The City by Night: The Magyar Memoir part 14

Following our exhilarating, yet exhausting, day at the baths, somehow we managed to get back to our "hostel neighborhood". We got cleaned up and headed back out for dinner, to the same wonderful spot where we had had the gelato the day prior. This time I had the Magyarian delicacy, Goulash. It was full of sausage and sweet paprika, even on a warm summer night, it is unbeatable! It was sort of muggy and warm out, we were seated on the patio facing the promenade and a view of the Dona. After swallowing a bottle of Egerian red wine,(Eger is a well known wine-growing area east of Budapest)too stuffed for dessert, an after dinner walk was in order to clear our alcohol hazed heads and calm our bulging bellies. So we headed back across the bridge where the afternoon market was held, toward the waterfront bellow the museums on the opposite side of the river.

As we approached the winding hill we had descended from the day before, we heard a commotion of happy drunken voices, but we didn't see anyone, just some work men silently setting up some tables and chairs in a beer garden that didn't appear to be open yet. We continued towards the hill, walking along the road, the noise seemed to be coming from the vaulted tunnel cut into the hill to allow cars to pass under. We looked up as the voices became more pronounced, sure enough, there were about 15 teenagers on top of cement edge of the tunnel entrance; laughing and carrying on from their precarious perch. It took only second for us to engage in a unspoken agreement to try to get up there. We analyzed their location and set up the stone path part way up the hill, then diverted off road through the trees and dirty in the directions of the voices. I might add this was a moonless night, and we had only our mobile phones to act as a makeshift flashlights. I trailed behind as I had flip-flops of some other non-hiking friendly shoes. I manged to navigate my way over tree roots, around, between and over boulders, and through small sharp thickets to a small clearing where Ashlee and Mylo were lingering, waiting on me. As I came into the clearing I let my guard down, safe at last, another successful night hike in improper footwear in a less than sober state of mind...uff!! At that moment I tripped over a stone retaining wall of some kind that's purpose is still unbeknownst to me. I fell face first into the concrete top of the tunnel for an audience of 15-20 Czech teens to see- these teens as a matter of fact!



I was bleeding in several places, but thank god I was wearing jeans, since my legs took the brunt of the skidding impact. After Ashlee and Mylo had composed their chortling over my collision with concrete, we gawked at the view (the way Clark W. Griswold does when they go to the Grand Canyon in the first National Lampoons Vacation) It was not as spectacular a view as my foreshadowing may have implied. We got back on the stone path and went headed towards the trolley that had taken us up the hill, where we found a footbridge that offered us a more civilized platform from which to take-in the city lights, there I took some of my favorite pictures of my trip. The first one is of Ashlee and I in the foreground, my finger bandaged with some random tissues someone had, and a few leaves still adhered to my hair; the lovely lit up city in the background. For the second shot, I managed to pull myself together and hide my wounds, that is the picture I choose to remember.