Dave and Josh are…
In Budapest.
I was joined this morning by the first travel companion in my now 9 month ramble. (I don’t count my Dad whose brief, though enjoyable, companionship was necessitated by illness or Rob who I met on the road.) Comrade Josh Brustein, part time communist, full time Browns apologist and the better half of the Brustein brothers flew out to join me for a week of proletarian adventure in Budapest and Transylvania.
We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the street while being serenaded by a nice little Hungarian two-piece, who broke out a version of Hava Nagila in his honor.
We then returned to explore Buda’s Citadel Hill where we failed to find the Museum of Commerce and Catering (a highly anticipated attraction featuring such great inventions as the “beer warmer”) but did find the excessively strange statue of a man falling, presumably to his death.
Less inexplicable but equally as humorous was this bit of street art.
Then it was time for serious business as we met Rob and went to the Terror Museum, chronicling the terror and horror of the Nazi and Soviet eras in Budapest, housed in the headquarters of the Gestapo and later the Hungarian secret police. The museum was aesthetically, very impressive as it did an incredible job of conveying a sense of terror or least a feeling of unease through dark art, pulsating music etc. Unfortunately it lost most of its dramatic punch because the information sheets in each room had little, and frequently absolutely nothing, to do with what was on display in the room. For example the room that consisted of a maze made out of simulated bars of soap had information on the life of peasants et al. This made for a lack of context or understanding that undercut the power of the audio/visual displays. And all that reading was making Josh fall asleep. In his defense the man was on vacation and jetlagged as hell.
But traveling with a commie means we cant end the day on such a negative depiction of Marxist ideals so after a stopover in a arty hipster movie house/coffee shop where we debated the issues of the day and reclined in beanbags, we headed over to Marxism Pizzeria where the walls are decorated with awesome communist graffiti,
the booths are wrapped in barbed wire, and the menu offers such delicacies as CCCP IZZA, Snow White and the 7 Small Proletars, Red October and pizza licensed by the KGB.