(June 15 -17, 2026)
The bus doors open and I step into the busy streets of Budapest, backpack weighted over my shoulders and guitar in hand, keen to find my hotel and settle in for an evening on the Danube before continuing my travels onward the next morning. After all, I had been to Budapest once before and this is a trip aiming for new horizons. As the bus pulls away, the undeniable rhythms and pulls of jazz music reverberate beyond the narrow passage way across the street and drew me promptly the direction opposite to that of my hotel near the Nyugati train station.
Well, what is this we have here?
If Superman succumbs to kryptonite, impromptu jazz encounters can crumble the best of my previously conceived of plans. I gravitate to the eclectic, and notably at times dissonant, riffs of synthesized keys and the hypnotic and sophisticated chiming of the drum cymbals. Jazz echoing from a leafy corridor off a busy thoroughfare moments upon arrival to a new city is perfectly on beat for my trip so far. I eventually ask someone if the show will go on for some time and come to learn this is only the first day of a week-long jazz festival, called the Rézi* Jazz Feszt.
Great!
I soak up one more song and float back to my hotel far less tired than I was when I first got off the city bus, which I had taken as a transfer from the Keleti station where my train from Slovakia had delivered me.
My great grandparents lived in Budapest and immigrated to America in 1908, eventually landing in Elgin, Illinois, where they would come to work in the watch factory there. I could not help but think of them as I watch the sun melt into the western horizon and enrapture the waterfront of the Danube river, the Hungarian Parliament building roaring in glory and a stream of people delighting in the scene at her apron, smoking cigarettes, sharing bottles of wine, or simply letting their minds reflect off the river as much as their own image.
After the riverfront stroll, I sample a local Hungarian goulash in my grandmother’s honor and make my way back to the jazz club, where the music has migrated inside as the day fell prey to dusk. I enter the doors and immediately descend into the cellar of the Menny Kultúrkocsma pub, a characteristic I am now convinced is paramount to the credentials of any legitimate jazz club. As a nuanced genre it strikes the appreciable soul more so than most and resonates better amongst the cavernous subterranean archways closer to the core of the Earth itself.
I delight in one infectious song after another and can’t help but notice over time that hardly any one is looking at their phone in this place. If they are not taking a cigarette break outside, nor entranced by the jazz rhythm, they are engaged in board games or cards. I eventually ask if I can join one table to observe.
-“Of course” responds a cheerful chocolate brunette next to whom there is a free seat. Her name is Ágnes, and her friend across the table is Dora. They are an inviting, bubbly pair to chat with.
“What are you playing? I am so impressed at seeing so many people playing cards.“
–“Oh, really? It’s quite popular these days. ”
As I watch, I see that another of her friends with an immaculately groomed dark beard has taken a break from the bar to join. His name is Hunor Demeter, and I mention to him how fantastic of a venue he has here. Great music, people interacting with each other, and reasonably priced beverages.
-“Thank you. This bar is part of our dream.“
“How do you mean?“
-“My co-owner and I are aspiring film producers. We have a dream of a making a short film and decided to launch this bar to help finance the cost of the production. The bar is named for it, the Menny Kultúrkocsma.”
“What would it be about, your film?“
-“Heaven, or Menny, in Hungarian.“
“Interesting. Tell me more.”
-“There is a family in which the older brother dies one day. The younger brother, grieving at the loss and absence of his sibling, asks his family where he has gone. They tell him he has gone to heaven, and he responds by asking what heaven is like. They describe all the most beautiful features of an elusive paradise, and soon after, the little brother becomes determined to find this place, looking far and wide, day after day. After some time, he is certain he has found it, a place with everything he was told about, and rejoices, running home to tell all his family that he has found heaven and they must come at once so that they can find his brother there.“
I am entirely enthralled by his outline of the script. And there, he leaves me at a cliffhanger….
Recognizing how little the beers I have been drinking cost, I immediately reach into my pocket and hand him the last 20 Euro bill I had in my wallet as I had yet to pick up Hungarian Florint.
“Take this as a small contribution to reach your funding goal! How much do you think you need?”
-“About 30,000 Euro. After that, we want to work on a full feature length production.“
A part of me is so moved by his verbal teaser that I contemplate, fantastically, writing him a check there on the spot to fund the venture – so much do I want to know what happens next!
Perhaps all the better for my travel budget a checkbook is not a readily available apparatus for spontaneous benevolence. It would be the ruin of me, similar to if many art galleries were so wise as to be open after midnight along the course of my inspired walks home from nights out when a particularly well illuminated piece catches the perfect light of the street lamps. Why, I would have certainly run out of wall space already, though I would also have a most adored bear painting, or two.
