Budapest

This past weekend my program took all of us to Budapest, about 7 hours form Prague by bus. Before I came to Europe, I'd always thought of it as an Eastern European city that used to be important but now was just old. Now I realize that it's a modern, beautiful city with a center much bigger than Prague's.

The funniest part of the trip was the abundance of the letter 'z' in Magyar (their language). As soon as we got out of the bus after we crossed the border, I saw the word 'busz' and started laughing. Later I would see szupermarkets and szex shops. It turns out that 'sz' is equivalent to the English 's' and that 's' is equivalent to the English 'sh'. This explains why it's prounounced Budapesht.

The most interesting part of the trip was learning about the city's Jewish Community and the present state of anti-Semitism in Hungary. The Dohany Synagogue in Budapest is essentially a Jewish Cathedral. I have never seen anything like it, and I don't know if there is anything like it. It's a massive hall with a huge bimah, a choir seated above the bimah and out of sight, an organ, and two pulpits. Yet, during services, men and women are separated. We were lucky enough to attend Friday night services there, and there were probably about 70 or 80 people there (the most in any shul I've been to in Europe) but I really, really want to go to High Holiday services there at some point in my life, just to see it full of Jews. I also ran into a friend from home here, my second huge coincidence encounter of the semester.

Today, there are 80,000-120,000 Jews in the city. Keeping in mind that Prague has a Jewish community of less than 3,000 Jews, and that is larger than any community in Poland, Budapest's community is insane. Most of them do not identify as Jewish, but they are 'technically' Jewish. I assumed that with such a large community, and with the vast majority of the Jews assimilated, anti-Semitism would not be a problem at all. But actually, it's much worse that anywhere else I've been. Recently a sort of neo-Arrow Cross Party has become more public. The party led Hungary in the interwar period and was actively anti-Semitic. We were told about these people, who wear the Arrow Cross flag on their arms, but I didn't expect to actually see any of them. Well, on our tour of the city, we ran into one of their rallies. I wasn't sure exactly who they were at first, and then I noticed that a man walking in our direction had a shirt with a Nike swoosh, but instead of saying "Nike," it said "Nazi." I was too scared to take a picture of him, but I did take one of the group gathering.

Aside from this frightening experience, Budapest was an amazing city. My favorite part was wandering around by the Danube, which divides Buda from Pest. I went with a group to the river at night, and then returned by bike the next day. I was really excited to see the Parliament Building, and it lived up to my expectations. The Chain Bridge was also incredibly beautiful at night.

My adventures were full of incredible views, many of which made me question of Budapest might actually be more beautiful than Prague. But I can't decide.

This weekend I'm traveling again. I'm going to Bratislava on Friday morning, and then to Brno (the second biggest city in the Czech Republic) on Saturday night. On Sunday I'm going to see the US vs. Czech Republic in the semifinal of the Fed Cup (the women's Davis Cup), which I'm pretty excited about.