Boring You With Budapest Pt 3. The Final Chapter

Random Street Art, People Watching, and...Erotic Budapest!
(The erotic part is just shit around town that I thought was funny...pervs, go away now)

Lets end this finally!

Start it out with some graffit-oh. Emo's apparently not just a shitty, lightweight brand of punk-rock that the kids listen to in Hungary, but some kind of social movement. We saw the word "emo" on many - usually black - objects. Shirts, posters, hats, tattoos. Don't know why. Cindy did get a hilarious t-shirt at a street vendor's tent that encourages people to kill themselves.


S'more graffiti. There actually wasn't a ton of graffiti around. All big cities should be decorated with spray paint.


Poseidon and the four furies? Dunno. This was about the first piece of public artwork that Cindy and I saw after our first scary day on subways and trains and buses and things.


The good king was alright, I guess.


But the kelp faces on the base were what I really liked.


Idn't that sweet, piping his sheep to sleep like that.


Eh?


I've brought you a present...And I'm naked. A lot of the buildings had neat statues attached to them, and most of them looked like they meant or symbolized something, but I don't know what it was.


Don't look at me!


If I were to name this one, it would be "Wet T-Shirt Contest at Spring Break, With My Two Homunculi."


This was the only "average" woman statue that we saw, and one of only a few "average" women we saw, period.


I think this guy's a doctor or something.


A Love Doctor! I'll use this as the segue into the next section of pictures...


Here I am contemplating a breast. Not that I have much to contemplate. I like them, and that's pretty much the long and the short of it.


What does this remind you of?


This was another statue that I really liked. But since it has rather prominent juggernauts, and I'm dirty talkin', I'll lump it in with this other stuff.


What do these remind you of?


Parliament. Nothing suggestive here, just a pretty building. I tried to take a picture of it at night when it was all lit up, but, alas, it was the night of one of the previously mentioned banquets and either the camera or the cameraman weren't functioning properly.


The Terror house, which was actually - despite outward appearances - a very somber museum. The house itself had been used as headquarters by both the local flavor of the Nazi Party and the Soviets. At it's worst it was essentially a gulag in downtown Budapest - there was a creepy dungeon/jail in the basement where many people were tortured and executed.


What does this remind you of?


The last night of the conference, prior to the lame dinner that was held, we sat outside in a square, and I had a cigar originating from a certain island nation while we sipped palinka and people watched.


Nice! She steals my jacket, and my stogey...


We also did some pigeon watching, as the pigeons looked a little bit different than what I'm used to.


There was a certain ass-backwards fashion sense that we noticed. Shorts or skirts and calf-length leggings being the most prominent. All these pictures were shot on the sly, so apologies for and graininess or bluriness.


I don't remember why this lady was singled out, maybe Cindy'll leave a comment to remind me...


Leggings and a skirt...So hot right now.


Then we saw mannequins in the window of one of the haute couture shops and it all made sense.


Perfect sense.


An example of the curious "Hungarian Red" hair-dye that we saw a lot of. There were also several women that had bleached white hair that was black at the tips, so they kind of looked like super-villains of one variety or another.


I think the fact that this "Keeper of the Flame" was shot at a distance and is kind of blurry only adds to the mystique.

Finally, here's the only two friendly locals we encountered...


As we strolled to the reception, and I finished my cigar, Cindy stopped to take my picture...


And the two guys in the background ran up and yelled out "Mafioso" for a picture. Of course I checked for my wallet immediately afterward - this was still in a big city and I'm paranoid. But it turned out that they were just out for a laugh.

Headache now.

PS - the things that are red in the captions are links, if anyone needs some more 'splaining about a couple of those terms...

My Friends That Live Out Of Doors

New month, more space on the Flickr account, I'm a happy man-child.

Every spring, for about three weeks, I get to see all sorts of neat and amazing organisms here in the ADK's. Before that, it's too ball-freezing cold for anything alive to be out wandering around, and after that the greenery starts to get too tall and too thick to see anything. Here's some pictures of the little pals that I met this year.

Every year when I pull the visqueen off of the garden, there's always at least one toad and one garter snake. This year I was not disappointed (although the toad I saw last year was an absolute giant compared to the guy hidden in there this year). This little fella/lady ate a worm while Ethan watched - which I caught on video...Hmmm...maybe I'll run to my office and try to YouTube that real quick like...Nope...No more YouTube uploads at work...Frown.

The toad. He offered me two bits if I would let him marry my miniature daughter. I didn't know what on earth he was talking about.

Not the greatest of pictures here, but this was the first live porcupine I've seen outside of a zoo. Usually they have been well-flattened by the time I get to see them.

He was crossing the road, so I hopped out and chased him down and took some pictures. Little bastards can really waddle pretty fast, and it didn't take him long to climb pretty high into that tree.

ALBINO MOTH! This moth insisted that his name was Edgar. Wink.

Boring You With Budapest, Pt 2

I need to get on this - I'm starting to forget what some of this stuff was!

