Entries about nightlife

I don't know why, but I have long had a fascination with communism since childhood. I did much of my growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell when I was eleven, and a very large proportion of TV, radio and print news coverage in Australia was devoted to communist countries and the relations between the West and those countries. I guess spending much of my childhood watching news repprts about the Reagan-Gorbachev summit on National Nine News or reading about Nicolae Ceaucescu's crimes against humanity in the Daily Mirror led me to wonder with childish curioisity about what life really was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that my first visit on a gloriously sunny Friday in Budapest was to Memento Park. This large park on the southwestern industrial outskirts of Budapest is home to the biggest collection of communist kitsch in the world. A ride on the M4 metro line to Kelenföld then a bus brought me to this eccentric collection of sculptures, friezes, murals and statues.

Like in all communist countries, town centres across Hungary were filled with statues of communist leaders and sculptures of striving labourers with bulging muscles and determined faces giving one hundred and ten percent of their energy to building the brave new socialist world to come. These were all produced in the Socialist Realism style, all chunky concrete and blocky brass. When communism fell in 1989, the authorities were left with the dilemma of what to do with these now politically incorrect adornments. Some bright spark hit upon the idea of dumping them on some waste ground on Budapest's outskirts squeezed between arterial roads clogged with trucks and high-voltage transmission lines. And thus was Memento Park born.

The usual suspects were well-represented - Lenin with arm raised, Marx and Engels with flowing beards, Red Army soldiers with bayonets fixed, countless aforementioned labourers, Bela Kun who led a short-lived communist regime in Hungary in 1919 - but the most striking item in the collection was an enormous pair of brass boots. These once belonged to Comrade Stalin, or rather, to a statue thereof. A statue of Stalin of truly titanic proportions graced one of Budapest's central squares until revolutionaries in the 1956 uprising managed to saw through the statue at the ankles and pull Stalin down, leaving only his footwear. Stalin's boots take pride of place on a huge podium at Memento Park.

Outside the entrance there is a small museum about the communist history of Hungary as well as a small cinema showing a constant loop of 1950s training films for new employees of ÁVH, the secret police. The films instructed recruits on the proper way to conduct a raid. In the films the ÁVH officers were polite and solicitous towards their suspects, which I am sure was not really the case. Perhaps the most unsettling film was the one where they taught rookies about how to obtain the apartment keys of suspects. The suspect would be given a fake notice to attend a fake medical screening. The suspect would attend the fake clinic, would take their clothes off, and the ÁVH officer would then rifle the pockets to find the keys, impress them into wax moulds, and then put the keys back in the pocket. The moulds would then be used to cut copies of the key so ÁVH could enter the apartment at will whenever the suspect was out of house.

I caught the bus back to Kelenföld station and then a tram to Clark Ádám Square at the western end of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge. The square lies at the bottom of a nineteenth century funicular railway that hauls passengers up to Buda Castle. The short ride with great views over the Danube and Pest on the eastern bank brought me to the castle grounds. It's not really a castle, but a whole town surrounded by ramparts on the ridge of a kilometre-long hill. It makes Prague Castle look tiny.

The most prominent building in the castle is at the southern end, the magnificent domed Royal Palace, formerly the modest little cottage of the Habsburg family but now home to the Hungarian National Museum. Along the edges of the ridge are ramparts, most of which are open to the public, along with watchtowers and bastions. The most famous is the Fisherman's Bastion which looks mediaeval but was only built in the nineteenth century, along with the Matthias Church next to it, which looks impressively ancient and Gothic but most of which was comprehensively rebuilt in the late nineteenth century.

The northern half of the castle is still a functional neighbourhood with houses and shops and restaurants and government departments and buses. It is in this neighbourhood that I visited the Labyrinth, a network of caves under Buda Castle that was transformed by mediaeval stonemasons into cellars and store rooms for the Hungarian royal household.

Labyrinth is now just a common tourist trap. You climb down the steep stairs, pay your admission fee, and then find yourself walking down stone-lined tunnels with waxworks depicting opera scenes, marble busts of Hungarian kings, a prison cell with heads on pikes representing Dracula's victims, sinister music and spraying mist jets. It's all very kitsch, it makes Memento Park look like the Louvre.

I continued walking around the ramparts, admiring the sunset over Buda. Despite being in the heart of the city, Buda Castle's great height above the Danube and its plains give the impression that this neighbourhood is a separate place, in Budapest but not of it. The peak-hour traffic jams on the bridges and boulevards were just pulsating twinkling lights; distant, barely audible ribbons of white and red.

It was my last night in Budapest. I checked out St Stephen's Basilica in Pest, the most important church in Hungary, rode the last two sections of the Budapest Metro I had not yet clinched, and headed to Erzsébetváros, the historic home of Budapest's Jewish community and now also the hipster nightlife district. The Jewish community of Erzsébetváros suffered greatly in the Holocaust after the Arrow Cross party formed a Nazi puppet government in the dying stages of World War Two. The community is now thankfully thriving. It is thriving so much that I saw an Orthodox Jewish man in his black hat and bushy beard and curly sideburns getting around Erzsébetváros on a skateboard. It was Shabbat evening so perhaps skateboards are the fastest kosher way of getting around.

