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Wanderung 12

Boarding a Bus Bound for Budapest.

April 2006

April 21st; The Prater in Vienna, Austria, and the drive to Budapest, Hungary

Finding it impossible to pack our luggage, we broke out our collapsible suitcase and loaded it with dolls, books, and gifts surrounded by dirty clothes to cushion it all. That gave us enough space that packing our suitcases was not too difficult, but it took so much time that we just able to put them outside our door by the 7:30 deadline. Breakfast was again a solid German-style buffet of meats, cheeses, broetchen, bread, jam, milk, cereal, and so forth, and that gave us enough energy to set out once again to see different parts of Vienna.

Our target for the morning was the Prater, an amusement park across the canal from the inner city with a really big Ferris wheel built way back in 1896. Along the way to the Prater we were caught by yet another bookstore. This time we found a "Liederfibel" book of German children's songs for Annalise; it was essentially a first music book and combines the words for each song with a melody depicted by pictures. A song about a duck, for example, has little ducks going up or down along a music staff to show the melody. For us we bought a book of Sudoku number puzzles, although the way things were going I didn't see that we'd ever get the time to really work on any of them until possibly on the flight home.

Ripping ourselves free of the literary quagmire of the bookstore, we finally made it to the Prater and saw the Riesenrad (literally, "Giant wheel") looming above us. The Riesenrad is huge; in fact it is so big that instead of open seats they have small cabins with a wood bench in the center. Each cabin is supported from a central pivot, so if we all crowded over to one side the cabin would tilt in that direction, an unsettling experience until we got used to it. But the wheel is also so heavy that it is rather slow and ponderous in its motion and that gave us a possibly illusory feeling of safety and security. The wheel pauses now and then as they load or unload passengers from each cabin, so we had good chances to take pictures of the scene below us from the open windows during the stops. Directly below us we saw the rest of the Prater amusement park spread out, including a miniature golf course and several roller coasters.


 

Further off in the distance we saw the inner city to one side and a set of skyscrapers on the other. The panoramic view of the inner city showed the entire set of palaces and grand government buildings that we had wandered amongst the previous day. I figured the cluster of modern, glass-covered skyscrapers on the other side probably represented the contemporary economic center of Vienna, but I wasn't sure.

After our ride we wandered up and down the amusement park area, and we both agreed that it seemed much larger than it had 25 years ago. In fact, we really couldn't remember any roller coasters or bumper cars back then, but memory can be quite fallible. When I went home and checked our 1980 vacation album I found a picture of the Prater that included at least a couple of small roller coasters, and another picture of our boys riding in miniature bumper cars. Still, the Prater seemed more extensive this time around; I counted at least 4 roller coasters and 4 bumper car rides on our walk through it.


 

Cutting back toward the canal we worked our way back to the bus, stopping off along the way to see if we could find the hotel where we stayed in 1980. We saw a couple of buildings in the neighborhood with a facade that reminded us of that hotel, but we weren't sure which one was the right place. I did remember a restaurant around the corner from our hotel where the waiter was so enchanted by our children that he gave them free desserts! In general on that trip the Austrians were hospitable to us and quite friendly to our rather active and occasionally rambunctious children, which was not always the case in Germany. We arrived back at Schwedenplatz with just enough time to sit down and have a liesurely lunch at a hole in the wall grill that only had two tables on the sidewalk out front but served very good food. Re-boarding the bus at 12:30, we headed for Hungary.


 

At the Hungarian boarder, however, a petite female immigration officer actually came on board the bus and, much to my satisfaction, stamped our passports. From the border to the central city of Budapest the countryside was either flat or gently rolling farmland with the occasional small towns. The appearance of the buildings in the towns was really quite similar to the typical Germany/Austria small town architecture. The street signs were still the European standard in size and shape, but the alphabet once again had some of the accents on the letters that we had seen Czech Republic. The Hungarian language is, however, not related to the Slavic and western European languages but rather to the languages of Estonia and Finnland as apparently all three countries were settled by migratory branches of the same basic cultural stock.

