June 11th, 2007, No Comments »
One of the highlights of our trip to Budapest and Vienna was our tour of the Hungarian State Opera House. I love theatre architecture, so I often try to go on these tours when we’re in a new city.
I took a bunch of photos, and they mostly sucked, but I was reasonably happy with these ten. One of the photos shows the air conditioning vents under each seat. These worked using huge blocks of ice in natural caves under the building, making the theatre one of the earliest buildings to have air conditioning. It was pretty muggy in Budapest, so I imagine these vents must have been a God-send for corseted opera-goers.
I added one of my opera house photos to the theatre’s Wikipedia entry, replacing one that was already there. I figured it was a better representation of the auditorium, and of a much larger size.
In Vienna, we mostly took photos of the Prater (a big fun fair) and the Naschmarkt.
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June 7th, 2007, 2 Comments »
The Gellért Baths, associated with the Gellért Hotel, are the most famous and tourist-friendly baths (or spa, in the most traditional sense of the word) in Budapest. They’re located on the Buda side of the river, and are easily reached by hopping on the #19 tram, which runs north-south along the west side of the river. Look for the first stop including the term ‘Gellért’. It’s about the fifth stop along, and occurs just as the tram turns away from the river.
You enter the baths around the corner to the right from the main entrance to the hotel. The baths’ lobby is vaulted, and enormous.
I’ve only been the one time, but things can be a bit confusing. Here’s my step-by-step description on how to negotiate the bath process:
Getting In
- As with all things, beat your fellow tourists by going early. We arrived by 8:45am and pretty much only saw locals until about 10:00am.
- If you speak English or German, you’re presented with two enormous price lists for the pool and baths. These are daunting and confusing as hell. The admission price to the baths and the pool are the same, and you can use both once you’re inside. The only difference is the entrance you choose. I recommend going with the pool.
- You can rent swimsuits, bathrobes and towels. You pay for these at the ticket booth along with your admission. They also take a steep deposit on these items. If you’re just going to the baths and pool, you don’t need a bathrobe–everybody just pads around in their swimsuits.
- Pay the ticket lady. Most people will just want a pool admission plus anything you might need to rent. She’ll give you a scannable card for admission, and a series of paper receipts for any items you’re renting.
- Give the scannable card to the attendant minding the turnstile. He’ll scan it for you and direct you to the pool.
Getting Wet
- Follow attendants’ directions through some labyrinthine passageways to the changing area. Both genders go together.
- When you arrive at the changing area, give the attendant your rental receipts. She’ll give you the items you rented, and direct you to a tiny cabin where your group can change. She speaks a wonderful creole of languages: “Numero fünf!” “Finito?” “Voici your key.”
- Get changed in the cabin.
- The attendant keeps your cabin key, but gives you a token with your cabin number on it. Tie this securely to your swimsuit. The cabin door locks automatically behind you.
- Proceed to the gorgeous, glass ceilinged swimming area. All of the rooms are extraordinary examples of Art Noveau decor. Don’t forget to look up.
- The pool area has two pools: a regular temperature lap pool and a warmer wading pool. If you’re so inclined, go for a swim.
- If you arrive early in the day (I believe the baths open at 6:00am), you’ll see that they’re populated almost exclusively by senior citizens. They meander around with varying degrees of spryness, and orbit the lap pool like slow-motion fun fair cars.
- The entrance to the baths is at the far end of the pool room, to the right. In the baths area, there are two wading pools, one slightly warmer than the other. It’s very pleasant to linger in one or the other, stretch out aching muscles, and dream early 20th century daydreams.
- There are showers here, should you want one.
- Past the showers, there are the two remaining basic aquatic services. First, visit the steamroom, which is the hottest, wettest, most suffocating room in the country. I declined to enter, fearing that ten seconds later the white-clad attendants would be hauling my pasty, unconscious Canadian body back onto the pool deck.
- Marvel at how the old ladies just frickin’ hang out in the steamroom.
- Outside the steamroom there’s a plunge pool set to a nard-shattering eight degrees Celsius. If you can handle the steam, risk cardiac arrest and wade into this pool.
- Dawdle amongst the sundry pools and baths for as long as you like.
Getting Out
- Once you’re finished, locate the cabin attendant to open your cabin.
- Return your rented items to the cabin attendant. She’ll give you your receipts back. Tip the attendant a couple hundred forints.
- Wind your way back to the main lobby. Give the scannable card to the attendant at the turnstile. If you’ve been there less than three hours, you get a small refund. He scans your card, you walk through the turnstile, and gather your refund from a small machine on the wall to your right.
- Return to the ticket window with your receipts to claim your refund. Regardless of how you paid, you get your refund back in cash. Hence, the baths are a handy way to get cash back off your Visa card without the associated fee.
- You’re done! Strong work! If you’re feeling spry, there’s a nice walk up the hill across the street. Don’t miss the cave church on the way up.
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June 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »
I really dig nice hotels. I’m a Taurus, and apparently that makes me a sucker for luxury. I like old school hotels, and I like nice post-modern ones, too.
