Usa Roadtrip East Coast

Hey everyone,

Since Csaba is also writing a blog about our road trip in Hungarian (buc-usatrip.blogspot.com) and my English writing skills can obviously use some practice, I decided to share my take on these events in English. Hope this doesn’t mean loosing all my faithful readers. If you’re one of my native English friends (especially if you’re Jake) and think that my writing skills would benefit from your feedback, feel free to share it with me.

So let’s start from the beginning.  As most of you might already know, we’ve been planning this trip ever since I set foot on US soil, and now – after hours of facebook chat planning/organizing/making politically incorrect and inappropriate references involving the female genitalia (keep in mind, this is the story of five Eastern European guys) -  it’s finally happening.

So here’s our team: Csaba, a Budapest lawyer, my best friend since first grade in elementary school, Ákos, Péter, Dániel, all impeccable products of the physics program of Budapest University of Technology and Economics and last but not least, my incredibly handsome but still unreasonably humble self.

Stage 0: DC&College Park with Ákos and Daniel

The first folk to enjoy the smooth night touch of our couch was Ákos. Apparently, the MSU semester ends two weeks earlier than the UMD one and being bored of East Lansing’s enchanted forests, he decided to arrive to the base camp a week earlier. After a brief make out session with Momo, I immediately threw him to the deep waters of U-street and Adams Morgan, and with a few other folks, we constructed a fair hangover for the following day using beers and jellowshots in the company of a dancing pirate (the shots were only $1 if ordered while the pirate was busting his moves). For the record, the power hours (Unlimited drinking for $10) at Town Tavern are between 8-10 on Saturdays. Yes, we missed that. 

Besides visiting the Capitol and the Congress Library which are beautiful buildings with bunch of statues (pics to follow on facebook later), our next few days were dedicated to hunt down some carps for the Fisherman’s soup we were planning to make. Sadly, carps just appear to refuse to die during the first half of the week and we had to lower our standards and buy a bunch of dead catfishes at the Fisherman’s wharf near the Potomac waterfront. Apparently, the people selling the fishes are not allowed to clean them (kibelezni/megpucolni, vocabulary+1) in the US and we had to take them to a licensed pirate fish cleaner who seemed to be a little overly enthusiastic about his job and we were given a 30 minutes lecture about  the past and present of the artistry of removing sea creature intestines which could have been only made more credible had he had a hook instead of at least one of his hands. That would have been real badass.

I also gave Ákos a campus tour, during which we passed through the undergrad housing area of south campus which first of all looks like an ancient Roman forum and secondly it is usually filled with fine ladies enjoying the sun in their bikinis. We figured that the best way to achieve an unnoticed polite and respectful creep-stare is to wear our aviators. Well, turns out it doesn’t help much if you don’t pay attention and walk straight into a construction fence...

On Thursday, we started cooking for the Hungarian Invasion party which I threw in order to have the best of both worlds mingle with each other in the company of a lot of food, pálinka and beer. How could this be bad, right? Well it took an unexpected 16 hours diluted with occasional, „I’m so tired of this shit..” style movie watching and distracting Katelyn from doing her work. Midway through, Dan arrived in the middle of the night from Berkeley just in time to witness the creation of the most unorthodox paprikáschicken ever conceived. 

As a closing accord of this chapter, I took both to campus the following day to get a last minute I-20 immigration signature just in case somebody in Arizona wanted to detain and deport me for posing as an illegal Mexican immigrant driving his rental car. (Little explanation: according to recent Arizona law, the police has to detain and possibly deport anybody who can’t prove it with sufficient immigration documents that they are lawfully in the US as the detaining part happened to a high ranking German official of the local branch of Mercedes) I got lucky, they had an academic adviser on call who did it for me, hurray. 

Stage 1. DC

The Friday night party went very good I think (and mostly remember). The food turned out to be super popular, a lot of people came and we made a giant mess (gazillons of thanks to Katelyn and Shirley for cleaning up most of it!!). The remaining two Hungarians found their way to the House and the pálinka arrived safely with them too.