Budapest is famous for its ruin bars. Budapest has a large number of abandoned, boarded-up buildings. Enterprising, free-spirited young souls have decided to liberate these premises from abandonment without the leave of their official owners and have set up pubs, dance floors and live music venues in these rotting edifices. These illicit venues have thrived and are now an integral part of Budapest's culture.

I went to the biggest and most famous ruin bar, Szimpla Kert (Simple Garden), in the heart of Erzsébetváros's nightlife precinct. I waited forever in a line, got a full-body pat-down by security, had my bag searched and was forced to dispose of my bottle of water, then went into a graffiti covered courtyard with ten thousand other people. Most of them appeared to be lager louts from the United Kingdom - loud, jeering, obnoxious boors guzzling generic European pale lagers as if the world's beer supply were to be cut off permanently tomorrow. You would think that beer was unavailable in Billericay and Basildon and Burnley judging by these uncouth Brits. Do you want to know why Australia has such a terrible problem with binge drinking and alcohol-fuelled violence and disorderly behaviour in our towns and cities on Friday and Saturday nights? It's because we inherited that culture from the British and the vast majority of Australians are of British ancestry.

I then spent half an hour waiting at one of the many bars dotted around the perimeter of the courtyard to be served a one thousand forint glass of beer - two to three times the price of everywhere else. And to add insult to injury, the beer was served in a plastic cup.

I then went into a side room where there was an open mic session that may as well have been karaoke, so abysmal was the quality of the performers. I then went out into the courtyard to finish my beer only to be bumped into by a hundred ruddy-faced drunken gits from the dreary satellite towns of the Home Counties.

So I finished my beer as quickly as I could, said "f@#$ this for a joke" to myself and walked a kilometre or two back to where I was staying. Just down the street from my room is the little corner pub I've been to a few times during my stay, Roots, owned by the aspiring musician who is a massive fan of Australian indie rock. It sure as hell beats Szimpla Kert. I fell into conversation with a Hungarian, György, who had lived in the United Kingdom for many years and spoke good English and, like many expatriate Hungarians, had learned to open up and not be so mistrustful of strangers. He was still Hungarian - very no-nonsense, very abrupt, very little visible emotional affect - but just to crack the ice a bit and talk with a stranger is something that is uncommon among the people here.

György is a builder and was back in Hungary visiting friends and family. We had a wide-ranging conversation about politics, culture, finance, history. This is what I love about Europe the most - just how easy it is to have an intelligent conversation here. Australians are not dumb. You don't build one of the world's most successful economies and stable democracies by being a bunch of morons. Australians may not be dumb but they are anti-intellectual. There's a shallowness to Australian culture that can be unsatisfying. There is not much chance that I could meet a construction worker in a typical pub in Sydney and have a conversation that went much further beyond sport, chicks, fast cars and casual racism. Australian brains tend not to plunge too deeply into subjects beyond the merely pragmatic.

György and I talked about communism in Hungary. He was about my age and so had plenty of childhood memories of the last decade of communism. "We weren't as bad off as other countries. There was plenty of food in the markets. Most families had a small car - a Trabant or a Polski, we were given a free flat because my father worked at a truck factory. You could have an OK life here. But if you wanted anything more than that very basic life - you couldn't have it unless you were a member of the corrupt elite."

György mentioned that at the very end of communism, nobody did any work. "The whole economy stopped. Nobody did anything. Why bother? If you were doing an exam at a university, and everybody got sixty percent regardless of how well they did, would you bother studying?" As someone who was addicted to getting high distinctions (the highest possible grade at Australian universities) when I did my degree in surveying and spatial information, I could relate to this wholeheartedly.

"So capitalism isn't working. Communism didn't work. What's the answer, do you reckon?" I asked.

"Search me. If I knew the answer I'd be a politician. Capitalism is terrible and has many problems and needs to be fixed, but communism was never the answer."

The conversation turned to cars - I am fascinated by Trabants and I drove a Trabi in Berlin in 2017. I talked about my first car, a 1983 Holden Camira, the biggest shitbox ever to have been produced out of the many shitboxes produced by Australia's now-dead car industry. I did a Google Images search for a 1983 Holden Camira and showed György and his friends some photos of what my first car looked like.

"If you had driven a car like that in Hungary in the 1980s, you would have been surrounded by a thousand girls wanting to marry you!" György said and I laughed, trying to imagine a Holden Camira ever being a chick magnet and failing miserably.

It was time to call an end to my last night in Budapest. I farewelled György and farewelled Roots and shook the hands of the owner and wished him all the best.