We’re staying at the Novotel Budpaest Danube, a four-star hotel that’s right on the river in Buda, directly across from the Hungarian parliament. In actuality, it’s not a particularly remarkable hotel, but they’ve done it up nice. It’s a very modern, comfortable business hotel, with all the amenities you’d expect. The staff speak good English (certainly not a requirement, but handy) and have been very friendly and helpful.
At first glance, the location looks a little dubious. It’s seemingly central, but most of the cool stuff in Budapest is either up in Buda Castle or across the river in Pest. Happily, the hotel is two minutes away from both the excellent metro system and a tram line. We’re big believers in using public transport when we visit big cities–driving is usually stressful, frustrating and expensive–and so the location has worked really well for us.
I enjoy modern European hotels because they’re often full of cool, tiny design features which I haven’t seen before. I’m not one to peruse House & Home magazine, so these may seem unremarkable to everybody else.
I really dug the anti-steam mirror. I guess the hot water tubes are run behind the central portion of the glass, and it never steams up. I also liked the nifty sink, where the counter just kind of melts smoothly into the basin:
In the toilet room, I enjoyed another playful design element. In many parts of the world, they divide the toilet’s flushing mechanism into two buttons. This is a clever water conservation strategy, as you need less flushing water for, uh, number one than for number two.
In this bathroom, they’ve kind of exploded the scale of the button (which is usually the size of a loonie and embedded in the top of the basin), rendering them as two stainless steel bubbles on the wall. Cool, eh?
This is a great example of how clever designers rethink ordinary things and show them to us in a new way.
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June 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Julie and her Mom made a day trip to Comino, the third island in the archipelago of Maltese islands. Nestled between the two bigger islands and named for the cumin that once grew there, it has all of four full time residents, one resort, and one of the most picturesque lagoons in the world.
Because of the Blue Lagoon, the place gets inundated with hordes of day-tripping tourists. The trick is to stay at the resort, so that you can enjoy the lagoon in relative peace and quiet in the early morning and late afternoon. We plan to give that a try over the summer. Julie took a few photos of the extraordinarily aquamarine water around Comino (click for the complete set):
As I mentioned, we’re on a working holiday in Budapest and Vienna this week, balancing work with some sight seeing and shopping. Yes, I’ve acquired a new MacBook, and the Hungarian keyboard is frickin’ awesome. We’ve taken some photos, ad I think this is my (somewhat manipulated) favourite (again, click for the whole set):
On a related note, how’s this for a strange flavour of chocolate bar? Nonetheless, it was tasty.
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May 29th, 2007, 15 Comments »
Three unrelated facts send us to Budapest and Vienna for a working holiday next week.
- Julie’s Hungarian heritage.
- We’ve always wanted to see Vienna, but have never gotten around to it.
- My PowerBook is dying.
I must confess that I made a miscalculation when abstractly considering travel options from Malta. I figured if we’re close (from a North American perspective) to places like Morocco and Israel, then it must be easy to fly there.
There are direct flights, but inexplicably they fly at the most heinous times of day. For example, we could spend four nights in Morocco, but we’d have to take flights which leave more or less at midnight each way. The same goes for Israel. The alternative is to fly to London, which just seems ludicrous, particularly for a long weekend.
We’ll get to those places sooner or later, but for now we’ve picked Budapest as next week’s destination. Not only is it an engaging cosmopolitan city, but it also has several vendors of Apple MacBooks. I spoke to a couple of them today. Their English was Boratesque, but it was far better than my Hungarian.
My beloved PowerBook is almost exactly four years old, and has been ridden like a Pony Express stallion. I’d hoped it would last until our return to Vancouver, but alas, it’s on its last legs. The hard drive sounds like an angry bee hive, and I’m spending more time staring at the Gay Spinning Pizza of Death than working.
We could get it repaired, but the money is better spent on a new Hungarian MacBook.
So, next week we’ll be working in and wandering around Budpaest from Sunday to Wednesday. Then on to Vienna by train for Thursday and Friday nights, and back to Budapest for the flight out on Sunday.
We’ll read the guide books and surf around online a bit, but I’m always open to top tips from those who have gone before me. Any favourite spots in Vienna or Budapest?
How Screwed Up Will My Keyboard Be?
UPDATE: Derek raises a good point in the comments:
Are you going to end up with a wacky Hungarian keyboard of some sort?
Good question. There’s two levels of ‘wacky’ here–the aesthetic and the functional. I’m a touch-typer, so it doesn’t actually matter to me what’s written on the keys. In fact, I might like the exoticism of having some weird symbols on some keys. Resale value isn’t an isssue, as I tend to use computers until they die or get antiquated. This blog post makes a kind of cryptic reference to this:
Hungarian layout keyboard has too few signs on it.
Presumably there will be minor differences in how some of the secondary keys are mapped. For example, in Ireland, the ‘@’ sign lived somewhere around the question mark.
Assuming that I’ll need to, can I remap a MacBook’s keyboard? It looks like I probably can, thought it’s not immediately apparent how to do so.
Ah, hang on, I found it under System Preferences –> International –> Input Menu. That allows me to choose keyboard layouts for any number of countries, including both USA and Hungary. So presumably I’ll just chose my preferred layout there.
UPDATE #2: If all else fails, The Unofficial Apple Weblog indicates that I can use this keyboard layout editor to make my keyboard play nice.
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