Budapest Castle (Or Is It Castle Budapest?) and the Chain Bridge

I should mention that Budapest is really two cities. Pest (pronounced "pesht" by the locals) is on the Eastern(?) side of the Danube, which is where the plains (or is it steppes? I don't know) start. So it's flat, and seems to be where the commerce, housing, squalor, etc. is. That's where we spent most of our time - and there's lots of modern shopping and public art and stuff like that in Pest. However, Buda's on the other side of the river, is hilly, has nicer architecture, and cooler "touristy" things to do (that is, unless you consider shopping as the be-all-end-all of a vacation, in which case, stay in Pest). We didn't really know this until late into our stay. The Chain Bridge is a neat looking bridge that a lot of people use to get from one side to the other.

This is looking from the Eastern side of the Chain Bridge (I really liked the kick ass lions...the gypsy beggars that were literally underfoot - as in I had to step over the woman - not so much).

This was at the base of the funicular - which as it turns out is NOT a slang term for a girl's naughty parts - that you could ride up to the castle. We opted for the stairs.

This peasant woman selling her embroidery was probably the most authentic thing we saw during the entire stay. And I have no doubt that she took breaks to run back the the beemer and check her text messages in between hawking quilts.

Is this an eagle? A vulture? What does it mean? Do I want a replica in my bedroom? Yes.

This is a giant fountain that depicts many scenes of hunting and manliness. Kick ass.

This was the second monk, of a second variety, that we spotted.

The chain bridge, at night, from some ritzy hotel where we attended a gala that had little food and too much drink. Not that I'm complaining, but you should see the other pictures I tried to take that night!

Heroes' Square

Heroes' Square is a great big monument in the middle of Pest that has bronze statues of...heroes. I really can't explain much more than that as there weren't any plaques around - even in Magyar - that explained any of it. Just statues of a lot of guys - all of whom were the proud bearers of fantastic mustaches - that I'm guessing you probably wouldn't want to piss off if you were to travel back in time and meet. They all looked pretty hard core. Here's pictures of a few of them.

Why no, sir, I do not wish to engage in fisticuffs with you or your horse. That is a mighty fine looking mustache, however. Might I touch it?

Here's the first monk, of the first variety that we spotted. Wily wife jumped out into foot traffic so I could pretend like I was taking a picture of her as he approached, but I think he was wise to our scheme, as he scowled after I took this.

Here's the whole of Heroe's Square. Wish I knew what it all meant.

These two guys are definitely hard core. Pay close attention to the guy on the right...

...It's one thing to make yourself badass, but if you're so badass that you need to make your horse harder by STRAPPING ANTLERS TO ITS DAMN FACE then my hat is off to you, sir.

I was going to save this one for my final, hopefully funny, entry about Budapest, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to throw in this statue of our guy here, proudly dsiplaying his baby-dick.

Bryan, tell me what's going on here...

...Because I thought it was a battle or something (there's probably a dozen or so of these reliefs) but after I saw this one, I'm not so sure...

The Citadel

The Citadella was also on the Buda side of the Danube. I think that, aside from the castle, it was the only other thing we visited on that side of the river. It's way up on top of a hill, so you get a nice view of the whole city, you can see the Danube and all of the bridges (by the way, whoever wrote "Blue Danube" is full of shit - that thing was brown and nasty looking), there's sort of a cool authentic curio shop dealing with used artifacts from the soviet era, and there are some more unexplained statues. Also, tour buses like to drop people off up here and then take three to four hours to return and pick them up.

Here's the Danube, Chain Bridge, etc. taken from up top.

Probably my favorite statue that I saw. I have no idea who it is, what it means (I'm guessing it's a holdover from the soviet occupation) but I do know that it's A GIANT NAKED GUY COMING CORRECT ON A DRAGON!

Some dapper looking man molested my wife while we awaited the return of the bus.

But she can take care of herself.

TV In Budapest

I just had to share this. Since Budapest is so close to Austria, many of the TV channels are German programming. What does this mean? We watched lots of German MTV (more on this in a minute), and late night programming - which was when we were in the hotel the most - was the most insane thing I've ever seen. There was a show on one channel that lasted hours that consisted of nothing but a puppet pound cake, front and center, nattering on and on. There was another channel that had a game show that had a woman (and sometimes a man) that would take phone calls...and get progressively more and more naked. And not in an Ooh-La-La striptease kind of way, more like "thanks for the bid, and now I happen to be topless" kind of way. And there was hard core porn on basic cable.

But my favorite was when MTV Germany let this guy take over the airways:

Check out "Augen Auf" if you want the highlight reel to continue - It may even be a better showing than this video.

At first it seemed kind of cool - some dude from Berlin in a metal skull mask rapping about his block. Until he takes the mask off and it's some skeevy looking man-child underneath. He don't look like he could kick my grandma's ass...

The Answer To Bryan's Question

Yes, I did find myself to be more...hungry whilst in Hungary. That's because when we could find food, it was usually in small portions (and I'm no fan of overly large, American restaurant portions) and it usually sucked. Although we did get fed a huge, strange breakfast every morning by the hotel. I got to start the day with pâté.

The Best Beer Commercial Ever. Word.

I remember trying to make these noises all the time as a little squirt.

Also, this had me laughing pretty hard. I bet there were some pretty stoked 12 year olds.

Someday, when I'm not busy with my head in excel spreadsheets, I'll get back to the boring you with Budapest bullsh*t.

-B-