According to the original plan, we had an appointment at the white house 7:30am the following day, but thank god that got cancelled due to some unexpected oval office party so we started in the National Archives later at a much more friendly 10:45am. Besides being a beautiful building, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and unknown to me, an original copy of the Magna  Charta from England. At this point we started wondering: If somebody just burns all these documents, are all these people suddenly become British??

Still mostly hungover, we left the Archives for a Chipotle to share some awesomeness with my friends. Since in Hungary, the soda fountains are almost never consumer accessible, our Budapest based friends were slightly puzzled. More precisely, Pete wasn’t puzzled at all, he was so happy that the drinks were free in the US up until the point when Ákos told him that they wasn’t. 

Our next stop was going to be the Air&Space Smithsonian but since I wanted to see something new too, we first went to the Hishorn right next to it where there was a visual illusion exhibition that was just simply supercool. After getting intimate with the moonstone, we headed to my favorite Irish  pub, Fadó’s to watch the Champions League finals and see my favorite Indian going into several cardiac arrests over Chelsea’s struggles and eventual victory.

A few hours of monument-crawl followed and I realized that the lake on the mall is the lake where politicians and government official conspire on a bench in movies so we couldn’t resist the temptation to make some pics/videos of us doing it. It will surely go well with the X-files OST.

As by this time Mr Jetlag punched our heroic friends in the face hard, we decided to head back to our HQ on 51st Ave and put us on the charger. 

Stage 2: Philly&NY

The next morning we woke up and got ready to hit the road surprisingly quickly. Our first destination was the Sandy Point Beach in Chesapeake Bay as we wanted to be able to say at the end of the trip that we swam in both of the Oceans washing the US shores. I’m not sure if the car key had the same intentions, but nevertheless I forgot it in my swimsuit pocket and rendered the remote unusable for a day but fortunately no permanent damage was done.

Philadelphia was the next stop where we obviously had to make some cracked Bell pictures and eat a cheesesteak lunch after which we took a tour in the Independence Hall narrated by a very angry little man. Seriously, his passion and theatrical anger in his voice actually made me wonder if he was unsatisfied with how history turned out. Maybe he was a secret redcoat agent...

We also realized that the three most popular tags at this part of the globe are independence, liberty and freedom. I think there might easily be a random historical sight generator working along the liberty/independence/freedom + object scheme. Anyway it was pretty cool to see these places live and Philly seemed to be a pretty nice city where of course it’s always sunny.

Now it was my turn to drive and as I hadn’t driven for ages (other than the driving test), starting with a minivan was a little challenging in the beginning, but I got used to it pretty quickly and it was all fine except for the Lincoln Tunnel which was a little claustrophobic and I had the feeling that I was driving on the only golden path and if I had steered away even the slightest I’d have smeared ourselves on the wall. So yes, I can say I’ve driven in Manhattan, niiiccceeeee....

Our first Hostel seemed pretty nice at first but we had to realize pretty early that whatever time of the day you check in, there will be people sleeping in the room. I actually think that one of the guys was dead as he was sleeping when we arrived and he was still sleeping 14 hours later when we left for our first NY day. It turned out later that this is a common phenomenon in hostels, so we quickly named them the sleeper cell and ignored them.

The hostel itself was located on the corner of Amsterdam Ave&103th St which is very close to Central Park so I convinced the guys to ignore the exhaustion and go for a night walk in the city. Actually I just wanted to have a beer at the Galway Hooker but it’s pretty close to Grand Central/Times Square/Empire State so Csaba could put his head into a constant upright position and just stare at the skyscrapers.

The next day we did the standard Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island cruise (which was the third time for me, I swear the next time I go to NYC I’ll refuse to see a single sight)  in the pouring rain after which it was time to have my one and only Five Guys visit of the year (a burger place). 

Actually feeling the cardiovascular contamination made us eager for some further walk in Central Park after which we headed back to the hostel for some promised $1 beer happy hour. This was a little disappointing as the party consisted of 40 dudes and one girl (like math parties, yeahh), numbers that grew a little by the time we got to the pub but the ratio remained constant so we were relieved to see a fussball table in the bar on which we spent the next two hours beating the living crap out of various South American duos.

