On Budapest

We got scammed in Budapest. Well, not really scammed. Scammed in the idea that we spent money we weren’t planning on spending and definitely got overcharged, but when you have six Hungarian men playing double basses and cimbalon at you, what are you going to do?

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Backtrack. It’s been an odd week. We started off in Edinburgh. 18 degrees. Rain. A whiskey tasting at Devil’s Advocate, a little whiskey bar on a ‘close’, a tiny alley in between buildings. I was introducing Grace to my high school friend Megan who I hadn’t seen in ten years. Like most of my oldest relationships, the conversation start fairly superficial (what do you do for work) and dives very deep quickly (how’s your childhood trauma treating you).

Grace got a pretty deep look into my teenage years, I got to re-examine a bunch of child-hood beliefs, we drank some smokey whiskey. Followed it up with a cod sausage and a late night train back to Glasgow where we spent the day exploring the first of many museums.

We stayed at a ‘tenement’ in Glasgow, which is basically an apartment, but originally built as low cost housing. With the passage of time, what was a cheap flat in the 1800s that would have housed 12 people is now a trendy light-filled four bedroom apartment walking distance from town. This particular one had incredibly high ceilings, a grand piano in the living room and an odd slant to the doorways. Glasgow was bombed during World War II and half of the building came down. When they rebuilt it they braced up the still standing section as much as they could, but there was still some irregularities. Squeaky floor boards and doors that don’t quite shut.

Another odd thing about a lot of UK houses is the multiple key holes. Houses in Australia might have a normal lock and a deadbolt for security, but the tenement we were staying in had a row of six keyholes, starting above your head and spanning the right edge of the door, one every half a foot or so. The check in instructions told us to ‘use two key holes – the shin height one, and the normal-looking one’, but even with these instructions it took me about ten minutes to figure out the entrance. Turns out the lock was both a little sticky and required both keys to be used at once, so we spent a fair bit of our Glasgow-time kneeling in the doorway arms stretched out, trying to twist two keys at once.

We went to a trad Irish session at ‘Waxy O’Connells’ – two accordions and two fiddles tucked into the corner of a pub, snuck in a ‘haggis burger’ which came in at $36 and was… ok and drank some local beers. Most of the local pubs have a selection of European beers on tap – something Italian, German, Dutch, and a selection of local beers. The stereotype of terrible hand-cranked warm English Ales persists, but we’ve also had a handful of other shockers – a ‘flat cider’ which was abysmal, a nitro-stout which wired me for two days and a house Hungarian beer whose only redeeming quality was being cheap and cheerful.

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The band has dispersed – band members off to Athens, Barcelona, London and Slovenia.

We were meant to catch our flight out to Budapest at 7.30 pm but it got delayed by an hour and we lost another hour to time-zone changes, so we landed at midnight. The trip from the airport to our hotel in the middle of town tacked on another hour and then we were creaking up an iron stair-case to one of the most ornate rooms I’ve stayed in. Grace was in charge of accommodation for this part of the trip and booked us an ‘attic room’ in the Gerlóczy Boutique Hotel. I’m not saying she blew the budget on the first three nights, but this place was faaaancy. Wrought iron taps, a sink basin almost large enough to bathe in, a selection of ‘bonnet de douche’ in ornate wooden boxes which I assumed were bath soaps but turned out to be elegant shower caps.

Also blessed air-conditioning. It was 25 degrees when we landed at midnight, and pushed 36 in the middle of the day. The city was survivable in the shade, but the sun was rough. Everything a big soggy mess by 10 am, as we found our first Hungarian breakfast – a place with ‘strict rules’ on their meals. To Grace’s dismay, she found out that this means no sugar allowed in coffee and the eggs benedict came floating on a salad of pickled onions. Deliciously disturbing.

We did a free walking tour of the city for a little historical context, found our way to Starbucks for an enormously large iced latte covered in whipped cream (making up for the lack of breakfast sugar), and headed to a ‘traditional Hungarian restaurant’ for a goulash and chicken paprikaash.

By this point I’d found a place online offering some live local music, so we went for a walk to find it. The online reviews were a brilliant mix between ‘the greatest experience of the holiday’ and ‘an outright scam’, so I had some vague foreknowledge of what was about to come. Giero Pub is a tiny hole in the wall, a little underground pub with space for four tables, eight patrons and about fifteen fans. There were fans everywhere, pointing every direction, blasting warm muggy air at the six heavily shirted men sitting in the room. When we arrived we asked if there was music on, and they gave us a thumbs up – five minutes, five minutes.  We got ourselves a drink and sat at a free table, and the bar-tender, a gently sweating grey-haired woman scampered over to re-position some fans to point at us.

Then it was on. The band started out as two violins, a double bass and a cimbalon – a Hungarian version of a dulcimer. The pub had an odd curved ceiling that made the internal acoustics odd. The double bass player was the farthest one away from us, but the loudest thing we could hear. He was carrying on a conversation with one of the band members through one of the songs and it carried over top of everything else that was happening, but it felt so genuinely authentic. The music was Hungarian folk music and had a beautiful sway to it – the main violinist kicked off solo and the band tumbled in behind him, each song was a journey in mood and tempo, when the band got excited everything sped up, when it got moody everything slowed down. It was really fun.

Halfway through the set they asked where we were from, then played a rousing version of Waltzing Matilda. I coaxed them back to playing Hungarian music and a couple more band members wandered in. The set ended with two double basses, three violins and the cimbalon. We were the only two patrons.

When they finished the band leader came up and asked if we would buy the band a round of schnapps. Cue scam. I was enamoured with the experience and gave him the nod, then he wandered back a minute later and asked if we would cover a round of beers to go with the schnapps. I knew what was coming, but figured we might as well do it. The band appreciatively took their two drinks upstairs and sat on the step to drink them. I fixed up the bill which was 13,000 Hungarian Forints, the equivalent of $50. More than I’d planned on spending, but for two rounds of drinks for eight people, plus a little mark-up for the bar, it wasn’t terrible.

There wasn’t a cover charge. There were no other patrons. And spending $50 on drinks was on the expensive side, but where else would you get six people to play you forty-five minutes of music in a private show?

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There’s an ongoing conversation around the devaluing of music in the digital age – with the advent of streaming, access costs for music have bottomed out at free and the people who create and record and write music are no longer getting reimbursed for their time, energy or creative vision. Most of the money in music is in live shows and merch sales and here was a band who have no internet presence, have nothing online to stream, no t-shirts or CDs for sale, but they’ll happily turn up on a Tuesday night and play for a couple of drinks from unsuspecting tourists.

I’d have loved to picked their brains for a bit. Do they have day jobs? Do they play other places? Do they write their own music? How did they learn to play? When I travel I’m always intrigued by what people do in the places I skim through. There are whole worlds everywhere we go with communities and relationships, people with habits and hopes, and I wish I had time to explore deeper.

I wonder if they’re having the same conversations we’re having in the Australian music scene. Are Hungarian festivals struggling? Are Hungarian live music venues closing? Or are they inoculated from these things that we see as issues because their livelihood is tied entirely to a local scene supported by tourism?

If the reviews on Tripadvisor for Giero Pub are anything to believe, the people who had the same experience as us come away split 50/50 between joy at the awesome music or annoyance at being asked to buy drinks for the band.

Maybe the real scam was late-stage capitalism ripping the guts out of the burgeoning recorded music scene. Or maybe we just need to find a way back to hyper-local communities where people play music with friends every night of the week.