The only person in the whole world: a weekend in Debrecen

Well my time here in Hungary is indeed flying by fast, much to my chagrin. I have been away from Canada almost nine months now...like I could have left home back in August and, unbeknownst to anyone at home in Canada, have gestated and given birth to a real live human child in this amount of time! But don't worry, that's not the case. The only thing I am (or will be) gestating is this dissertation...and I will be registering at Urban Barn for the dissertation-shower gifts I will be expecting this time next year.

Since being back in Budapest after my South African fantasy safari last month I have just been working my 'A' off, spending a lot of time alone in my sunless apartment (truly a boon to my productivity as my apartment does not allow me to notice that it is 23 degrees and sunny, the air scented with cherry blossoms...sigh). For all my effort and work, though, it just feels like not enough. While things are progressing well, I have entered the 'slog' zone of data analysis. This is when a more clear picture of what the hell I've been researching the last two years has finally emerged resulting in the analysis becoming almost mechanical; now it is an endurance game of 'trudgery'.

I also took up regular smoking for a week and a half earlier this month as a form of entertainment. The city has begun to open up and become bustling again as the weather has turned for the better; all the street cafes lining the squares and the banks of the Danube with the backdrop of 18th and 19th century architecture... they just beckon you...compel you, really... to purchase a five dollar pack of marlboros and order a cappuccino and people-watch. I've since 'quit' (or at least reverted back to being a casual smoker) and gone through my physiological withdrawl of disturbed sleep and a day or two of depression. 

A couple of friends and I have also taken it upon ourselves to hire a private Hungarian teacher to get back on the language learning horse. Learning Hungarian is full of small victories... and then you have a small encounter with someone in the street that reminds you just how very little you know. It's a humbling experience. But so far I am VERY good at ordering drinks, buying my groceries at the market, and I am beginning to be able to aurally decipher the numbers when a cashier tells me how much I have to pay. AND people in Budapest no longer immediately talk back to me in English when I ask them for things...except for the ubiquitous miserable Hungarian hipster bartenders. 

A WEEKEND IN DEBRECEN (pronounced: De-br-r-r-e-ts-en)

I headed off to the small city of Debrecen on the weekend as part of my mission to explore more of Hungary than just Budapest. Located about 2.5 hours east of Budapest by train, it is the second biggest city in Hungary, after Budapest, with 200,000 people. 

http://www.world-guides.com/europe/hungary/hajdu-bihar/debrecen/debrecen_maps.html

It boasts a lovely university campus:

Some housing on campus

The main university building with the library

Nice and quiet... one of the few people I saw the whole weekend

Another university building of sorts

...and the city also boasts the historical fun-fact that it had become such an adamantly Calvinist city BEFORE being Calvinist was hip that it was nicknamed "the Calvinist Rome"... Ha! Basically Debrecen was the center of the Hungarian reformation which accounts for the relative lack of aesthetic and luxurious architecture of its churches:

Reformatus nagytemplom, Debrecen

Reformatus kistemplom, Debrecen

Undoubtedly, one thing the Catholics have excelled at way more than boring, colourless protestants is the aesthetics of their churches, partially built by tricking peasants into giving them what little money they had...but hey it looks great though, right?:

Szent Istvan Bazilika, Budapest

Matthias templom, Budapest

I arrived to my hotel in the center of town late at night, just off of Piac Utca, the happenin' Debreceni street along which Debrecen's two trams runs:

Piac Utca, the main central shopping street of Debrecen

Piac Utca, Debrecen

Piac Utca, Debrecen

Csokonai Nemzeti Szinhaz (national theatre), Debrecen

Little walk-way off of Kossuth Utca, Debrecen

Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Utca, just off of Piac Utca, Debrecen

The next morning I awoke early and hopped on what felt like a post-war train to the village of Hortobagy, about 45 minutes outside of Debrecen (the green splotch on the map below):

http://www.world-guides.com/europe/hungary/hajdu-bihar/debrecen/debrecen_maps.html

Train to Hortobagy from Debrecen...time warp

Hortobagy is located in Hortobagy National Park. This national park protects the largest continuous natural grassland in Europe, meaning grassland that was not created by deforestation. This marvelous expanse is basically prairie but is called a puszta (pronounced: pooh-staw) in Hungarian. Unlike the mockery the prairies of Canada receives (poor Saskatchewan), this prairie is an important defining landscape for Hungarian culture and history, the seat of livestock agriculture and a wide array of non-human living creatures. The people of the Pannonian Steppe (the location of these Great Hungarian Plains) have historically been horse people. In fact, the Pannonian Avars (occupying the Pannonian Basin --modern day Hungary) were the first to bring stirrups to Europe from Asia--allegedly-- in the 6th and 7th century for chrissake! Also, Hungarian Goulash was invented here. Gulyás (goo-yash) translates as 'herdsmen' or shepherd, and the famed stew itself was what these men of the Great Hungarian Plain would eat as they herded livestock across the plains. The Hungarian mounted herdsman, or csikós (pronounced cheek-ohsh), are legendary for their crazy antics like this:

A Hungarian csiko... yes it's a touristy thing now but you get the gist (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/12/travel/hungary-wild-east/)

Some real olden-timey day csikos sitting on the well-slides... these were used to draw water as well as communication devices whereby setting them at certain angles to be seen across the grasslands signaled different things: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/304415256036810989/

Upon arrival to the sleepy village of Hortobagy at 7:45 am:

Hortobagy train station

The streets of Hortobagy 

I walked a few hundred meters to the visitor information center and rented myself a ride for the day for seven bucks:

My ride

And set out on highway 33, that transects the  national park, towards the Hortobagy great fishponds, about 6 km down this highway.

