Europe 24 - From Budapest to Rome

Sunday was a travel day, but before we left Budapest Kim wanted to go to the farmer’s market.

Given that we were mere hours from having to stuff all of our belongings onto a plane it was an interesting question what we would purchase there, but you don’t really need to buy anything at a farmer’s market to enjoy it. It’s an experience in itself. And this one was that.

The Szimpla Sunday Farmer’s Market is only open on Sundays, as one would gather from the name, and it is located in the Szimpla Kert Ruin Bar. The “ruin bar” seems to be something fairly unique to Budapest as far as I can tell, and it is exactly what it sounds like. These pubs – of which Szimpla Kert was one of the first – occupy spaces that are in fact more or less ruins: old half-destroyed buildings, cellars, former shops, and so on, generally with mismatched and elderly furniture and decoration that falls under the heading of “eclectic,” which is what you get when you try to describe “weird” in a real estate context. Szimpla Kert is open in the evenings, as you would expect from a bar, but on Sunday mornings it transforms into a local market for produce, baked goods, and all of the things you normally find in farmer’s markets around the world.

You have to find your way there, though. It’s not really obvious.

Oliver elected to sleep in a bit while he could, so Kim and I set out on foot toward the market before deciding to take the Metro for as close as it would take us. The Budapest Metro, as with other such systems in cities built by rivers, runs extraordinarily deep under the ground in order to cross the river and getting down to the tracks can be a long process. But once you get down there, the trains run every couple of minutes and all you have to do is get off at the proper stop and figure out how to get back up to the surface. This is where it comes in handy to know the word for “exit” in the local language.

We emerged blinking back into the sunlight and set off for the market, which from the outside doesn’t look like much – an unremarkable entryway in the middle of a block of buildings that don’t really seem to have much to do with farmer’s markets. But then you see the little sign telling you you’re in the right place and head in and suddenly it all unfolds in front of you.

The vendors were still setting up when we got there, but we had a good time exploring the place and seeing what there was on offer. There was a guy selling hot sauces, which is always an attraction for me. He let me try one, with the warning that it was hot – as indeed it was, but since I’m the target market for such things I enjoyed it and he seemed happy. There was produce and bread. Kim ended up buying an herbal tea blend, which the seller was careful to warn her “works as an aphrodisiac.” We promised to give it a try. We also ended up buying some pastry to eat on the way back to the apartment.

The thing about these markets is that the vendors usually enjoy talking with people and we had some interesting conversations. One vendor and I got into a long conversation about the nature of money and what it does to people who have a lot of it, which ended with her asking me to write down a bit of it in her phone’s notes app (which was flattering) and giving me one of the energy bars that she makes in return. It was a very tasty energy bar, something that is not all that common with energy bars really. I highly recommend them.

We couldn’t stay too long, so we headed back out and walked to the apartment, passing a few memorable things along the way.

This pet food and supply store, for example.

Or this sign, which seemed to be attached to a bar of some kind and made me wonder just what sort of things happen there.

As a fan of the Philadelphia Flyers, this appealed to me.

Back at the apartment we packed up our stuff, tidied up the place a bit, said our goodbyes to Klara who happened to be by the mailboxes as we were passing through, and then headed out to the stop by our little park to catch the 100 Bus to the airport. That one isn’t included with the usual bus pass so you have to pay an extra fee, which they are happy to handle right there. It’s a long ride but a fairly nice one and then suddenly you’re at the terminal and looking for your flight, which is of course delayed.

They’re always delayed. Sometimes this works in your favor, but for this flight it was not what I wanted because we were heading to Rome and we wanted to catch up with Anita there.

When we were planning this trip she and I tried to figure out if there was a way we could do that, and it turned out that between her schedule and ours the only thing that would work would be to find each other at the Fiumicino Airport. Our flight was scheduled to get in at 4 and she and her dad, Giancarlo, were scheduled to fly out at 7 for a trip of their own, but even just that much would be lovely so that was what we planned.

And then our flight was delayed.

So Anita and I fired up the WhatsApp machine trying to see if it would still work, and meanwhile Kim, Oliver and I found some lunch and waited for the all clear to be given for our flight. We were supposed to check our carryon bags for this flight but it turned out that they let us carry them on anyway.  I'm not sure if this was an oversight or a gift but either way we didn't question it. This made meeting up with Anita that much easier since we could do it inside the security perimeter rather than trying to find each other at baggage claim.

