The Journey
After a harrowing late train experience, I disembarked, found the bus stop like a boss (#askingfordirections), got to the airport, and arrived well on time.
Chatted with a Budapestian girl working in Bern and going home for the weekend (surprising how easy this is given purchasing power differences of salaries in the respective places.) Then boarded the plane for Budapest.
Read Antifragile on the plane, which was really very interesting–he starts off with some tirades against academia and “robust” thinking in general which frustrated me, but after that I thought a lot of his points (particularly his characterization of most antifragile systems as a network of sub-agents passing around information via stressors and becoming stronger via the local response of each subagent to the stressors they receive) were awesome.
Arrived in Budapest airport, went outside to take the shuttle-bus into town. After some shenanigans buying the wrong ticket, I made it onto the (packed) bus. The city looked really cool coming in–there were all sorts of little things I noticed and was going to write down right away but I forgot. Saw some crazy water pipes suspended in the air on the side of a railway, like some kind of aqueduct.
Got off downtown and found my way to the M1 metro line in my inimitable style: walked around cluelessly until some station attendant preyed on my cluelessness by asking to see my ticket; gave the guy the wrong ticket (my receipt, which looked just like the ticket). The fellow argued with his colleague for a few minutes about what to do with me in Hungarian, then finally I realized and gave him the right ticket. Found my way to the metro line after re-punching the right ticket in these cool little machines that take a physical bite out of the ticket. The Line 1 was the first underground railway in Europe, apparently–it’s easy to forget just how powerful and grand Austria-Hungary was not very long ago, under the Habsburg empire, which I’d completely forgotten about. There were in the Metro leather straps to hang onto, which struck me as completely foreign and neat.
The Hostel (California?)
Got to my hostel, second floor of a crumbling old building that looked like my old roommate’s building in China. I’d paid $40 for four nights at the place with free breakfast. Shockingly, the place was unbelievably nice. (For one thing, the kitchen has incredible plywood work, inset dish drainers, etc. The dining room lights are spaced evenly on a grid of thin wires.) For another thing, there was a live-in volunteer guy named Tai and a girl working there from the UK named Molly, who were really nice and had nothing better to do than engage me in conversation–apparently there was a pub crawl in the evening, maybe this was how the hostel made money–but it sounded like less than $20 for a lot of alcohol.
Went up to my room, chose the top bunk, which was absolutely lovely (everything home-built out of varnished OSB). Went out for a walk, ended up on a bridge over the Danube that overlooked the beautifully illuminated old buildings, went back and got some groceries, apples, toothpaste and beer (the essentials) on the way back.
Dinner was served for free at the hostel. How?? It was just pasta with some sweet potato, but pretty decent. Hung out with Molly and Tai and this crazy dude named Jordan who’s apparently a bona fide lawyer, but has been living in the area’s party hostels for nearly a year, drinking every night and then playing Starcraft until 6am (and a MS victim, Steven, from the US with a survivor’s joy and a terrific sense of humor).
Live Like it’s Post Scarcity
Then the drinking games started. I used up both my beers plus one freebie that Tai got me from the hostel’s bar. (#postscarcityillusion) Then it was off to the Pub Crawl. Steven advised me to take only a small amount of money (3000 Hungarian forint, or about $12) and my phone, so I locked everything else in my locker.
We first got a little booklet with a bingo-style grid and a huge set of numbered ways to embarrass ourselves. I knew immediately it’d be too much decision making work to do the challenges and resolved to just help others with theirs. Then to the ground floor/bar/outdoor area of the Hive party hostel. I befriended some Brits in our group and goofed off with them. We were there for an hour, soaking up the unlimited beer and wine and sangria like cactus spines soaking up moisture.
Then two more bars, which were a riot of sound and light and goofiness. I apparently solved some math problems for the Brits, who greeted my mathematical prowess with ribald enthusiasm. There was a Ninja Tag circle at some point, and a bunch of dancing and helping others complete their crazy challenges. It was a very good-natured time. We definitely got more free shots than advertised.
At last we arrived in a club, mostly underground, with a labrynthinity worse than Cascade Hall at Whatcom. It would have been hard to navigate sober. Followed people around for a while, and ended up in a dancing room where the dancing seemed to be entirely amorously intended. I determined to test the limits of my courage, and danced with as much confidence and indifference to those around me as apparently required. Ended up dancing with a girl from our group, Maria, and after that we exhaustedly went back to the hostel. I crashed with hardly a thought left in my head, not a tornado in my brain, but the ashes of a fiery forest, devoid of life, but hopefully rich in potassium.
Gratitude List
- Transportation worked! I can’t believe how easy it is to navigate with systems I barely understand, a rough patchwork of overlapping systems with just enough similarity to use.
- Amazing hostel and conversation with Molly and Tai and Jordan
- The really nice people I met on the Pub Crawl :) The Brits seemed like they might have ridiculed my idiosyncracities, but instead they embraced them. And I got to chat a bit more with Molly.
- Made it back to the hostel without getting run over by a mafia-owned taxi (apparently there are lots of them and they don’t give a d**n).
Little wins
- Remembering the Habsburg empire :P
- Got into Antifragile to the extent I started annotating pages :D
- Audacity wins: just started talking to the Budapestian in the airport, ended up being interesting and fun; and dancing audacity.
Revising copy-and-paste social attitudes
A note on audacity–when I was a social greenie fresh from Homeschoolandia, I faced (in the context of groups) social sanctions, and therefore attempted (pretty successfully) to copy the attitudes of my socially more successful friends, becoming more chill, more normal, and more diffident. Some attitudes I copied directly, on faith of their efficacy. Introducing yourself to the person you’re sitting next to on a flight is something that almost no millenial does, and so I followed suit for a while. But then I realized, huh, actually people almost universally appreciate it, assuming basic prerequisites like that they don’t look busy. This might be a leveling-up–I’m finding social situations where the prevailing cultural attitudes are not just first-principles wrong, but wrong in the sense that not-done behaviors provoke warm and positive responses. Who knows how many more things in my corpus of learnt social attitudes are vulnerable to such empirically motivated revision? How many more social freedoms might I discover? Obviously I can’t overturn converse bounds on social freedom proved by respectible theoreticians like my Mom and Dad ;) but I bet there are many more little wins out there!