Exhausted and frustrated, I decided to sit down on a chair and then refused to talk to anyone until all of the overanxious and persistent peddlers of various flats backed off.
I told the hawkers that I was prepared to sleep there in the station on the floor.
At that moment, Gyorgy Bakunin, came to our rescue.
Gyorgy happened to be in the Buda Train station awaiting friends from Sweden, and he took pity on we three tired and surrounded travelers.
Observing our tiredness (and readiness just to camp-out and sleep on the floor of that train station with many other East Europeans and gypsies), Gyorgy came and spoke in a calming manner to the other Hungarians who had been harassing us with their insistence on our taking a room at their rates.
Finally, Gryorgy announced, “I am George and I have a free apartment for you.”
You see, Gyorgy was an electrical engineer in his early thirties. He had worked especially hard to get his degree, his job and his English skills. Gyorgy usually slept at his girlfriends apartment in the city--or with other family members.
His stable government job afforded him a large flat in the outskirts of the urban landscape. However, the commute was often too long for the average Hungarian worker to make such a round trip—and maintain any social life.
In prior years in that decade, Gyorgy had also tried to make a bit of extra money in the summers by coming to the train station and renting out his flat to strangers. However, he hadn’t really needed the money—he told us—he had done so mainly in order to improve his English skills and to make friends with visitors from the West.
NOTE: As fate would have it, some of his friends from Scandinavia (whom Gyorgy’d first met in 1985) had originally contacted Gryorgy to indicate their arrival on the same train that we arrived in.
Alas, a few hours before the train arrived, these same Scandinavian had canceled his travel plans for the week.
However, since communication between East and West (and even among Eastern) states was dodgy, Gyorgy had shown up at the train station that very afternoon just to make sure he had no friends coming to town after all.
A NEW MAN OR A GUARDIAN ANGEL?
True to his word, Gyorgy gave the three strangers (including myself) from North and South America the keys to his flat for the next 4 night in an area far out on the commuter line past Pest. Soon Gyorgy disappeared into the night, leaving his phone number by the telephone in one of his rooms—along with a map to find our way back to the flat each day.
On our last night in Buda, Gyorgy met the three of us for some coffee in the famous Café New York--which was certainly an honor for anyone who has been their to drink or to listen to music in that city on the Danube. Click here.
There was wonderful blues and jazz that night. Gyorgy and I then escorted the Brazilian and Argentinean couple to their night train. (Finally, for westerners the evening was relatively inexpensive. We student-budget travelers would have never been able to afford such a snazzy café in the West.)
