose they had to go below that even! There’s just layer upon layer of stuff going on underneath that town.

We rode the train to Salerno, not sure if we wanted to get out and walk around. Since our next Amalfi bus wasn’t until noon and we were there thirty minutes early, we decided to walk around. We grabbed a couple of huge scoops of really delicious gelato and walked down the pedestrian mall, which was right out the train station. After spending some time milling around, we went over to catch the bus. I can’t say how Salerno is, but I can tell you that it wouldn’t be a bad spot to base your visit to Naples. Since the L2 takes you to the main station, and to the old town, it’s really quite accessible. Also Salerno is fairly flat around the old town, has really long beaches, and is relatively cheap, especially compared to the Amalfi Coast. So to any visit of the two regions, I might even recommend staying in Salerno. These were, of course, my thoughts before I went to Sorrento.

random view from the bus

The bus fills up even in the winter months, though it’s at a greater frequency in summer. There’s also no way to reserve your spot. So be warned.

The Amalfi Coast

The Amalfi Coast is composed of a mountain range that ends abruptly into the sea. At some point in ancient history, some crazy bastards decided to put villages on the sides of these mountains, which not only became marvels of civil engineering, but also easily defensible as they were impossible to get to by land. It’s really amazing visiting these places, and just riding the bus down across the coast, as not only the buildings seem impossibly built, but also the road. The ancient dwellers here must have been quite skilled at terracing, and actually, having been in many places across Italy, I can say that perhaps this is just a skill that Italians must have possessed to an advanced degree throughout their history. The Amalfi Coast is perhaps the most impressive display of this though.

Amalfi

We rode the local SitaSud bus, the fare included in our Arte Card. It was easily marked to Amalfi, right outside the train station. Then we just sat back and relaxed, catching in all the amazing sites.

The tight curves were pretty crazy. The buses all have a tactic that, when they come to a sharp turn, they’ve got to honk to make sure people knew they were coming. The streets all had mirrors, and were well marked about where a car should stop to give way to buses making the corner, since the bus often needed the whole street to turn. Though it seemed fairly apparent to me that Italians are in no condition to worry about silly street markings!

I would love to stay in Salerno or Sorrento, bus in and visit a couple of the villages each day, spending the days soaking up the sun on the beach and drinking coffee and writing in the coffee shops. But we didn’t have time for such leisure, which meant we had to enjoy them from our window.

Amalfi

We did get out at two places though. Our first stop was actually the bus’s final destination: Amalfi.

Amalfi

Amalfi is also the name of a little village that’s basically right in the middle of the coast. I suppose the coast could have just as easily been named the Castiglione Coast, or the Conca dei Marini Coast, but Amalfi happened to be in the middle, so it's the Amalfi Coast.

looking up the main street

Amalfi dates from about the 6th century, when it was a bustling trading port, exchanging gold from Egypt, slaves from Europe, and salt from Sardinia—back in that time Africans were keeping Europeans as slaves, and Europeans mostly other Europeans, and Arabs just kept everyone as slaves. True story. Why anyone is surprised that Europeans took Native Americans as slaves is beyond me. There was a point of decrease in slavery in Europe, when the Pope said you can’t keep a Christian as a slave in the 9th century, which meant that the only source of slaves would be non-Christians (pagans, Muslims, or Jews). Though to be fair, most slavery occurring in Continental Europe was abolished by the 15th century, and the rest of the world lagged quite a bit behind in that.

exploring one of the upper roads

Anyways, Amalfi is a really beautiful gorge of a town. It goes straight up and straight down, and you can follow it up the gorge for about half a kilometer or so of solid buildings that all cling to the side of mountains. There are a great mix of cafes, some cheap places to eat, lots of expensive places to eat, you only have to open your eyes and look. We found a place to the back of the village, that was a fairly cheap bistro. 6 euros for a plate of pretty delicious pasta, and 5 euros for a bottle of wine. When we arrived, we realized there were two ladies we had seen on the train and on our bus. Small world.

enjoying some local wine

There's a really interesting church in the main square. The church dates back to the 9th square, and has some key aspects from all across the Mediterranean fusing into it. It's just an absolutely beautiful building, and a perfect place to find peace in an already peaceful place.

Amalfi Cathedral from the main square

the front steps of Amalfi Cathedral

Looking up

Positano

If you want a really expensive place to stay, then it’d be Positano, which is apparently where all the Hollywood stars vacation. And who can blame them. We thought Amalfi was incredible, Positano is perhaps even moreso, though it’s also that much moreso difficult to navigate. Where at least Amalfi has a flat interior, Positano is just built on the side of a mountain. We got off the bus at one end, and walked through the town all the way to the other. There is a lot of climbing in that town, I won’t lie!

arriving in Positano

starting our walk

Looking down at the cathedral

Positano was founded in the medieval times, and came to its peak in the 16th century, and by the 19th century, it wasn't doing so well, so most people from there had moved to a New York City tenement, wondering why the hell they moved. So they got angry, joined with the Sicilians, and started the mafia. Also true story.

