There are times in life when we just have to drop all our plans and improvise, no matter how much we think we can plan ahead. My ambitious idea of a nonstop train-hopping over the next twenty-four hours to Paris overlooked one crucial detail–the beauty of Budapest. Walking down the grand concourse of the station, all I intended to do at first was to check out the departure board to see where I could board the next train to Vienna. Everything changed instantly when I caught a glimpse of the streets outside the station through a small arched gate to the side. Buildings and the streets laced with fall colors had a certain inexplicable quality that enticed me. When I breathed in the unfamiliar scent of the autumn morning air, I knew that I had to stay no matter how rushed I was. My carefully laid plans quickly crumbled in the face of the unforeseen charm of the city.
With time running short, the main question was how long I could afford to stay in Budapest. I sat down on the bench near the platform and looked for an alternative route to London as the steady stream of the morning crowd passed me by. Since there were so many options, all seemingly improbable, I broke down the problem into two simpler ones. The first problem was how to reach Vienna, and the second was how to reach Paris from Vienna before the last Eurostar train to London. For the first problem, I decided to leave Budapest on a 4:55PM train and arrive in Vienna by 7:30PM. It just seemed like a reasonable move that would allow me to spend the day in Budapest. For the second problem, ideally I wanted to take a sleeper train through Germany and get to Paris by the afternoon. But all the sleeper trains were booked out since it was the last minute. I asked the staff at the ticket office but they too said that the system didn’t allow them to book any of the sleeper trains I wanted. So I booked a regular night train from Vienna that would arrive in Stuttgart by 5:00AM the following morning. From there, I planned to catch another train departing at 3:00PM that would get me to Paris by 6:00PM. I had no idea what was even in Stuttgart but figured the stopover would be an opportunity to discover something unexpected.
After putting my backpack in the station locker, I resisted the temptation to head straight into the streets outside the station and instead took the subway to the area near the Danube River. I didn’t have much time in the city and most places seemed to be centered around the Danube. When I got off the subway and finally emerged onto the streets, it seemed I had made the right choice to delay my trip a bit to check out Budapest. What sparked that feeling wasn’t the pretty cobblestone streets and impressive cathedrals with imposing facades. In fact, they were rather too perfect and you can guess who quickly lost interest in them. Instead, what reassured me of that feeling was that, walking down the streets, I could once again see the transformation of abstract distance into the real. The languages, the appearances of people, the shape of the buildings, the atmosphere on the streets had all changed so abruptly since leaving Istanbul. It was the most drastic change I had observed since the trip began. That observation made me happy. Not for a single moment had I been completely sure I could cover the mammoth distance between Istanbul and Dublin in the remaining three days. But gradually, I started believing again that I could get there. The vague distance once unknown and frightening was gradually being uncovered. The roads, once imaginary, were becoming real in front of my eyes.
All my bias against outward perfection aside, some of the buildings and streets were really extraordinary. Anastasia wasn’t exaggerating about the impressive architecture of Budapest–sometimes, I just had to stop and admire even the simplest things like an ordinary street for a while. Near the famed buildings standing in quiet grandeur, the Danube flowed peacefully and lazily, mirroring the afternoon sun. Anastasia had told me that on the east side of the Danube was Pest, so the other side that lay before me must have been Buda. The indifferent Danube looked so massive that all the lofty man-made structures over at Buda appeared so insignificant and fleeting. My meager steps also began to feel rather inconsequential compared to the grand scale of the river and the eons of history it must have witnessed in silence. Did my daydream matter? I started getting a hollow feeling and began facing the question of the meaning of this trip. I thought I had caught a glimpse of the reason somewhere around Baku, but it didn’t feel satisfactory anymore. For the moment, I chalked the existential thoughts up to the fatigue and time pressure. After walking down the bank for a while, I crossed the Danube for the second time since yesterday when I entered Romania.
On the other side of the river, I walked up a hill that was overlooking the Danube and Pest. The hill had many important-looking historic sites and museums, but as usual, my uninformed eyes weren’t able to pierce their well-presented exteriors to fathom their significance. Some things just speak to your heart and you can be intrigued by their story even though you do not understand what they mean. They are things like raw streets, fading urban mosaics, a sunrise over train windows, decrepit bus terminals. But I couldn’t feel the story of the monumental castles and fortresses. If they had any story to tell, all the hubbub and the rituals of photo taking were drowning out whatever they were trying to whisper. In the sea of crowds, my mind kept wandering off to the train that I was supposed to be on soon.
But some things managed to pique my interest. The view over the Danube was one of them. From the hillside, the river seemed even more massive and its lazy flow all the more indifferent to its surroundings. It even took on the color of the blue sky rather than the murky green seen from the ground. The river’s muddy water that I saw from that slow Bucharest-bound train the other day must have flowed through this exact city. There was something about that heartless stride of the massive stretch of water, flowing in the opposite direction as I pressed westward in my quiet march. It reminded me of all the inescapable choices in life that forced me into conformity. The river’s flow felt to me as the inertia that brought life to a standstill and the safeguards that trapped one’s thoughts into the realm of the ordinary. It was like life’s forces that, through relentless and systemic influence, inculcated a sense that it was safer to fall back to what was considered normal and convinced us never to swim against its current. The river kept flowing.