One of the (non) fun things of touristing is that you often can try and do things that you planned only to find yourself bicycling on the non-existent shoulder of the highway to your first planned destination, large transport trucks are whizzing by at 130 km/hr and after 20 minutes realising that this is super fucking dangerous and if you keep going you'll have to also ride back on this dangerous road and so you turn around and go back and say "oohh weelll...I tried".... 

Riding along hwy 33...nice and smooth when no vehicles are driving by.

The Bridge of Nine Holes, on hwy 33 in Hortobagy National Park

After turning back and giving up on the great fishponds, I decided to turn off the highway onto a smaller quiet road that led to the rare-breed animal park. This is an interesting place that is a little touristy but still a nice opportunity to see some of the unique Hungarian breeds of livestock:

Hungarian turkey

Weird Hungarian chickens

Hungarian Grey Cattle... these are pretty rad.

The beloved Mangalica pig--thez come in white, black, or ginger-haired. THIS particular breed's fat is allegedly healthy for you... ha!

Hortobagyi Racka Sheep

Another interestingly horned goat

No idea..but cool curly horns

And if you're feeling frisky, you may hit up the petting zoo or, as this translates in Hungarian:

Lost in translation....

And perhaps there will be an opportunity to see some puszta livestock roaming in action:

Herding livestock on the puszta

And when I say that things were "touristy" here at the rare animal breed park, I am referring to the infrastructure... not that there was another living soul around. In fact there was basically no other human animal encountered the entire day as I biked around the national park.

After the rare breeds, I decided to bike around the village of Hortobagy a bit and, lo and behold, found some signs for an actually path off the highway that would lead me to the great fishponds that I had tried getting to earlier via the dangerous highway. Always a nice surprise to get a second chance to achieve touristing goals. And off I went with my binoculars dangling around my neck, like a lone bicycle grassland safari-ing warrior, feeling like the only person in the whole wide world.

I wondrously dilly-dallied along the way, stopping for some bird-watching and to try and capture the beauty of this isolated environment, made even more romantically lonesome by the scraggly trees dotting the landscape that had yet to sprout their leaves and the solo white storks rambling along in the grass:

The trail between the village of Hortobagy and the Great Fishponds...nice and flat. Just how I like it.

The puszta

A ruin of an old puszta structure 

Wetlands in Hortobagy National Park,  part of the Great Fishponds

A white stork wandering the puszta all alone

One of my favourite things to do in foreign countries is exactly this; rent a bike and ride around in rural (flat) areas. I recall the first time I ever did this was with some friends in the tea plantation areas of Srimongal, Bangladesh and I felt like I'd be alright if I died that day. The fresh air, the freedom, the tranquility, the shedding of obligation and responsibility... these experiences of solitude are my happy places, my meditative spaces.

After a good solid 6 hours of bicycling on trails with no shocks-absorption structures built onto the bike, me and my mashed-up nether regions made it back to the visitor center, grabbed a beer in the sunshine before catching the next train back to  Debrecen.

That evening back in Debrecen, I stopped for a couple reflective beers and some potato chips on a nice restaurant patio, before wandering back to my hotel to make pizza and drink wine on my hotel terrace, while skyping with my friend in Edmonton and taking in the last bits of the summery day:

Post-puszta bicycle safari drinks on my empty hotel's balcony, Debrecen

The next day, I had planned to check out the university campus and find a place to set up and work for a few hours before hitting one of the thermal baths. Yes I made it to the university campus on that fine Saturday morning. I had expected there to be students hard at work on campus, like on large Canadian campuses in the middle of the school year...but alas, buildings were locked up tight and nary was there another living soul to be found wandering the campus.

After a bit more nature-meditation walking through the campus botanical garden, I finally found an open cafe and set down to work after which time I did indeed make it to the thermal baths which was also practically isolated.

After this experience and my previous experience in Eger a couple months ago, I've come to the conclusion that Hungary is a really quiet little country, on the whole. Budapest is, I guess, the only place where there is any real bustle and tourist fray seven days a week. For this weekend trip to Debrecen, I did not make the same mistake as when I went to Eger a couple months ago where I stayed about four hours too long... instead, I left on the train back to Budapest before lunch on Sunday...avoiding the inevitable aimless wandering in a quiet, empty small Hungarian city on a Sunday afternoon. 

Despite my love of isolation in natural settings I also realised this weekend that, for the time being, I have grown a bit sick of exploring alone. I feel a growing discomfort in how comfortable I can be in this state of isolation, whether its sitting alone and writing for days on end in my dark apartment or whether its adventuring off to empty cities by myself. It is a good thing that my parents arrive this week for an extended visit and we have some plans to do some family exploring around Hungary and other neighbouring countries... so stay tuned for more weird eastern/central European adventures with fairy-tale castles, I suspect.