I wish him the best in this endeavor and carry on with his group. Ágnes and her friends eventually teach me quite a bit about the Hungarian diaspora in Romania, which is where they are all from, including the bar owners. As a legacy of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which partitioned lands after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, nearly a million ethnic Hungarians came to reside overnight within the Kingdom of Romania after World War I. Today, many of them come to Hungary for university or pursuit of professional careers, and it presents a bit of a dilemma as to which nation to fully feel at home in, as in part they admit to not being fully fledged speakers of the Romanian language nor ensconced in the culture despite growing up there.
The conversation flows, but the time comes for Hunor to close the bar and move revelers outside. There I speak at some length with some of the performers, one of which is the organizer of the festival.
-“Will you be coming back tomorrow? This is just the first night. You have come to Budapest at just the right time.“
—
I head back to my hotel and decide this is the last time I get too far ahead myself and book an onward train ticket prior to reaching my immediate next destination. I forego the 14 Euro ticket the next morning to Subotica on other side of the border with Serbia and decide to invest at least another full day and night in the city, if for nothing more than a tribute to my ancestry and the good vibes I find in jazz bars the world over.
I take in many of the spectacular tourist sites that one should, as the city is truly an outdoor museum of impressive scale. But always looking for something a bit outside the norm, I find my way into the Hospital in the Rock museum, which is sited within a natural cave system underneath the Fisherman’s Bastion, one of Budapest’s most prominent landmarks. It served as a subterranean medical facility both during World War II and the 1956 anti-communist uprising before it was crushed by Soviet forces after 19 days.
Later on the Hospital in the Rock was outfitted to act as a nuclear bomb shelter, for which the tour ended with exceptional displays cataloging the destruction and death from the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Shockingly, it also presented how small in comparison the might of those bombs were to modern arsenals – something purely incomprehensible when figuring that both the USA and Russia possess more than 5,000 nuclear bombs each in their inventories.
I have to admit I could hardly hold back an emotional wave of sobbing outright upon review of the photographic evidence from those tragedies, especially the tale of Sadako Sasaki, the girl from Hiroshima who folded over 1,000 origami cranes as part of a belief that it would cure the radiation-induced leukemia that ultimately took her life 10 years after the bomb dropped when she was only two years old.
I exit the cavernous labyrinth having delved far deeper into the sobering depths of humanity’s dark side than I anticipated and step into the blinding daylight that ever so languidly attempted to wash away the heavy dismay I was cloaked in.
I need a drink, and later, some more jazz.
I head to the Ruins Bar, a stellar kaleidoscope of variously themed bars in a single previously derelict building in a hip neighborhood on Kazinczy street. I write there and decompress. It is amazing what artistic and bohemian expressionism can do to assuage the afflicted soul. I would love to have experienced the space late at night but return to the jazz festival earlier this evening to catch more acts than I did the night before.
There, I encounter Ágnes and Bora, promoting the festival just outside the alley way and we chat in between sets.
“I decided to stay another day! It was such a good time the night before.“
At the bar inside, I meet Aziz, a charismatic Iranian studying international business in Budapest but aspiring to become an actor, his true passion. We hit it off quite well and relate philosophically and experientially on a whole suite of matters.
-“Bro, you should come to the DAAD music festival this coming weekend. It is the most amazing time. I look forward to it all year, and I can tell you would enjoy it quite the same. It is a beautiful location, not too big, and the best vibes.”
This is the exact kind of thing I usually respond very well to and would serve as a poetically perfect wave to ride into the serendipitous current of freewheeling travel.
I seriously consider. I tell him I will sleep on it and follow up, not wanting to overcommit and backtrack. We exchange contacts. I say good bye to the various jazz heads I met over the last couple nights and head to the hotel at a reasonable hour.
The bohemian subcurrents of Europe have a strong pull on me. And I could spend a lifetime in this part of the world. Its different, but familiar enough.
But there are few mountains.
I recognize if I say yes to this, as much I really wanted to, it would be a slippery slope. While the philosophy of my Journey to Nowhere in Particular is to embrace the chance counters and curious detours along the road, time is finite, and I do have a backbone of purpose to my trip – one of seeking inspiration and beauty from places much further afield than central Europe, a land I can easily return to within reason.
Looking on a map, I have a lot of ground to cover to get to Georgia and the Caucasus region in time for the melting snows to open up the high altitude tracks that I have long dreamed of knowing. The delay of my trip and resulting compression on my allotted time in Europe from waiting on the China visa is being felt, but I trust that will later be worth it.
Every detour now will come at the expense of another destination in lands much further away later, and I must practice some discipline of purpose.
I board the train to Serbia the next morning and write Aziz a thank you note days later wishing him a wonderful time at the festival.
I enter Serbia and am immediately relieved I had casually begun studying Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet in the months preceding this trip…
“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore“.
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