Below Belief

Rise late after one of the best nights sleep ever. Something about sleeping surrounded by fifteen sweaty, slumbering people on these rough mattresses is incredibly relaxing.
The sun is bright in a blue sky and we decide this marks a turning point in our journey as the first half ends and the second begins. North becomes South and East turns real East. We head first for the Romanian embassy where we need to purchase a visa for the next, rather daunting stage of the journey through Romania and Bulgaria, two of the poorest countries in Europe. Outside the gates is a crowd of scruffy dark-skinned Romanians who seem to be waiting for a guard to open up. We wait with them patiently, feeling rather out of place and not knowing what else to do. It becomes obvious that peoples’ names are being called out to enter the office. When the guard at last opens up, we adopt a stand-tall-and-look-nordic stance and this quickly brings us to his attention not least because we are a foot taller than everyone else.
Inside the cramped, sweaty office, Romanian style queueing is in force and everyone is more than a little flustered. We wait half an hour before the visa counter opens up and after pushing straight in at the front, a further ten minutes while our visa is made up. At $38 each, Romania had better be good. Satisfied with our day’s work, we head for lunch at a restaurant we have heard of on ‘Castle Hill’ – the parallel with Cambridge being the Curry Centre and too good to miss. It is inside the entrance to a concert hall and according to LP is cheap and cheerful. Cryptically, once inside, we are led by an old German man across the road to what turns out to be his own restaurant. He gestures us to sit down, but the menu is expensive so we make our excuses and head back to satisfy our curiosity at where this cheap place is.
A girl in the box office tells us she has heard the same story before from travellers with the Lonely Planet but tells us there has never been a cheap restaurant there. We always suspected they put red herrings in the book to catch people out. However, she does give us the name of a good restaurant on the other side of the river and so we take her advice. We end up in a restaurant where no-one at all speaks English. We manage to get a broad translation of the menu from a passing business woman and both rather cautiously order roast duck because this is the only thing we understood from the translation. The waitresses smile broadly at our predicament and seem to find us a bit of a novelty in a place which is obviously more usually full of Hungarian workers. I manage to spill coke everywhere but this only seems to improve our relations with the waitresses who can’t seem to do enough to help us, smiling and nodding all the time. The meal is actually very good and costs £3.50 for both of us.
After lunch, we decide to try the funicular railway, again our desire to be in a high place manifesting itself. At the top, looking out over the city, we are approached by a Hungarian man who speaks a very strange Oxford English and claims to be a Tourist Guide who can solve all our problems. Doubting this very much, we tell him we have already found the cheapest restaurant in Budapest for our lunch and considering this record are unlikely to require his assistance. He is indignant and claims he can do better for us. He even has an ID card to prove he is pucker. He offers us some crafty deal where we pay him by the hour to guide us around, but tells us that as a group of two it will be very expensive. He vanishes, just as soon as he appeared, to recruit some more members of his group and we take the opportunity to run for it, there and then.
We walk to the top of a hill and to a buttress which, for all the world with its fairy tale spires, looks like it was built for the tourists. It turns out be genuine, but not nearly as impressive close up as we imagined. The view is great, but the whole thing is rather spoilt by a man sat on a folding stool and playing the old ‘three-cup, where’s the ball?’ routine. Not only this, but he has an American tourist placing £40 bets each time. His technique, like so many, is to play her along and let her win a couple of times offering double or nothing returns. Then he changes to ‘sleight’ of hand and creams his profit. Chris thinks he can make a tidy sum too, but when he tries to bet with a handful of coins, he is told it is kinder spiel – childs play – and lacking the stupidity and the finances to offer £40 he has no option but to watch the American lose face.
We decide we’re going to give the thermal baths a try. Chris is very apprehensive at first, but we’ve heard the baths are very good for relaxation and after the stress of dealing with a very frustrating locker attendant, we are both ready to relax. We are motioned towards some white cubicles and handed beige loin cloths which are tastefully designed to cover absolutely nothing and make everyone’s bottom look as stupid as possible. We walk out looking for all the world like two white Englishmen in French Maid outfits. Joss told us yesterday the women looked even worse in their ‘frontal aprons’. Chris and I question whether that could be possible. Left to discover the mystifying experience of thermal bathing without instruction, we establish a cycle moving through progressively hotter rooms until eventually we can take the heat and steam no longer and have to jump into the icy plunge pool. The sensation is incredible. It can’t be good for the heart but the skin tingling is wonderful. In the shower area there is a beday type arrangement which looks like it came from some KGB torture chamber. It consists of a grey metal seat centred over a rather powerful jet of water. Enema, colonic irrigator and tonsil cleaner all in one. In the naturally heated pools we can sit back and relax while we watch the American tourists passing by wearing speedos under their loin cloths and get the impression they’re not really entering into the true spirit of things. The guide book did warn us that ‘the baths are sometimes frequented by people whose sole interest is not in getting clean; friendly conversation should be approached with caution.’, but wearing trunks is taking it a little far.
We come out feeling wonderfully clean and so relaxed we could sleep. After a pizza, we do just that and return to bed. On the way home we bump into the Harris Isle guys again, this time being led off to some dodgy accommodation by a brutal looking matron of a woman who shakes our hands. Typical, them behaving like sheep again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 31st, 1996 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.