Obstacles Ahead

I’m walking down the street with Szilvi. I’m stumbling along on the sidewalk, and she’s parallel to me on the street. It’s 1 in the morning and I am tired. Ten minutes prior to this moment I had been sitting in a bar with Szilvi, Dave and his new girlfriend, to which I have now completely forgotten her name. We all order drinks. They come. I take a gulp. And get up to leave.

Where are you going?

Home. I can barely keep my eyes open.

Dave just looks at me, half smiling the way he always does. What about your beer, he asks.

Drink it. I don’t care.

Szilvi accompanies me, probably understanding once I left it would just be her with the happy couple. She caught the whiff of freedom and jumped on it. I can’t remember if she also left a beer behind. We probably left them with two extra drinks. I didn’t care. I just wanted my bed.

So we’re walking along Múzeum körút, talking about something. I can’t remember, because of what happened next.

I said something to Szilvi that made her laugh, and I looked down at my feet. Right at that moment I blinked, but it didn’t seem like I was blinking. The darkness was too long. My mind was engulfed in darkness, and I thought insanely: Maybe I just went blind.

But then pain shot through my right side, erasing any thoughts of blindness. Arghhhh, I remember hearing. My forever blink ends and the lights of night come back to me. I look around and see where my pain had originated from: I had run right into a pole. To my right are a group of five girls, completely silent and watching the confused idiot who just ran into a pole.

Um. Where is Szilvi, I’m wondering. I look past the group of girls, who are giggling now as I massage the right side of my chest. Ow damnit. She’s nowhere to be found. Vanished. What happened?

And then I remember.

Szilvi had gone back to Jaro’s a while back. She had gone right at Kalvin tér, and I had gone left. Yes, we had been talking and walking down the street together earlier, but that was then. She left and I continued towards my home, my bed, and from everything I can tell, I continued the conversation as well.

I had fallen asleep while walking down the streets of Budapest, and had a vivid dream while doing it. Something akin to reality, but not quite. Still, I can’t be certain. It felt real. But then, I was actually walking on that exact same street in my dream, as in reality.

It made all the sense in the world that it was a rigid jolt that brought me back, brought me back into my conscious self. I’m still walking down the same street, but I better watch for those obstacles ahead.

Medically Challenged

I'm sitting there at the stadium, with warm beer in one hand and a hot dog loaded with condiments in the other. Jaro is munching down on his hot dog so fast I'm waiting for him to choke. But not to worry. There are medics directly to my left so I'm not too worried about his state of health.

We're there to watch Lodzi play his American football game. Yes. American football. They actually have this here. And it sure looks like the same thing too. But Lodzi is sitting on the bench, looking bored out of his mind. The minutes stretch into months. Christ, I'm saying, since when was this game so boring?

There's a big hit, someone topples over. He doesnt get up. The coach runs out to assess the situation. And starts screaming for the medics. But no one with a stretcher runs out, like usual. Where the hell are the medics? People are looking around.

Sometimes, in this crazy city, you can have a shitty day and one beam of shining light makes up for all the bad stuff that happened before. This was one of those moments. The game was a disaster. Really. We didn't care about it. We were there to support Lodzi, and carp about the Americans chasing skirts in the stands. And then...

Medics! The coach is screaming for someone to help his injured player but no one comes out. Jaro and I are looking at the medics now, the exemplary Hungarian medics that should be out on the field. They're sitting in the ambulance, backs turned toward the field, smoking cigarettes and talking like it was a Sunday afternoon in the park.

We start to laugh as the coach has to physically run over to the ambulance and grab the medics. They stub out their cigarettes and look confused. What do you mean someone was hurt?

It's times like these that you remember where you are. I mean, really remember. That shit just would not fly back home. And certainly no medics would be caught smoking inside an ambulance. I'm not saying this is only the Hungarian's fault. This might happen all throughout Central Europe. But I'm not all throughout Central Europe. I'm sitting right here, munching on my hot dog and grimacing at the warm beer (where the fuck are the coolers?!) and watching the way the Hungarians do business in the medical services.

I can't even imagine what surgery is like here.

Later, after the top-notch medics haul this big mother of a guy in full football gear onto a stretcher, they can't seem to figure out how to get the stretcher into the ambulance. They're fiddling with switches and the stretcher and just looking at the back of the ambulance with a deer-in-the-headlights look. Jaro can't even believe what he's seeing. Do you see this dude? He's asking. Yes. They're fucking retards. It takes 5 minutes for the medics to figure out what they're doing. And the football player is just laying there, sometimes waving at the small crowd, sometimes watching the medics do there thing. This is a total clusterfuck, I'm saying.

I get up to piss. And stop. There on the ground is a 9mm shell casing. Just sitting there. Holy shit! Look at this Jaro...

There is a funny aspect of gun culture in Hungary. Guns can be bought in stores all over the place. There is a shop with all types and sizes across the street from Jaro's flat. But none of these places sell bullets. Its like the NRA's personal hell. So many guns. But no bullets. They have to be procured by other means (I'm sure the Mafia have their ways - open Schengen borders help a lot).

This is why the bullet casing sitting on the stone bleachers in a diminutive football stadium in Budapest was such a surprise to me. You could even see where the hammer snapped into place and started the chain reaction to send the little bugger on its lone journey through the air.

What happened here? If there was someone here with a 9mm popping someone you would see other casings, or dried blood, for that matter. But none of that is around. Just one casing. Just sitting there. Waiting for me to pick it up. The last journey it will take.

I still have it now. Sitting on my desk, collecting dust. I want to remember that moment, the medics, the warm beer, the guy on the stretcher waving to the crowd. It's all part of the Budapest experience.