Thursday was the biggest holiday in Hungary – St. Stephen’s Day (Szent Istvan, in Hungarian). St. Stephen’s Day is a big celebration of St. Stephen, the patron Saint of Hungary and the first King of Hungary, who brought Christianity to the Hungarians. Nobody works (except for the restaurants and such) and they have a big outdoor food fair along the Buda side of the Danube below the Buda Castle. There’s a procession through the city, and they march the Holy right hand of St. Steven (a 1000 year-old relic and the actual right hand of Istvan Kiraly) from Buda, across the Chain Bridge, and into St. Stephen’s Basilica, where it is permanently housed. There’s a large mass at St. Stephen’s Basilica in the early evening and fireworks all along the Danube between the four central bridges at night.
The festivities continued into the next day, with the food fair open and the chain bridge closed to vehicle traffic. A girl I met through couchsurfing told me about a free jazz concert that was supposed to be going on that night, and we agreed to meet up for that. Unfortunately, the jazz concert turned out to be more like a cover band – ManDoki Soulmates – playing old rock hits from the 70s and 80s. The crowd was huge, though – it was like one of the bigger summer concerts at the Del Mar racetrack. I guess the drummer, Leslie Mandoki, is Hungarian and was vocal in the student opposition movement in the 1970’s before fleeing Hungary for Germany.
After the concert, a small group of us headed over to the Rudas thermal baths. Budapest has dozens of different bathhouses, but Rudas is significant because it has the oldest thermal baths in the city – over 500 years old. It sits on the Danube, just beneath Gellért Hill and, in addition to the thermal baths, has several swimming pools, including a rooftop pool overlooking the Danube River, the Elizabeth and Green bridges, and Pest. This was the nighttime view from this incredible rooftop pool:
This morning was an Escape Room excursion. I had never heard of an Escape Room before, but these are huge in Budapest and growing in popularity in Europe in general. An Escape Room is basically an hour long puzzle – in the original incarnation, a group of people is locked into a room and has to figure out how to get out. However, Escape Rooms have started to develop with different objectives – ours today required us to find the antidote to a deadly virus.
Basically, the room was set up like an old timey office, and we had to snoop around looking in trash cans, through books and other places for clues as to where we might find keys or codes for unlocking the various locks. We had to solve puzzles using chemical equations and the periodic table, a chess board, cryptic handwritten notes, color codes, coordinated power switches, and I don’t remember what else. It was so much fun! And the design of the room and the various safes and lock boxes was unbelievably creative. It was incredibly detailed and complex, with plenty of false leads and wondering whether we were paying attention to the right information. I told my friends it felt like something out of the movie “A Beautiful Mind” – trying to connect dots I wasn’t entirely sure were supposed to connect. It was fun. I highly recommend it. My teammate from Iowa tells me they actually have one of these in Des Moines now. Have you heard of this? Do they have these elsewhere in the States and I’m just behind the times?
TL;DR: Took in ancient and contemporary Hungarian culture on this long holiday weekend.
