Now you can do Budapest in a long weekend

A view of Budapest

Budapest is the Europe you've been looking for.

It's a city steeped in a wonderfully convoluted past—Romans and Magyars, Mongols and Turks, Austrian emperors and Soviet puppets—yet one that looks to the future, with elegantly odd new buildings going up to replace some of the cement-block scars from the Soviet era.

These mingle with a gorgeous mélange (yes, I said it: a gorgeous mélange) of decorous 19th century Empire structures and decorative Secessionist ones, all jostling for space on busy boulevards.

Budapest is laid along both banks of the Danube: the palatial fortress of Buda rising high above the river to one side, the commercial center of Pest splayed along the flat bank opposite. It is a city of hearty food, forthright and genuine people, fine wines, and those elegant thermal baths. 

Those famous Budapest baths

The Rudas Baths in Budapest

Budapest's famous bathhouses range from broodingly 16th century Turkish (the Rudas Baths; www.budapestgyogyfurdoi.hu), to grand Art Nouveau (the famed Géllert Baths; www.gellertbath.com), to button-down modern (the Danubius Grand on Margarit Island; www.danubiushotels.com) with menus of treatments ranging from spa massages and mus baths to nose jobs, cosmetic dentistry, and laser eye surgery.

And, yes, you can do it all in a long weekend. (And, despite all news to the contrary, there is not currently a toxic river of sludge moving down the Danube.)
Read more »

Runde Ecke: How an idealogical dictatorship turned calculated cruelty into a daily routine

They would steam open all your mail, record your every phone call, track your daily movements, and secretly enter your home to copy any document you hadn’t managed to hide.

If they suspected you might harbor anti-government sentiments, they would engage in a years-long clandestine campaign to ruin utterly your personal and professional life—merely to ensure you had neither the time, nor the resources, nor the will to oppose the state.

They were the Stasi, the East German secret police, and their Leipzig headquarters was the Runde Ecke. This stately “Round Corner” building now contains a wonderfully homespun “Power and Banality” museum that documents the Stasi era of terror in the very offices from which they waged ongoing war against their own citizens.

It's a surprising and disturbing window into the everyday middle management of running a dictatorship and reflexively cruel police state.
Read more »

Broken boats, injured crews, and other brushes with death: Day 1 of the 116 summer sailing trip, 2010

Sailing: Day 1

Key Largo to Rodriguez Key. [Repeat]

Our 41-foot Hunter was called Blue Moon, but we nicknamed it "The Camry," because on two separate occasions we found ourselves in a situation in which we could sail it just fine… we just couldn't make it stop.

First day out, we got a late afternoon start because the tides trapped us in the Key Largo Marina. To relieve the boredom of waiting, I arranged to be nearly brained by the anchor of a hanging boat.

In which we almost lose one boat (and I almost die) before we even get out of the marina

Blue Moon was a whole lot bigger than Captain Rhoad’s own boat, a 29-footer (I believe) he keeps on the Chesapeake. So I don’t blame him. He was being forced to get the hang of this gargantuan new boat in a terribly narrow marina channel, in a blasted rush, with the locals yelling at him to hurry up, and at full speed.

This is because, though we had been told we'd be stuck in the marina until 5pm or 6pm waiting for the high tide to open an exit, no one had mentioned that the fuel station, which we had to visit before setting off and which lay just a few hundred yards down at the end of the marina, would be closing at 5pm.

By 4:30pm, we had just started loading our gear and a week’s worth of food onto the boats (most of it was still in the parking lot, being staged and divided between the Blue Moon and our other boat, a 36-foot Pearson called Stargazer), when someone from the fuel station wandered up and warned us of their imminent closure.

We started frantically slinging gear on board both boats. In the process, some people’s personal gear ended up on the wrong boat, other bits were misplaced for the duration, and a few pieces managed to get lost entirely.

Every five minutes or so, the fuel jerks would swing by to remind us of the ticking clock in nasty tones.


Read more »

Should tourists go to North Korea?

So, now Americans can visit North Korea year-round (not just during the big showcase Arirang spectacle of creepily syncronized kindergarten kids). See: http://www.northkorea1on1.com

The real question is: should we be going at all? I am sure all visits will be as structured, regimented, and closely guarded as ever (a tourism variant on the old Potemkin Village), so would that stifle any of the potential benefits travel otherwise usually brings--a cultural exchange on a personal level in which people from both nations get to learn a bit about one another and, hopefully, foster a greater understanding. 

Or will it be more of the same story: tourists blithely contributing to both the piggybank of a repressive regime and helping further its propoganda machine. 

In other words, should travel to North Korea be boycotted, as it frequently is to other despotic countries like Myanmar?

ReidsGuides.com
Travel beyond vacations (tm)

New passport, how to I hate thee?...

I hate the new passports. I'm not just talking about the truly horrendous digitized photograph of me that makes me look like a shiny, blubbery, 450-pound rubberized simulacrum of myself. That's to be expected (though how, in the digital age, passport photos are getting worse rather than better is beyond me).

I hate the treacly, jingoistic "America the Beautiful" theme that makes every page scream USA! USA! USA! I VOTED FOR GEORGE W. BUSH!

Also why, in a document designed expressly for the purposes of visiting other countries, does every page serve as an ad to stay home and see the wonders of this country? OK, so sure, the first photo/engraving page sports my own hometown sights of Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Clearly, they're trying to butter me up. Won't work.

After Philly's contributions, we get Cape Cod, Mt. Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty. We get a Mississippi riverboat, places in the west where buffalo roam beneath Teton-y peaks and men in cowboy hats wrangle longhorns, some flat place in the Midwest where wheat and handplows rule, a train in Utah, and a grizzly eating salmon in the shade of a totem pole in the Pacific Northwest, saguaro in Arizona, and a palm tree in Hawaii. This patriotic march of images culminates in a final photo which implies, by extension, that the U.S. also owns the moon and outer space in general. Nice. And we wonder why the rest of the world finds us to arrogant and self-important.

I also hate the instructions that the document is never to be folded, spindled, or mutilated for fear of damaging the Big Brother microchip embedded inside so anyone with a receiver can steal all my personal data. Don't they know what travel does to a passport? The one I sent in to have replaced resembled nothing so much as a wad of damp cardboard with a mash-up of some exotic stamps barely visible in it.

Finally: I hate the fact that I have to memorize a whole new passport number. What was wrong with the old one?