Eventually Wizz Air (really, that’s the Hungarian airline we were flying) told us we had an actual departing flight so we went down to the gate to get in line, and then they announced (in Hungarian) that we needed to go to a different gate and after some initial puzzlement we followed the crowd to the new gate where we were processed into a waiting area and, well, waited.

After a while they announced that the flight would be delayed by a total of 90 minutes so if we wanted to leave some ID with the gate personnel we could go out and get snacks or whatever. Fortunately we did that quickly and were back in the waiting area when – rather short of the 90 minutes they’d previously told us – they suddenly told us all we could get on the bus and go out to the plane waiting on the tarmac.

We didn’t actually take off until the full 90 minutes had passed so I’m not sure what that was all about, but there you have it. Nobody really understands why airlines do the things they do. We put up with it because reasons, and here we are. But they did let us onto the plane and then flew us to Rome as we had paid them to do, and that has to count for something.

We got off the plane at the very far end of Terminal A at Fiumicino and spent the next forty days and forty nights migrating toward the center of the terminal and when we got there we found Anita and Giancarlo!

We had about 15-20 minutes together, but that was enough to enjoy a lovely conversation and catch up on our various lives before we had to part ways. It was wonderful to see Anita again, and we enjoyed meeting Giancarlo as well!

Getting from there to where we were staying in Rome was fairly simple, all things considered. We’ve done it before. It is a very strange thing to me, at this point in my life, to realize that I have a small amount of familiarity with Rome now. This is the third time we’ve stayed at that apartment in Testaccio, a neighborhood slightly outside of most of the tourist areas where you can go to grocery stores, little restaurants where nobody speaks English and nothing on the menu is translated, and the kind of normal bakeries and shops that people who live in a place actually use. I know where the ATM that works best with my American debit card is. I have a favorite restaurant. I know where the nearest bus stops are and for which routes. For someone whose world was largely contained in a ten square mile area of Philadelphia and its suburbs for his first two-plus decades, it’s a fascinating thing to realize. I have to say that I like the familiarity with this new place, such as I have.

The train runs from the airport to the Pyramide station in Testaccio on a schedule that doesn’t really require you to look anything up – you just buy your ticket from the machine and stand on the platform until the next one comes in a few minutes and then it’s a 25-minute ride through the countryside and environs around Rome until you get to the station and discover that somewhere between Budapest and Rome the top blew off the thermometer and it is seriously hot out there because it is summer in Italy and the climate isn’t changing, folks, it has changed and this is where we are now. It was a cloudless 36-39C (97-102F) the whole time we were there, and as someone whose preferred temperature is 17C (63F) with overcast skies this was a hard, hard thing. But we had our water bottles and knew where the fountains were – there’s one right by the apartment, in fact – and the apartment is air conditioned.

But first we had to get there.

We got out of Pyramide station and debated what the best form of bus pass would be – ATAC, the Roman bus system, now has an app but it seems to be regarded as a waste of time by most people who have left reviews so I walked over to the machines out in the parking lot by where the buses congregate and – perhaps because it was later in the day and the machines were out of direct sunlight so you could actually read the little screens that tell you what to do – easily purchased three week-long passes. Win all around, I say. We found one of the buses that would take us to the neighborhood fairly quickly (“Adesso?” “Si!”), validated our tickets, rode to a stop a couple of blocks away from the apartment, and walked over from there. It was lovely to see the neighborhood again.

Our host Stefano met us there and we got the paperwork that Italian law requires of AirBnB guests straightened out. We gave him the peanut-butter crackers we’d brought for him – we left some there after our first visit and he seemed to enjoy them – and he pointed out the nice bottle of wine on the table and the bag of Italian snacks next to it.

By this point we were pretty tired, so I headed out to the nearby grocery to get some things for dinner – bread, meats, cheeses, fruit, drinks (chinotto!), and so on. I also bought a bottle of the standard Italian supermarket yellow mustard, which it turns out is not the standard supermarket yellow mustard you find in the US. It’s more of a Dijon, and I ended up carting it all over Italy before finally being forced to abandon it in Avigliano. It was really good.

We had a low-key evening after a long day of travel. I got some grading done for my online class that never ends, and we watched some Italian television – it’s always fun to see what people watch in other places – before calling it a night.