To get context for this post, please be sure you have first read yesterday’s.

After six hours of a relatively monotonous Danube shoreline, Budapest, spreading on both sides of the river, came as a total shock, its beauty fulfilling all of the hype given me on the boat. If you have been there, you know what I mean.

The castle on the Buda side.

The parliament building on the Pest side.

It was late afternoon, as I recall, when we arrived, and I bounded up the stairs on the dock with a feeling that I had arrived in paradise and nothing could go wrong. Following the instructions from my travel agent, I located the small office of Ibusz, the state tourist agency, near the dock, where I was to collect my hotel voucher.

I arrived just as the two young employees, one male, one female, were closing for the day. They were about my age and, because I was now an energetic young fellow who had just entered paradise, I was sure they would become my best friends.

I told them my name and why I was there and showed them my receipt from my travel agency. They each had the same response – a blank stare. They had never heard of me. They had never heard of the travel agency. They had no hotel room for me. There were no hotel rooms in Budapest available that night. I should get on the next train and go back to Vienna.

Now, had I been Arthur Hessel that day, that is probably what I would have done. But I was Super Art, invincible, and I could control my own destiny, Ibusz be damned.

I told them that there was no way that there was no room in all of Budapest for me and that, if we worked together as the perfect trio I knew we were, we would find me a place to stay. Again, normally they would have ignored me, but because I was Super Art, they happily agreed to stick around, keep the office open after hours, and man the phones. After about half an hour, they found a place.

It was not a hotel, and  airbnbs had not been invented, but they had found a room in the apartment of a woman who could use a little money.

She lived in a typical Pest tenament building. From the street, these late 19th century Budapest neighborhoods sort of look like the Bronx, but the overall footprint of the buildings is very different because they are built around large open courtyards with the apartments reached by external stairs within the courtyards, like this:

But hers, of course, was not nearly as fancy.

She was an old woman and spoke no English. We could communicate with my high school German but not perfectly. I know nothing at all about her and didn’t find out much then, either. Her apartment (cold water only) was very run down. The furniture was old. She clearly had no money, but……

She told me she had a grandson, and more than anything else, she wanted to buy my blue jeans (obviously then a valuable commodity in Hungary) to give to him. In fact, this poor, old woman kept raising the price she would pay me for my jeans until she got to the equivalent of 40 US dollars. $40 in 1973 would be close to $300 today.

I was aghast. How could anyone pay that much for a pair of jeans? How could this woman, seemingly lacking everything, pay that much? Even had I been willing to get rid of my jeans, I would never have taken that much from her. I would rather just give them to her. But then what would I wear the rest of my trip?

Of course, there were other possibilities. Maybe she had no grandson. Or no grandson who wanted jeans. Maybe this was simply a business proposition. Maybe she knew she could sell them for $50. I will never know.

But I did realize that I had made a mistake. Had I brought a few extra pairs of jeans with me, I could have paid for my entire trip. Or perhaps wound up behind bars.

Guess what? I am out of space again, and I still haven’t told you about my time in Budapest.

Come back tomorrow, OK?