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crawling with human-interested microbes
Sunday, March 25 2018
location: British Airways airplane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
I looked out of the window at some point and saw fingers of land reaching out into the ocean, which was surprising. It turned out that we'd already reached the west coast of Ireland. Not long after that, we were over southern Wales and making a descent into London.
Heathrow is such a large airport that things that one would normally walk between require buses or even small-scale trains. A bus collected us from where we landed and took us to another terminal, where we had to go through security as though we'd just arrived on a floating mat of vegetation from Morocco. The procedure wasn't immediately clear, and somehow (and this always seems to happen) Gretchen and I, when given a choice, ended up in the slowest of the lines. Gretchen and I always dub such lines with the insensitive term "tard line." In our case, the line seemed to be held up things people had foolishly left in their bags. But then it turned out that Gretchen had filled her water bottle at some point in the flight and forgotten it was in her bag, so of course it got queued up for individual inspection, a time-consuming process in a space built in seeming denial of humanity's essentially biological nature. There is no bathroom provided in the place where one waits to have their bags gone over, and at some point Gretchen couldn't wait any longer. She headed off to find a bathroom, and the nearest one turned out to be about a third of a mile away. This left me to be the one present as Gretchen's bag eventually was inspected and that stupid bottle of completely harmless water was found.
Another maddening thing about Heathrow is that, after the ordeal of seemingly-unnecessary security, one is dumped out into a highly commercialized mall-like space and then pointedly not told what gate your flight is loading at. The hope seems to be that you will stay in the "mall" and shop until the last minute, when your gate is revealed. When it is revealed, sometimes it is only a half hour before departure and some distance away. And then, at least for the flight to Budapest, we had to go through a passport inspection checkpoint and wait in this secured room for our plane without access to a bathroom (or any place to buy things except from a vending machine). Evidently part of keeping a stiff upper lip is retaining one's shit. True, we could always leave that room and go back out into the airport, but this would mean that we'd have to queue up and go through the gate-only checkpoint an additional time when we came back.
The plane to Budapest was a smaller one with, in coach, three seats on either side of a single aisle. Gretchen had again located us in a window and aisle seats respectively, with the hope nobody would be placed between us. When this trick worked for a second time, it really seemed like Gretchen had figured out a workable hack around the misery of flying in coach.
In the Budapest airport, there didn't seem to be any sort of immigration or passport control, at least not for planes from London. That seemed a little odd for a country that is several years into a semi-authoritarian anti-immigration freakout. As we neared the doors to the street, we were accosted by people trying to sell us bus rides into the heart of the city. Gretchen was skeptical, and quickly decided to get a bunch of Hungarian money (forints) from an ATM and then, when a taxi guy showed up, accept his price for a ride to our hotel. Since forints are such an alien measure of value, Gretchen just picked the highest number the ATM was willing to dispense, two hundred thousand. That was equal to just under $800, an amount no American cash machine will ever dispense.
Our driver was of an Eastern-European archetype I know from such sources as Uber rides in Los Angeles and the second season of The Wire. He was muscular, had a shaved head, and a strictly no-nonsense demeanor. He seemed like the kind of guy that would do anything you were willing to pay him to do, including the most gruesome forms of murder, all while listening to cheesy European dance pop. Before long we were in the heart of downtown Budapest and crossing the beautiful Liberty Bridge (Szabadság hid) to our destination, the beautiful Gellért Hotel, an early-20th Century bath on the steep Buda bank of the Danube, just beneath a warren of ancient buildings attached to a cliff and a heroic sculpture that looks to date from Soviet times.
When checked in, Gretchen was horrified to discover that she'd booked last night and today, not today and yesterday (as she should've). This happened once before when booking a hotel in a timezone hours to the east, where it's easy to lose a day in calculations. In the end, it didn't matter; we got our room, and all was well.
Gretchen is familiar with my aversion to touch public surfaces such as the poles and other grips in forms of public transportation. Today she saw me carefully avoiding the touching of one of the Gellért's elevator buttons and realized that I am a lot more germophobic than she'd thought. In this case, I might actually have been trying to avoid a potential shock from static electricity as germs, but it's the kind of thing I've been doing more and more in public places as I've gotten older. And it makes sense: public places, particularly in winter, are crawling with human-interested microbes, and if it's easy to avoid exposing yourself to them, why not? And once you develop the habits that keep you from touching such surfaces, those habits tend to spread. For example, if I do happen to touch a surface, I remember that the hand that did the touching is contaminated, and I avoid touching my face with that hand. Gretchen had been surprised earlier on the plane when she went to touch my face and I recoiled in horror. But it was natural to view hands that had spent hours in public places (hands I hadn't been closely monitoring) as contaminated. Gretchen hadn't really thought much about the contamination of public surfaces, though it's a hard thing to put out of your mind once you have. Later in the day, she had begin taking similar measures.
Budapest is full of vegan restaurants, and we went to one tonight with semipronounceable name of Napfényes Étterem, which means "Sunshine Restaurant." It turned out to be something of a traditional Hungarian restaurant, with all the oily, heavy dishes re-imagined in vegan form (usually using lots of seitan). I had a soup that was full of smoky, savory paprika umami, and it was so good that I had most of Gretchen's as well. She'd ordered something that was like chicken Kiev, with faux cheese inside breaded & fried cutlets of seitan, and I had "Seitan Roast à la Brasov with Ratatouille," a pile of Hungarian comfort food that resembled an extra-chunky poutine (featuring thick fries slathered in red sauce and chunks of seitan). There was also a pizza menu and a raw menu, though neither of us were interested in the latter. The Napfényes seemed to be coming from some sort of health perspective, though what precisely that was wasn't entirely clear. There was, for example, no alcohol available, and all the baked goods that might normally have contained chocolate contained carob instead. A fair number of the diners there tonight were morbidly obese. There was also at least one table of Isrælis, whom Gretchen met at the salad bar after overhearing them speaking in Hebrew.
Back near the Gellért, Gretchen and I wanted to see what exactly the old-looking structures encrusting the hillside to the north were. So we climbed up there and entered the glassed-in front of what appeared to be a cave. It was, we learned, "The Cave Church," a Roman Catholic church that had either been cut excavated into the mountain, made from a cave, or some combination of the two. It being Sunday night, we happened to be there during mass. The place was crowded with people in its warren of spaces divided chaotically by a system of walls and thick supporting pillars interpersped with speakers and monitors for those who otherwise wouldn't be able to see or hear. I never actually saw the guy leading the mass (except on a monitor), but Gretchen did. We didn't stay long.
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