We had a brief pause after arriving at the Tulip Inn near downtown Pest. Budapest is actually two cities that have grown together over the centuries; Pest occupies the eastern bank of the Danube River while the older city of Buda occupies the western bank. Monika and I used the opportunity to change into our slightly nicer clothes for the evening's entertainment. I sat down on the end of the bed to change my shoes, and the other end of the bed flipped up into the air and I slid onto the floor! Whoa! Unlike all the other beds we experienced on our trip, the platform beds in this hotel were not fastened down and when you sat down on one end it acted rather like a child's teeter-totter. I was not the only one surprised by this; I heard one other lady on our bus describing exactly the same experience. Except for that oddity, our rooms at the Tulip Inn were quite nice.

Around 7 p.m. we drove off in the bus for an evening of Hungarian and Gypsy folk music and dancing. Although the musical group was a quartet similar to the one in Prague (two violins, a hammer dulcimer, and a bass plus the singer), the dance troupe was quite a bit larger, consisting of at least five couples. Both the Hungarian and Gypsy music was fast and furious, and to some extent it sounded all rather alike. But the quality of the players, particularly the lead violinist, was superb; he could make that violin sing or cry at will. The evening performance came complete with a hearty meal of authentic cuisine. The appetizer was Hungarian goulash following by a main course of turkey breast, beef, and sausages plus potatoes and pasta, so we enjoyed a nice dinner while listening to the music and watching the dances.

The dance group was also skilled, but in a folk dancing sense rather than a classical ballet or modern dance sense. That is, their skill lay in the flawless execution of intricate dance steps and basic movements timed to the music rather than holding difficult poses well and making flowing, graceful movements to transition from one pose to the other. The dance movements for the men, for example, emphasized a lot of stomping, jumping, and slapping various parts of the body right down to the boots. I suppose a ballet dancer could stomp his feet, but with those ballet slippers on it wouldn't have quite the same effect and, as for jumping up and slapping the slipper, that would just seem to be rather pointless, wouldn't you think? During the performance the entire troupe of dancers, both male and female, somehow managed to change costumes for every ensemble number, which they managed by interleaving a dance with just 2 or 3 dancers between each of the full ensemble numbers.


 

The costumes chosen for each number reflected whether the dance had a Hungarian or Gypsy origin. For the women, the Hungarian dresses were full and flowing with colorful embroidery and a fancy apron like thing at the front. For the Hungarian dances the women usually carried a lace handkerchief that was used in the pattern of dance figures and movements. The women's outfits for the Gypsy dances were also colorful but lacked embroidery and were a lot more (ahem) revealing than the Hungarian dresses. Instead of aprons, the Gypsy dresses were decorated with golden coins or bangles of some type suspended by chains around the hips. For the Gypsy dances the women would, if anything, carry a small tambourine to give emphasis to the beat of the music. The total effect was very colorful, energetic, and attractive and I overheard an older gentleman at the next table pipe up and say, "Is it too late for us to become Gypsies?".


 

While I was busy watching the women dance and the men slap their boots, Monika also noticed another, subtler, difference between the dances chosen to represent each culture. It seemed to her that the Hungarian dances focused on the couple as the unit of interaction in the dance and the main movements and steps involved a man and a woman as a pair. In contrast, the Gypsy dances seemed to be more what I would call "line" dances where the men danced mostly with the men and the women danced mostly with the women. Not that there wasn't pairing occurring during the Gypsy dances, I hasten to add, but that pairing always seemed to be temporary and a secondary rather than a primary focus of the dance. Whether or not this is a valid reflection of each culture, we certainly had a wonderful time seeing both kinds of dances performed.

At the end of the evening we had a bit of audience participation, which was fun. Toni was, of course, in the thick of it leading the way, but we had a really cross-cultural mix of New Zealanders, Americans, and Japanese all performing the chicken dance together. I had forgotten how to do the chicken dance but quickly relearned. The Japanese, on the other hand, seemed to never have been exposed to it but had a wonderful time learning on the spot. It was curious how the Japanese could be out on the dance floor cutting up and still manage to be polite and courteous. It would have been easy, especially with the wine freely flowing, to lose control in a situation like that and get a little rambunctious, but they never did. After a brief stop at the gift shop at the end of the evening, it was finally time for us all to re-board the bus and return to the hotel for the night, especially as our wake up call was for 7 a.m. the next morning.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
April 2006
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Epilog

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