Part 1, into the vampire mountains

A number of unfamiliar sensations across 12000 miles, a series in (?) parts

It has been 26 days since I almost missed my flight out of the city, on a cold night not quite early enough to sleep. This is a problem forever unsolved, flying across this particular ocean is a promise of a sleepless night in an inhuman position watching mediocre films in their worst possible milieu.

The flight’s just long enough to wallow in that understanding and when I land in Budapest my eyes feel like they’re full of mud. I can’t even see well enough to figure out where the luggage has ended up, I feel completely unprepared to get myself online to buy my SIM and then figure out how to get where I’m supposed to be.

It only really occurs to me there in the airport that there’s not a word of English in the repertoires of any of the places I’ve chosen to fly over my next month. Of the 5 countries I will almost certainly get lost in, only one of them speaks a language native to me and even then, Barcelona is on the whole violently opposed to speaking it.

So I get ready not to be able to communicate without my hands. It’s not entirely unfamiliar but it makes it hard to crack a joke.

I make a maybe stupid mistake I’m too sleep deprived to properly regret, a Hungarian bar crawl through a number of bars abandoned in the cold war, bomb shelters, garrisons. Horrible medicinal shots provided at each but there is a social element that feels essential to the flow of this month mostly alone.

So I learn about Budapest’s Tuesday Night drunk scene, dragged through what constitutes a map of emergency spaces, ancient courtyard fortifications not made for this purpose and thus ideal for it.

Everyone signed up speaks English at least. A brief stay of verbal execution. The guide is an Iranian artist who transplanted herself into Eastern Europe and listed a familiarity on her CV of bars she’d never been to having just arrived. She ends up great for and at the job. What do any of the drunken foreigners know, anyway to call her on? Mostly we’re here for the terrible shots. As with most places there are funhouse reflections of American things in almost every space. An idea of how we’re seen or maybe just a shared laugh at the absurdity that dominates the global airwaves. Either way it seems to suit its purpose.

Whatever night scene I expected in Hungary is not equal to the task of its description. It is a Tuesday outside of any tourist season and still each of the bars is overflowing. Something about this place feels weirdly familiar to my bloodshot 80s cold war eyes. Street lights a shade of yellow since extinct. Cigarette smoke in every passage. When I leave the group at 2am I am the first to go. I have exhausted my exhaustion and blacking out after zero sleep at the starting line seems not to be advised. So I head to bed.

The city is stunning. A kind of grit and obscene beauty that will follow consistently through every city until the last stop. Places of a different infrastructural DNA that externalizes the inner life of buildings. I drink coffee somewhere new every day and try not to telegraph how ignorant I am of any part of how this city spends its morning. There are cheeseburgers everywhere themed to different US states. Some of the names are funny but horrifying. A New York City Pulled Pork sandwich mixes its metaphors. I don’t ever get a chance to try and see if they’re accurate to whatever they’re aiming for. I’m eating haphazardly, some kind of morning protein sets up a day full of forgetting what time it is and ignoring my body’s cues until I realize it’s past dinnertime and I haven’t really eaten since.

On the 3rd day I meet Maz at the train station portaling us to Transylvania and we’re so ahead of schedule that we get cocky and decide to toast the journey across the street. Pulling into the bar, the cobblestone outside devours one of the wheels on my suitcase, a portent for the journey or at least for the lifespan of this suitcase. Inside, the hobbled suitcase tips over and in reaching out for it the wine in my glass takes that moment to escape to the freedom of every fiber of cotton in my slacks. I wonder if they’ll even let me on the train smelling like I’ve slept in a bar storage room. Outside the bar, taking our time to savor the head start, we decide we still have plenty of time to spare and at the end of a long line at a suspect convenience store we buy the first salvo in a number of snacks we mostly will not eat. We’ve paid for old timey eastern european sleeper beds and it’s obvious to me that I’m going to throw most of this popcorn across the sleeper car at Maz’s bed. This turns out to be too hopeful an ambition.

When we finally cross to the station (it is important to note for the next part that we have literally been across the street), we realize we’ve gotten the timing wrong and are instead of coasting delicately in our sock feet into home plate actually one minute late. We run with my 3 legged suitcase towards the hopefully waiting train, which a guy in an official shirt tells us is on the first track, something like 20 tracks from where we are. It is about then that we realize the station is easily 3x bigger than we had taken it for. The front entrance opens inexplicably on the last lane, so we’re as far from our destination as is possible while still being in the building. At the very end of the string of visible tracks we’re at is a 2nd cluster we can’t see until we finish the level we’re currently trying to pass. Turning the corner we notice the new level is an entire train length deeper, the station curving backwards like a twist in inception, the different sections descending away from our perspective like a very upsetting ladder. When we get to the end of that one there’s another, and way at the end track 1. It feels like we run a mile and when we get there it’s probably 12 minutes of running later and whatever train we paid for is gone.

We interview a string of correctly shirted representatives, none of which have any reason to speak English, all of whom do their best to reach across that chasm and give us advice that proves without exception inaccurate. We finally figure out a train that’ll get us to Brasov but our tickets are no good as it’s a Hungarian line whereas I’d booked a Romanian line originally for the snacks it promised. Pity is taken on us, to a degree, and we pay a little more again but not the whole thing twice, and finally in humiliation board a different train more or less in the same timeframe but with no beds free.

It’ll have to do.

We sit in uncomfortable seats and settle in for an overnight train ride we won’t be able to sleep through. My 2nd of the last 4 days. But adventure is its own reward.

A few hours later Maz wanders off in what seems like the wrong direction and is gone a while. After a while a giddy voice whispers “wanna sleep in a bed?” It turns out Maz has greased the proper Hungarian (possibly Romanian?) hands with Euros and we’ve gotten 2nd hand access to a car occupied only thus far by a sleeping conductor in his underpants. He gets up and throws all our stuff onto the top bunk and we climb up onto our cot-width old timey Eastern European sleeper beds. The car is hot like a sauna and there’s an old man with a mustache in there with us we can’t understand and he likewise us. I opt not to throw the popcorn out of respect for what I assume is his position and the fact it’s now 3am. It’s not easy to sleep in there, but I get a couple hours and when the train pulls in to the mountains of Transylvania I have technically experienced an ill-advised cross country sleeper train.

TO BE CONTINUED.