Well, truthfully, my wife knew because she lived in that amazing country for a year . . . and has any number of fascinating stories about the experience. For instance there was the unpleasant woman who was part concierge, part stool pidgin in the apartment building where my wife was living. This unpleasant women was…
On our second visit to Hungary, we took several days to visit the puszta, the great plain in the eastern part of the country. It’s 800 square kilometers and the largest continuous natural grassland in Europe, all within the Hortobágyi National Park. The Hungarian puszta is cattle country and along with sheep and goats,…
I’ve made two trips to Hungary and both were fascinating, although in a couple of very different ways. The first time was in the mid-1980s when Hungary was still in the Russian sphere. We were traveling there by train, and had our first taste of a repressive society at the Austro-Hungarian border. Armed soldiers entered…
After concluding our first trip to Hungary in the mid-1980s, my wife and I continued our travels by taking a Czech train from Budapest to Prague—a magnificent city, of course, but just the train ride there was notable in several ways. We had lunch in the dining car on that train. I ordered a beer and, when…