St. Francis with a view

no need for a stairmaster in this town

Positano is not for people who like things easy though. If you hate stairs, skip the town. The whole city is climbing. But it’s also well worth it, in my point of view.

Sorrento

Our last stop was Sorrento. On the bus, I was thinking that Salerno would be the perfect place to stay next time we visited Campania. Sorrento made me change my mind.

Sorrento has got a cute old town, flat and up against the sea, bright narrow streets and alleys that must have been how Naples had looked hundreds of years ago. It was in much better condition and much cleaner than anything that I had seen in Italy before.

Though something weird was going on in Sorrento. Though it was late January, they were appearing to have Christmas holidays. There was a huge Christmas tree still up in the main square, lights over every street and hanging in all the trees. What was going on?

the Sorrento Christmas tree

Even weirder was that everything was closed! I know that happened to us already in Ischia, but this was different. It was already after 6. Places should be open. Restaurants should be open. I looked on my Google maps, hitting up one restaurant after the next, each saying they were open, but upon physical investigation, appearing that they in fact weren’t. Was there a time vortex at the train station, or what? But then, why was my GPS and cell internet working? So that couldn’t have been it.

it's looking a lot like Christmas

The only thing that was open were souvenir shops, all full to the brim with bottles and bottles of limoncello, which is the local drink and is also popular throughout Campania. It’s a lemon aperitif, served cold, and tastes hardly alcoholic even though it is quite so, so it’s great to buy for the ladies.

a street in Sorrento

We were just about to give up when we finally found a restaurant, the Ristorante Pizzeria Tasso. Don’t be fooled by its name, despite its “pizzeria” title, it’s by no means the cheap restaurant we were looking for. The first menu item was a seabass for 20 euro, which is actually a good price for seabass, but a bit over the bar food kind of thing we were looking for. But as they did put “pizzeria” in the title, we felt no shame ordering pizza, which actually wasn’t that expensive, at about 8 euros each. Expensive for Campania, but not expensive for the restaurant.

A short rant on pizza

Pizza is from Naples. If you come to the Campania region, you have to eat pizza. Everything else is second. The pizza there is beyond pizza that you’ll have anywhere else. I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s like every kitchen in the region has a special brick pizza oven that just makes awesome pizza. I was told to go to this pizza restaurant or that in Naples, but I’ve learned, it doesn’t really matter. Everywhere is going to have great pizza. And that was true here. And that was true everywhere. And the pizza is cheap. The standard item on the menu might be 30 euros, but they’ll still have pizza for under 10. There’s no rhyme or reason. Why should a fancy place even have pizza?

I never remember to take a pic before starting...

From Sorrento

There are two ways to go between Sorrento and Naples. That old rickety train I mentioned in my Pompeii blog, or by boat.

By boat, you can take the high-speed ferry provided by Caremar, with a transfer in Capri. It’s 20 euro to Capri, and 20 euro to Naples. There’s also a high-speed hydrofoil thru Alilaura that’s direct and only costs 13 euros, but that’s still double the price of the train. You can check all those times here or at their individual sites.

As we had the Arte Card, the choice home was obvious. We’d just take the train. And then wrap up our visit to Naples with wine on the rooftop of our hotel.

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#history #beach #touristicsites #amalfi #naples

Naples: Water for the Ancients

We made it back to Naples from our outing to Pompeii and Herculaneum with time to spare. This was where the tricky part in planning came in. Would we just wander away the day, or would we tick something else off the list to give us more room for our third day’s travel to the Almafi Coast? We decided on the latter and we headed to the underground.

Sotterranea Napoli

There are quite a few catacombs tours and entrances throughout the town of Naples. A few center around dead people—real, bonafide catacombs—and a few of the others center around the aqueduct system. To me, the civil engineering and city design history of the city is great interest to me, especially when it comes to how the ancients drank and pooped, so going for the latter-type sotterranea was an obvious choice.

above the entrance door

The Sotterranea Napoli is perhaps the most famous of the underground tours. There is no way to book ahead, and you have to go in with a tour guide. Which is good, because you can probably get lost and never found down there. The entrance is right in the middle of the old town, next to the Basilica of San Paolo Maggiore. When you’re there, you find the organizer and tell them you want an English tour (or Russian, Italian, Spanish, or whatever) and then they’ll call out your language after a bit. The Italian line is the longest, and the English line is quite a bit shorter, but I’m not sure if that holds true during the tourist season.

