Getting around in Budapest

... hopefully, a sparklingly witty examination of it, but I'll settle for interesting.

First, I have to say that, in general, I've been enjoying things here. A lot of stuff is cheaper, particularly food and drinks other than water, the people in the program are cool, and after an initial week of unseasonal rain, the weather has been warm and hazy, which reminds me, actually, of LA in winter (though I'm sure the pollutants are different, the pollution is definitely the same). At the same time, though, a lot of things have enough ridiculous to them that you have to take it in stride.

The example that comes to mind first is the public transportation. It's really convenient, runs throughout the city, comes at short intervals, and is really cheap (like $30 for a monthly pass). At any given time during the day, the city is crisscrossed with metro trains, trams, buses, and trolleybuses (basically buses that run on wires, like the trams). At 11:30, though, weekday and weekend alike, it all shuts down.

In lieu of daytime transport, Budapest has the night buses. These are all those long accordian buses, so imagine, if you will, a big bus totally packed with people. Now, since it's nighttime, at least half those people will be drunk. Since they are young people, there will be at least three couples on the bus making out, which is culturally acceptable here. Since there are no public container laws here either to the best of my knowledge, if you're lucky, people will be passing around champagne. To top it off, the drivers of night buses are clearly completely crazy; they drive with reckless abandon, particularly around curves, and I've definitely been in buses that have jumped a curb, swerved to avoid a pedestrian, almost been hit by cars, etc.

Some nights, this adds a coda of adventure and excitement to a night out. Others, it's irritating and a little embarrassing when you, the american, end up falling all over the place while everyone else seems impervious to even the most unexpected lurches. When you're a little sick, it's torture, and seems to last for hours. When you're on the verge of passing out, though, the motion of the vehicle can definitely lull you to sleep (as both my roommate Peter and I have discovered, though fortunately on separate occaisions and in each others' company). In all cases, though, I always wonder why they run the buses at all. Everything starts up again at like 4:30 in the morning, so they only have five hours of night bus service, but they're five hours that are definitely part of a night out, particularly on the weekends. I'm sure that the city has considered alternatives, but is it really that much cheaper/safer to run things this way?

Additionally, although everything here is really cheap, nothing is free. The pay toilets may be the most famous feature and common to all of europe, but we definitely went to a club last weekend with a fifty cent cover charge. They had turnstiles, into which you inserted one 100 forint coin, and they hired a cashier whose only job was to make change for people who had large bills so that they'd have coins to put in the turnstiles. In the same vein, many public parks here have large trampolines, but they cost about $2.50 for like five minutes, so nobody uses them, and they have hired attendents there to take people's money... it seems to me to barely be cost-effective, let alone a good use of the space.

This nothing-free thing brings me back to public transport. One-way tickets cost between $.60 and $1.10, depending on how far you go, and a monthly pass is only $30, which I find to be a really good value. Enforcement of these fares, though, is based on the honor system: there is supposedly always a risk of encountering transit authorities with red armbands, who will require you to show your ticket; otherwise, there is no way to tell if people paid or not. Most significantly, I have only ever seen transit cops at metro stations, never on trams, trolleys, or night buses, and, with only one or two exceptions after three weeks of being in town, my friends haven't either. In fact, some tram stops don't even appear to sell tickets. Even when there are metro cops, the enforcement is lax--I definitely didn't see them one time getting off the metro and walked right past them onto the escalator, and only found out they were checking passes later when the people I was with showed up a minute after I did. Although I'm sure they'd be less crowded and make more revenue if they just made sure people paid, I think we've all had moments when we've been glad turnstile-hopping is almost encouraged.

sam