E-VITA

In the summer of 1986 I planned to go for a holiday to Budapest in Hungary. In my mind, Budapest was and exotic maybe even middle east like fairytale kind of city. I did not realize very well that it was in Eastern Europe. We planned to go by a special bus, in which you could also take your bicycles. Anyway, after a while of discussing we arrived at the suburbs of a city (it was early night) and it did not look very glamorous. There was a river there. And then he stopped and pointed out to get out, because we were in Budapest!

We thought we would need days of small trips to come this far, but it took us half a day only. We thanked him with loads of music cassettes, got out, and set out to walk through town with our bicycles beside us. After an hour we realized where we were on our not so detailed map and we realized it would take hours to go to the camping site that was at the other end of town. Then we stumbled upon the metro, and realized we could take that. After waiting for a while, there was a lot of loud speaking voices in the metro station, and everyone went out to street again, really everyone. It was hard work to get our bicycles up with us again up all the stairs. When we were back in the street, almost everyone had gone. We were wondering what to do now when a woman came up to us and invited us to come with her. We followed her quite a long time to a typical Russian style suburb with lots of high buildings looking depressing. She led us to her apartment that was in one of the buildings. She lived there with her daughter. Only two rooms and a very small kitchen. In the end she appeared very proud to have us there, we put our bicycles on her balcony, and she offered us a tomato and a glass of milk, AND a large bed to sleep in. We did not know yet how small the apartment was until the next day.

The lady told us the bicycles could stay and we could pick them up in one-half week time, so we could go to the camping site without them, that would be easier. We realized they did not have the same living standards as us, such a small apartment and they just had bread with milk for breakfast, nothing else. The camping site was full of Eastern and Western Germany tourists. What happened was that Eastern Germany citizens were allowed in special cases to go to Hungary for their holiday and their families from Western Germany as well of course, so they met each other there, sometimes it took them years without seeing each other as it was hard for the Eastern Germans save money to go for a holiday.  In the end we spend some days at the Balaton lake in Hungary and in Budapest. It was both great. People were extremely friendly and the only way Tsjernobyl influenced it all is that we were not allowed to eat fruits and vegetables. Well, the Hungarians did, so we did as well, only two weeks we thought would not harm us. It was an important trip for us, in which we learned that the world was a lot more complicated than we thought, and that our reality was completely different than for others, for example the German families separated the Iron curtain. In a less large scale, we realised that we were rich compared to the normal people in Hungary.

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