When we got there, we were lucky that there’s a free toilet for anyone waiting in line. We were glad to take advantage of that since we knew that there would be no toilet where we were going.

The tour starts off with a staircase leading down some 40 meters below the city, into the aqueduct system. The system was made by the first Greek settlers in 400 BC. They dug down into the tufa, a kind of soft volcanic rock, and mined the tufa to build the buildings up above. However, they mined it in a very specific way to match the plans of the city, and they created an intricate freshwater and sewage system to supply the town. Most houses above would have access to their own private aquifer, or water tank, that from within their house they could gather water.

slaves mining the tufa

If this sounds familiar from my Pompeii blog, it’s because it is. The same system that supplied water to Naples, also supplied water to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and many other towns throughout Campania, and went under an even more massive expansion and upkeep under the Emperor Augustus in 30 BC, making the system an insane 170 kilometers in length.

After they were done creating the system of tunnels, wells, and aquifers, they built an above and underground canal system from a nearby river, channeling it off to fill up the underground aqueduct system. The idea was that it would only fill up to a certain level, and the water would be continuously moving, so that there would be no still water. Still water is toxic water, after all. The wells were also designed in such a way that cleaners could be lowered down and be able to clean the water and the walls, making sure that gunk, rocks, or murdered bodies didn’t collect too much down there.

a Roman water bottle (amphora) being lowered down to get water

The aqueduct stopped being used in about the 19th century, when there was some sort of plague caused in part by the water supply. That caused the water supply to be upgraded to somewhat modern standards, and the water being drained out of the old aqueduct.

Bomb shelter

And it was a good thing the water was drained out. In the Second World War, Naples became the biggest Italian target of Allied bombing campaigns, receiving more than 200 carpet bombings in four years of the war, and 180 raids in 1943 alone. The aqueducts were the perfect places for people to hide away, often for three days to a week at a time. The tour takes you to this part of the history, where they’ve a couple of exhibits set up. One exhibit is of a large model tank, and another is of all sorts of random children’s toys they found down there. Also, part of the air raid tour, we got to see the public toilets, which didn’t really look so bad considering they were in tunnels 40 meters down. I can’t imagine the smell though.

children's toys found down below

they used to have doors

In Naples defense, it wasn’t really a center of festering Fascism. After the fall of Mussolini, the Germans invaded Italy and occupied it, partly as a preventative measure against the now disorganized Italian army, and partly because the Allies had landed on the boot and somebody had to fight them. There was a full rebellion going on, and the Nazis decided they couldn’t maintain the city between the rebellion and the advancing Allied army. So they did what they did best: they murdered hundreds of people somewhat pointlessly and ran away. The revolt though kept the city in tact, as Hitler’s plans were to completely obliterate the city after the German retreat.

More aqueduct action

After the bomb shelter tour, we were taken to an area where there were extremely tight water tunnels. They gave us little “candles”, the plastic kind you light up on the bottom found commonly in Catholic tourist trap churches, and we walked through them. They were a super tight fit, and occasionally opened up into huge man-made caverns that still stored water. All of the water there was pumped in just for the tour, but it gave a nice imagery of what it was like. This was probably the neatest part of the tour.

my wife lighting the way

one of the many water channels

Theatre

After the underground tour, they brought us out of the aqueduct and walked down a long street. There was a bit of confusion at what the point of this was, but it was an interesting conclusion to the tour. First they brought us to a small room that looked like an apartment. The occupants were doing an expansion in their cellar when they stumbled into some old walls of very interesting design. Archaeologists came down and discovered this too was part of an ancient Greek theater, and a historical preservation society has since tried to buy the various apartments that were built in the theater so that they could deconstruct the apartments and reveal the original structure. The results have been hodge podge, with bits of theater revealed, cut across at random by huge blocks of apartment. Actually, a pretty interesting part of the tour.

inside part of the theater, outside someone's apartment

Finally, they brought us around to a woodworking shop that was actually also in a part of the ancient Greek theater. The woodwork shop now hosts an exhibition of some fifty or so various nativity scenes. Neapolitans love nativity scenes. This is because Jesus comes from Naples. True story.

a couple of nativity scenes

Final thoughts

If I were to choose again which tour without having gone, I’d still pick this tour. It’s great for everyone who wants to learn some history of Naples, and who’s interested at the amazing engineering that went on to build the aqueduct system. I imagine the catacombs tours are also great, and if I’m back in Naples I’ll do one gladly, but at this point, I had had enough of dead people stuff over at Pompei. Which I know, is hard to imagine, but still. Stay tuned next week for our trip to the incredible Almafi Coast.

#history #touristicsites #Rome #theatre #museums