The next day was Jerry’s grand tour around NY city. Jerry is a born and raised New Yorker in his seventies and an insatiable hunger for walking. For  $10/person he does a 10-13 hours long walk from all the way Brooklyn up to Central Park. This sounded really good, unfortunately, the execution was more like a hippy cult’s brainwashing bootcamp about world peace. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the notion, but going on and on overly sentimentally about how he cried like a baby about certain historical events (without much attempt to actually be historically accurate) quickly became rather annoying. He also complained a great deal about Europe not having too many WWII memorials dedicated to the Americans. Well, in Eastern Europe’s name I could have expressed my gratitude for Jalta, but rather decided not to.

Also, Hungarian speakers try to say quickly: „Kis Itália a kis genitáliájúaké”

Moreover, he was 90% deaf I think which is perfectly ok, but pretending to understand us and having the scariest evil genius laughter as a response to  yes/no question was pretty amusing.  In addition, he had that stereotypical german war criminal face which might have partly explained his constant attempts on befriending the Argentinians. At least he became bff’s (best friends forever) in an upper-middle aged Dutch guy with the worst jokes ever thought of on the face of this planet. You guys know that coming from me this means a lot. His  face was strangely red so we named him Cherry to fit with Jerry.

It was around this time when we realized that even though using English words in Hungarian conversations can be cool, it’s pretty dangerous around here. This revelation was prompted by Peter embedding the term „semen shower” into a conversation the details of which I won’t discuss but I can promise the dear reader that it was a perfectly appropriate and mature expression in the context.

After 8 wonderful hours  on this tour we decided to part ways and took the only girl from the group with us (Hungary-South America 2-0 muhhaha). Emily was Australian and was just traveling randomly for three months starting in New York and then going somewhere. She was a little shy at first but when she actually started talking she turned out to be pretty cool, so we rejected the dinner Jerry’s tour had to offer and the six of us went to an Indian restaurant where upon hearing us speaking Hungarian, the waiter invited us in with a gentle „beszélek ám én magyarul is!”. It turned out that he spent his college years in Budapest and was amongst the few who actually learned the language. It was pretty amazing as he barely made any grammatical mistakes. The food was awesome and super spicy (probably because the guy knew what Hungarians mean when they say spicy) which had some repercussions the following day not discussed in details on these pages for the reader’s sake.

To help our stomach in digesting, we hit a dive bar where they had a $2 shot happy hour all night and tried some whiskey’s none of us had before.  Also, I’m pretty sure we saw Slash there but since South Park told us he wasn’t real, I’m pretty sure it was one of my parents. Emily didn’t want to drink, but Ákos convinced him over the course of this conversation:

-          -Are you drinking?

-          -No.

-          -Yes, you are.

-          -Ok, so beer?

When this was done, we fulfilled biggest dream: The flat iron building and once we were there we realized that we might as well go up to the Empire State Building. It’s open very late in the night and we got up with virtually no line. It was a general thing that wherever I had t the top, o stand in line for hours and hours during my previous visits, this time we got in no time. On the Ákos randomly bumped into a high school classmate of this.. What are the chances?? Probability theory just doesn’t make sense.

By the time we got back on the street again, it was already pretty late so after finishing up with Madison’s Square Garden and Times Square, we headed back to the hostel to get at least some rest before leaving for Toronto the following day.

Stage 3: Niagara Falls and Toronto

To break the monotonicity of the 8 hours drive between New York and Toronto, we stopped at Watkins Glenn National Park, NY. It was pretty darn nice, I immediately thought about canyoning in Slovenia, I should do that again at some point. Driver switch and on the road again, it took us another four hours to get to Niagara Falls, where we took some awesome night photos.

This is when I managed to loose my camera somewhere by leaving it on the sidewalk next to the car. There is a word for that in Hungarian: to pajorize. It’s only used in a very special regional dialect mainly spoken in the region around me to describe making trivial mistakes in life resulting in mild to severe financial losses.

