Wednesday, July 7th started somewhat busy as we went to run some errands and then head back to our hostel and proceed to conduct the now-usual jigsaw of trying to fit all of our stuff into our backpacks. We got packed up and went to the train station to get our tickets for the night train to Krakow, put the packs into a locker, and see one last thing in Budapest before we left.
There's a bunch of 4x4s in place as construction scaffolding (or something like that) in the international ticket office at Budapest Keleti train station. It appears to have been in place since 2007, judging from the dates on it. At some point, someone wrote their journey's stops and signed their home country, name, and that day's date. Now the scaffolding is covered, and as we waited, we enjoyed perusing the gallery of where everyone had been before they ended up in Budapest, or where they were planning to go. John added us to the historical register. I love it.
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Bags in lockers, we headed over to the Great Synagogue and Jewish Museum to see what there was to see.
This is the world's second or third largest synagogue (depending on which source you read.) It's absolutely BEAUTIFUL.
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Something that absolutely fascinated us about the place (aside from its size) was the resemblance it bore to, well, a church. (Incidentally, the word for both church and synagogue in Hungarian is “templom”.) It had an organ and an altar and a choir and frescoes on the walls and a dome and a bunch of marble. It just seemed somewhat odd to us, but we both still were amazed by its sheer size and beauty.
A couple of things I somehow neglected to get a cameraphone picture of, but that I know I have pictures of on my big camera. First, in the courtyard area next to the synagogue, there is a mass grave where over 2000 victims of the Nazis from the Budapest ghetto during the winter of 1944-1945 are buried. The courtyard now contains trees, ivy, and a lot of gravestones that are just leaned up against each other and against the trees, since because they’re mass graves, people aren’t sure where the gravestones need to go. Around the outside of the courtyard are pictures of the courtyard (which was supposed to be a garden originally) from the early 1900s until the 1980s, including pictures of the bodies and their burial. Very, very sad and moving.
The other thing I don’t have a picture of is the Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, a silver sculpture designed to look like a weeping willow tree. On the leaves are engraved the names of the 300,000+ Hungarian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. It’s located next to the synagogue in Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who used his position to help Hungarian Jews emigrate to safety during the war, and was eventually taken into custody by the Soviets and “died of a heart attack” at the age of 35 while in Soviet custody in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. What’s the old grim joke? Something about a .38mm heart attack? Not very funny, but sadly most likely true.
In any case, as part of the memorial park, they have plaques and pillars honoring him and many other Hungarian members of the Righteous Among the Nations, the designation for non-Jews who assisted Jews and helped them be saved from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I’m not quite sure why Wallenberg gets a plaque in the ground and certain names go on it (there were tons more names on three other pillars surrounding this central plaque.)
This is located in Raoul Wallenberg park behind the Great Synagogue in Budapest. The names on the stone are other Budapest members of the Righteous Among Nations, those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Nazis during World War II. The stones are part of a Jewish custom of leaving a stone on a person's grave as a sign of respect.
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After that, we went inside the museum. The top floor of the museum housed a temporary exhibit of Jewish rugs. At this point in the day, I was already kind of tired, so I almost asked if we could skip it… I’m so glad we didn’t! John and I actually spent more time here than we did in the rest of the museum. I’m not quite sure how to explain why we both found the whole thing so fascinating, but we did. It wasn’t just rugs made by Jewish people and/or for synagogues, either. They had Chinese-made rugs and Afghani-made rugs and even Navajo rugs.
This rug was made in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghani conflict. It has woven into it tanks, machine guns, and grenades. Sad.
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There was one more rug that both really really caught John’s and my attention, and left us thinking afterwards… but that’s going to be its own blog post. It’s that special. Yeah, I know we’re weird.
After we got out of the rug exhibit, we ended up at a Chinese food place (don’t laugh — we had to try it!) for dinner, and then we headed over to the McDonald’s by the train station to wait for our train. Yeah, we could have waited IN the train station, but for the price of a Coke, McDonald’s is clean, has clean bathrooms and free wifi, and is free of annoying people who keep asking us if we want to give them money or if we want a taxi or accommodations. Sometimes it’s just nice to not have to deal with that. I did my usual last-minute postcard writing (why do I always wait until the last minute??) and then we headed over to find our train.
Something that I find really cool about trains in Europe — you sit in a specific car based on your destination. A single train doesn’t always travel to a place in its entirety. Our train was at least 15 cars long, and it contained cars going to different cities all over eastern Europe (like the car in the following picture, whose final destination was St. Petersburg.) Then, at various stations on the journey, cars detach from one train and attach to another train, and are carried to their final destinations. Our car was the only one on the train going to Krakow, for example. SO NEAT.
Am I a freak for wanting to hop this train and go to St. Petersburg? I'd LOVE TO.
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Lousy cameraphone picture of us in our triple-decker bunks on the train.
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Train next to us leaving the station. I wonder where all those train cars are headed to.
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Sunset as seen from the train. It was an absolutely amazing one.
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I don’t think there are words to describe how happy I was to be on that train. I know I’m odd, but honestly, that’s been one of the highlights of this trip for me–lying in my bunk, hanging my head out the window, and watching the countryside go by. So so so amazing and wonderful.
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Where we are now:
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