One of the things that all (and I am sure I am not exaggerating) 80 year olds do is to look at the obituaries every day. Not, as the old “joke” says, to see if they are there, but – IMHO – because it’s the one place where it is unlikely that it’s fake news.

About a month ago, I saw a death notice of a man whom I had never met and whose name I had not thought of for about 50 years. But it was a name that brought back memories.

It was the early 1970s and I decided to take a trip behind the Iron Curtain. How this came about, I don’t quite remember, but someone advised me to call a certain Washington travel agency that arranged trips to Eastern Europe. The man who had died had been the owner of that agency.

[A diversion: Where is Eastern Europe? Much of what we think/thought of as Eastern Europe is more properly Central Europe. Do Poles think they live in Eastern Europe, for example? No way. “Mieszkamy w Europie Srodkowej!” or “We live in Central Europe!” In fact, based now on many trips, I realize that Eastern Europe seems to be located 100 km east of wherever you are at the time. What’s more, in Lithuania, some 30 km or so north of Vilnius, you pass a road sign that says: “Welcome to the geographic center of Europe.” Well, if you include Russia to the Urals, Norway towards the Pole, Iceland to the West and Sicily down South, this is pretty accurate.]

Whatever.

I called the dead man’s agency and arranged a trip (I was traveling alone) to Budapest and Prague. After Prague, I figured I’d relax in Italy, where I had traveled before.

Now today, people travel to Prague and Budapest like they travel to Rockville and Gaithersburg. But not then. Pleasure travel to Czechoslovakia and Hungary was very rare. And hard to arrange.

I flew first to Vienna and spent a few days there. I had been there before, and I have been there since, and frankly I don’t remember much of what I did there on this trip. I had booked a hotel which was relatively inexpensive and discovered that it wasn’t a free standing building but one floor of a regular office building that had doctors and lawyers and what have you. It was the first, but not the last, time I had seen such a hotel. I arrived in the late afternoon, checked in, and had an experience unique for me. The room I was given was small. No, it was tiny. No, it was miniscule. A rectangle with a single bed, a room so narrow that you could almost touch both walls while lying in the bed. There was a small chest of drawers, but you couldn’t open any drawer fully because you hit the side of the bed. Oh well, I said, just a couple of nights.

I asked where I could get a good meal nearby and I remember being directed to a small restaurant a block or so away with the name Zum Something or Other, that I was told was one of Schubert’s favorite places. It wasn’t crowded, I had a simple meal and perhaps the first Austrian wine I had ever had. Good wine, I thought. I looked for Schubert. He was not there.

I went back to my hotel and the small room. But I couldn’t sleep and in the middle of the night I left, walking the dark, empty streets of the old city of Vienna until I found a very nice small hotel with a larger room.

That is all that I remember about that trip to Vienna. I had booked passage on a hydrofoil to Budapest, a trip of a few hours up the Danube, and it was a beautiful day. The boat was modern and it was hard to believe that it skimmed on top of the water, but I guess it did.

I was a bit disappointed with the Danube scenery, and I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t stop at Bratislava, which we passed and looked interesting. I was intrigued by the guard towers, which appeared every 100 yards or so; I couldn’t tell if they were occupied. What did impress me were many of my fellow passengers who were Hungarian-Americans, many of whom were returning to their home country for the first time since they left, and most had left in 1956 during the failed revolution. They were the friendliest, most energetic, most welcoming of people, and they all convinced me that I would love Budapest, that it was heaven on earth. I was convinced.

If you have ever been to Budapest, and if you have arrived on the water, you know how magical the city is. You also know that you arrive at the pier, with the castle looming over you on the Buda side, and the Parliament on the Pest side. You climb a few steps to get to central Pest.

In those days, all travelers had to report in at Ibusz, the national travel agency, which controlled the life of all visitors. I had been told to report there and give them my voucher to the hotel arranged by the Washington travel agency. Ibusz was in a small building, and there were two young staffers, about my age, one male, one female. They took the voucher, did what they do, and told me two things: first, they had no record showing that I had a reservation and second, there were no vacancies in Budapest.

Now, I admit to being surprised, and you would possibly think that I would have been discouraged. But no. This was Budapest. The most wonderful place in the world. Nothing could discourage me. I simply changed my personality and acted as if these two Ibusz staffers were my oldest and best friends and surely together we would figure something out. And, lo and behold, these two loyal Communist functionaries seemed to change their personalities, too, and we went to work.

Before long, they told me that they found me a room not at a hotel, but with an elderly woman who took in travelers, but it was a cold water apartment, and she didn’t speak any English. No problem, I said, we worked out the details and I got the address.

Again, if you have been to Budapest, you know that central Pest is filled with (maybe) 6 story brick apartment houses, with flat fronts and an interior courtyard. You enter through the courtyard and, because there are no elevators, you climb interior stairs to balconies that run across all four sides of the building, and the apartment entries are off these balconies. Our landlady was quite elderly (it seemed to me at the time) and she was welcoming, but I couldn’t really communicate with her. She didn’t speak English, of course, but we couldn’t manage with my poor German, either. All I remember is that she wanted to buy my American blue jeans for her grandson and that she was willing to pay me $40 for them. That is the equivalent of almost $300 today. Where would she get that kind of money, I wondered. And if she could scrape it up, certainly that was something better to spend it on.

I did love Budapest. It was a very lively city with very active and attractive people – it certainly didn’t fit my image of a Communist city. The stores and markets seemed filled, and everyone you saw on the streets was well dressed. I visited the central market, and I ate some wonderful meals. The dollar was very strong then, and elegant meals, served in elegant settings, by very professional waiters, were dirt cheap. While I don’t remember all of the restaurants, I do remember Gundel, and a Russian restaurant on the Buda side called (in Hungarian) something that translated into Golden Caviar, where I ate on a subsequent trip, as well.

My other Budapest memory was my “night at the opera”, where I saw Don Giovanni done in Hungarian. It was a great performance in an old, then down-at-the-heels opera house, and I was amused at the sound of the opera in Hungarian – sounded to me that it was being done in baby-talk.

During the first act, something flew into my eye and I couldn’t get it out. At the intermission I went to one of the ushers (the ushers all looked like elderly Jewish women), and asked her in my best poor German where the restroom was. She smiled at me and responded in good German that the bar was in the room to the left. I realized she had not understood me, so I repeated it, louder and more slowly. She nodded and told me that the bar was in the room to the left. I was certain that my German was failing me, but I tried again, this time telling her that I had something in my eye and that I needed the bathroom to wash it out. She looked at me again, and told me that she knew that, and that the bar was to the left and that what I needed was not the restroom, but a cognac. I took her advice, got a cognac, chugged it, and my eye was fine.

From Budapest, I went to Prague and more adventures. Tune in tomorrow.