It was already getting kind of close to four o’clock and I needed to go back to the Budapest-Keleti station. I came down from the hill through the narrow and quaint streets, which were surprisingly empty and peaceful. Pretty soon, the river disappeared behind the buildings and the fall colors of trees, and I could no longer hear its silent invitation to halt my pointless pursuit. Only the decorated pinnacles rising from the distant rooftops and domes pierced the skyline ahead. They too went out of sight when I got to the ground. Before walking into a subway station, I managed to find a supermarket and picked up some bread and water. I had been pretty much running on nothing but them for the past couple of days, and now it even felt weird to not carry a bag of bread and water in one hand.
When I came back to the station and collected my stuff from the locker, the train to Vienna was already waiting for the passengers on the platform. My short and unexpected stay in Budapest was reaching its end. According to the original plan, I should have already left Vienna by that time and should have been on my way to Zurich. But what appeared the most logical and economical was actually not the way that everything unfolded. Life wasn’t an optimization problem that could be solved with a precisely calculated arrangement. My naive plan was perfect in every logical aspect but hadn’t considered what was probably most important–the feeling. The train departed the station and headed to Vienna. I felt glad that I had stayed in Budapest for the day.
I managed to find one free seat in a cabin and sat there, looking out the window as Budapest disappeared behind the train. Then I noticed that an old couple across from me were speaking in Russian. To entertain myself, I said “Zdrastvuyte,” (“Hello”) and the babushka exclaimed, “Gospodi, molodoy chelovek govorit po-russki!” (“My gosh, this young man speaks Russian!”) The couple said they were from Kiev and were traveling to Germany. “My yedem k nashemu synu,” they told me, “on seychaz zhivet v Germanii” (“We’re on our way to visit our son. He lives in Germany”). They asked me where I was going, and I told them that I was going to Dublin. They became interested in how I knew Russian–what little I knew of it, anyway. But before I could explain the whole thing about my wanting to travel to Central Asia to talk to Koryo-Saram, another passenger appeared and politely kicked me off the seat. I gathered my stuff and dragged my backpack and the plastic bag full of bread and water out of the cabin. All the other cabins were full, and so were the second-class seats in the other cars. It was probably wishful thinking that I could sit in a first-class cabin without a seat reservation. I just awkwardly stood between the train cars near the bathroom and an empty bike rack, doubting whether I had energy to keep standing for another two hours. After around half an hour, one of the foldable seats near the bathroom door freed up and I managed to give my legs a rest.
There was nothing to do, so I tried to read and pick up from where I left off since the last unsuccessful attempt during the bus ride to Istanbul. Better nourished and rested this time, I could actually recall the stories and characters and follow the story. As the train got closer to Austria, a quiet thought surfaced and interrupted my concentration. I started thinking that it would be a lot better to find a sleeper train for the night because fatigue was beginning to hit me hard. In addition, I kind of wanted to give the idea of going through Brussels another chance, because I had never been there. My search revealed some sleeper trains to cities such as Innsbruck or Dresden. From there, I could head to Brussels and take Eurostar to London. But as usual, I wasn’t able to reserve any of those trains because they had probably been sold out. As I was busy sorting through these alternative routes, the train became more and more empty. At one point, all the remaining passengers started packing up and getting ready to leave. The train was arriving in Vienna.
The first place I ran to after getting off the train was the ticket office. I went through my wish list of the sleeper trains for that night with a staff member at a counter. He patiently checked all the options as I bombarded him with one train after another, and we came to an inevitable conclusion that everything had been booked out. It seemed that I was even lucky to have the seat on the train to Stuttgart. With the much needed closure on the sleeper trains, I figured I’d roam around the area and see whatever I could of Vienna in the ninety minutes I had before the train. There was nothing much going on around the station because it was already night and quite chilly. Some palace was nearby, but it was already closed and nobody was around. The streets were eerily empty and lacked any activities. I trudged back to the station with my backpack pressing down heavily on my shoulders.
I had some bread and water for dinner while sitting on a platform bench, and eventually boarded the train. The train departed and smoothly rolled westward. There was nothing much to see outside the window except darkness, so I got around to doing some things I had been putting off. First, I booked the Eurostar train from Paris to London. If everything unfolded as planned, I would get to Paris by around 6:00PM on the following day, hop on a Eurostar train at 8:00PM, and arrive in London late at night. I also looked up the transport options from London to Dublin. That trip was going to take pretty much the whole day–if I could make an early start from London, I could be in Dublin by the evening. As always, I decided to hold off on reserving the tickets. The tickets weren’t cheap, and I was too tired to think straight and make logical decisions. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but the sleep didn’t come easily. I tried to read a little but continued to get stuck on a single sentence because I was too tired to think. I kept alternating unsuccessfully between the two activities. This went on slowly for a while until 2:00AM when I finally gave up on both and just stared out the window into the unfamiliar darkness.