I only discovered that my camera was missing halfway to Toronto, we went back but it was already gone. Of course, we checked in with the park police where we parked next to a seemingly very confused guy, who started accusing us of following him. After a few minutes of a yes-no-yes-no-yes-no conversation, he came in to the building behind me and started crying to the officers that he couldn’t get out of Niagara Falls. 

To finish up the camera story, nobody turned it in but the following day I got a semi-Hungarian e-mail from a random dude that he found it and left it at the Mariott’s reception so the next day when we went back anyway according to our plans my first trip was to retrieve it. I was happy beyond reason.

This sorted out, we could actually move on to the Niagara attractions, first the boatride into the mist and then the walk beyond the falls. Both were pretty amazing, I can only recommend them to anyone visiting.

Peter even contracted some Navi infection that started to turn him blue as his flipflops started to release some color upon getting soaked in the waterfall. We achieved medical victory by stopping the rotting only a day later.

Rushing back to Toronto we managed to catch the early sunset in the CN Tower (which resonating with our earlier „semen shower” incident gave rise to some more grownupness) and have a nice walk on the Ontario shore, I still find that place pretty amazing.

Of course we were once again late from the hostel’s official pubcrawl, but this time we went after „the crowd” only to find the world’s worst pubcrawl. Seriously if I was doing something like that for a group of hostel people, I’d at least try to play social games, but this dude in charge was just standing there saying a few words to everybody and then that’s it. Oh, and when we almost believed that we could get through that day without hearing a single hungry Hungarian joke, he just had to ruin it for us didn’t he...

This signaled that we should find our own ways to navigate through Toronto nightlife and we decided to just start walking toward the north. A bad photo of me marked the birth of Vladimir, my Ukrainan mobster alterego and since we stopped in the hostel on the way to execute a bottle of William’s pear pálinka, it seemed to be a good idea to harass people on the street with a fake russian accent and trying to recruit them to the business. Maybe they would have taken us seriously had we not kept on insisting that we were from the Soviet Union. (Csaba left us at this point to prepare for his duties as the designated driver for the next day)

It was here when we met Marc Anthony (not J-Lo’s one), a half native half Canadian nationalist in full military suit who were selling pin-buttons and only accepted American dollars just to burn them on the street. That’s an interesting business idea, the package also included a 3 minutes long ideologically not so coherent rap song mostly about the demise of the west and the end of capitalism. Hmm, heard better. He actually did love us for being from the Soviet Union. 

Leaving our confused friend behind, we desperately wanted to find a bar, so we kept on asking for direction and forgot to drop the Russian accent so a nice gay couple warned us that we just entered the „gayborhood”. As we didn’t really care, we found a pretty fine gay bar to have a few beers. By this point our fake accent had stuck so much that we even kept it after switching to Hungarian and it took 10 minutes before we asked each other why the hell were we still doing it.

The gay district of Toronto is a pretty funny one, where the „gayness” is emphasized in a satirical way, e.g. there was a picture above the urinal in our bar from which a ZZ-Top style bearded motorcycle guy was looking right into your eyes grabbing inside his pants while you were peeing. My love for Toronto just gut reassured.

A few rounds of beers and some deep philosophical conversations later, we headed back for the Hostel just to have the worst 12 hours long hangover-drive back to DC the next day including a detour to find an Amish village. The success was limited but we could make a few pictures of traveling Amishes at least. Also, upstate NY and Pennsylvania is pretty beautiful!

On a cartrip this long, it's hard to agree on what music to put in, and the bad compromise is always the radio 90% of which is guys in emotional distress type of music, so we were eventually forced to find a weird element of the intersection of our musical taste: Celtic rock, or as Peti put it, "whiskey-whiskey-iszunk-baszunk" (whiskey-whiskey-we drink-we fuck) music.

Upon arriving back to DC, me and Csaba took the car back to IAD went home and fell asleep immediately. 

Perfect time to finish writing as the Grand Canyon is approaching on my right, it’s a pretty amazing sight from the air, I’m going to look at it for a little.

So long guys!