Budapest

So I've got quite a few stories, so I think I'll separate this post that way, beginning with... (think of the TROJAN MAN voice on the commercials)

Bright red tattooed Hungarian Man
(wearing a Speedo)
I was at Szecheny Furdo, a place with a huge collection of warm swimming pools surrounded by fountains and statues. Buildings adjacent to the outdoor pools have an icy whirlpool and saunas. Well I was sitting on the edge of the icy whirlpool, swirling my ankle around in it for 15 minutes and watching the other people climb in and out very quickly, and all of a sudden, this mountain of a man with gold watches on each wrist, a gold chain you only see on the Crips and the Bloods in bad movies, and a bright red sunburn covering the entire front of his body plunges himself into the whirlpool, displacing all the water so that what used to be up to the middle of my shin made waves up to my stomach. In one motion he drops his entire body under the water and throws his head back the way girls in bikinis drop their hair into the water when they want to look sexy. He lifts his head halfway above the water, so that his mouth is still sort of underneath.

And he makes a sea lion noise.

At this point I was in shock. When it sunk in I wanted to laugh but he was one of those men that used to be a body builder and is now just a sack of softened muscle splurging out from everywhere, and I thought he might eat me. So I sat there, averting my eyes, waiting to see what would happen next. Would he storm out just as quickly, making a new wave up to my head? Would he make a different noise, like a goat or a whale or maybe a kitten? Would he start singing "Macho Man" in Hungarian?

In the end, it's possible that he did any or all of those things, but I had to leave the minute he started pounding his chest like a gorilla.

The Hungarian Wax
I'm not gonna lie -- it had to be done. So I figured this was a good place because a) I'm staying with someone, so I was able to ask her where to go, and b) things here are dirt cheap -- I paid what came out to just over $4 for The Hungarian Wax.

First off, the woman didn't know any English, so this woman I'm staying with (who seriously is the nicest person in the world) decided to come with me to translate. When we got there she realized that the woman doing the wax was the mother of a girl in her daughter's class, so throughout this whole thing they were talking and having a good time.

But when the woman said an entire bikini wax would take five minutes, I knew it wouldn't go well.

What happened was this: The woman used a rolling dispenser thing and just covered the entire area in wax. Now, keep in mind that when I say 'entire,' I'm not exaggerating at all. There was the front. There were the sides. There was the little man in the canoe; you know, the one with 10,000 nerve endings. Everything. Then she placed the strips on the wax and ripped them off. Over and over and over.

It was phenomenal.

The Night Bus
Last one, and this one's got to be quick because the person I'm staying with needs to use the computer (although at some point I totally have to tell you guys about the foster care system in Hungary, because it's even more Fucked Up than ours).

I'd been excited because all the buses here had clear annoucements about which stops to stop at, along with electronic boards that have them written out. Well last night I was hanging out with a bunch of Hungarian kids at an outdoor concert and then a bar, and one was telling me that they don't always have those announcements.

That night, of course, I encountered this.

And rode the Night Bus all the way to the end of the line. I couldn't ask the driver to stop at my stop because I wasn't sure how to pronounce it and didn't have it written down. I couldn't see anything on the street because it was dark, and the names of the stops weren't posted.

I probably would have just ridden it back and forth all night but finally I asked a guy next to me, "Do you know English?" in this pathetic, beaten tone, and he looked at me and said, "Of course, what do you need?"

Really should have done that earlier.