Memento Park

Stalin’s Boots at Memento Park

Vladimir Lenin at Memento Park

Fisherman’s Bastion at Buda Castle

Sikló funicular railway to Buda Castle

Matthias Church in Buda Castle

Royal Palace / Hungarian National Museum in Buda Castle

View over Danube and the Parliament from Buda Castle

St Stephen’s Basilica

Great Synagogue of Budapest

Szimpla Kert ruin pub

Ella, Sri Lanka
Thursday, 8 February 2019

I awoke shortly after six o'clock, well before I had set my alarm, having had eleven hours of deep sleep. I was not in a hurry so I took my sweet time eating a breakfast of leftover chocolate biscuits, spicy dried chickpeas and an apple that I bought for my bus trip from Matara to Tissamaharama, showering, shaving, reorganising my backpack, packing and searching for my hat.

My hat! My hat! I lost my beautiful hat! That steadfast and trusty companion on my travels that I bought at Big W in Bathurst for about twenty bucks six years ago. That hat was just perfect. It had a wide brim that protected my entire face and neck from the sun, it was made of straw so it collapsed easily into my luggage, because it was made of straw my head still got some ventilation, and it had a sturdy chinstrap with a movable woggle that stopped my hat flying away even in gale force winds.

I know exactly how I lost it, it was somewhere on the floor of the jeep that I went on to Yala National Park. Because the back of the jeep had a roof I didn't need it on all the time so I had stowed it under the seat in front of me. When I disembarked from my jeep at my hotel I did do a quick check of the floor to check that I hadn't left it behind but the hat must have slid away to some other part of the floor. I was also very, very tired and though I pride myself on my organisation, thoroughness and the fact that I rarely lose anything, when I am very tired I let my guard down and get a bit forgetful. It's why I left my daypack in the taxi van on the trip from the airport to my hotel in Colombo.

Oh well. I will just have to put plenty of sunscreen on my head until I come across a suitable hat somewhere else. Slightly pissed off with myself, I paid my bill of Rs. 3,690 to the owner's aunt - and at fifteen Australian dollars a night, that would have to be the cheapest I have ever paid for accommodation on any of my overseas travels - and asked her which bus I had to take to Ella. She didn't understand me so she called over some people from the shop next door. They also had difficulty with English so I got out my Sinhala phrasebook. Then they told me the good news - the stop was across the road and I only had to change once or twice.

Grateful for the glad tidings, I crossed the road and waited a whole two minutes until my first bus of the day, route 335/1 from Tissamaharama to Thanamalwila. I boarded the bus, I told the conductor that I wanted to go to Ella.

"I will help you, yes, I will help you."

It was the strangest bus I have been on in Sri Lanka - the driver stuck to the speed limit, obeyed the law, and was courteous to other road users. He even gave way to traffic already on a roundabout. I should have taken a video. I know that you won't believe me. I scarcely believe it myself. Most of the other passengers were country housewives off to do the shopping.

A few kilometres south of Thanamalwila on the A2 highway, a bus overtook us. "That's the bus towards Ella!" the conductor exclaimed. The conductor went up to the driver and asked him to honk his horn and flash his lights at the other bus. The other bus pulled over and the conductor told me to hurry, the bus was waiting just for me. Sri Lanka is like that - just when you get sick of the touts and con jobs, someone will surprise you with astonishing friendliness and hospitality that restores your faith in this country's people.

Thanking the conductor and driver far too quickly, I hopped onto the next bus, route 35 from Mathara to Monaragala. It was a fairly short journey for me as far as Wellawaya and I spent my time practicing my Sinhala with the middle-aged married couple sitting in front of me. I am starting to fall in love with Sinhala with its sinuous snail-like letters and musical murmuring and bouncy rhythms.

I got off at Wellawaya at about 11am. I had planned on just using Wellawaya as a lunch stop but on my way there I checked my Lonely Planet. There was a place called Buduruwagala, known for its ancient stone carving of Buddha on the side of a cliff, about ten kilometres out of town. I then changed my plans to have lunch then find a tuk-tuk to Buduruwagala.

I got off the bus and was mobbed by the usual crowd of desperate tuk-tuk drivers. One was a bit more persistent than the others and followed me.

"I am sorry, sir, but I don't need a tuk-tuk just now. I just want to find a restaurant so I can have lunch."

He seemed to relax. "It's OK, I will show you a restaurant. Follow me." He led me to one end of the bus station and on the other side of the highway was a Chinese restaurant.

The Chinese restaurant had yet to open for the day. "I'm sorry, sir, but the restaurant is not open. There is no other restaurant around here, you will need a taxi." And - what are the odds! - his tuk-tuk just so happened to be parked right there opposite the closed Chinese restaurant! What an amazing coincidence!

"I told you I do not need a tuk-tuk. I'll walk somewhere else, I know the town centre is just on the next street." I pointed at the busy intersection one block north.

"No, there's no restaurant there, it's too far. You can't walk there, you need a taxi." I ignored him and he followed me a short distance before giving up.

Right-wingers and conservative parties, even some centre-left parties, in Western countries like Australia want to abolish the welfare state, the greatest moral advance of the twentieth century. They dream of some Hobbesian free-market utopia, a war of all against all, the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, devil take the hindmost. They want to force society's most vulnerable people, the poor, the lonely, the disabled, the single parents, even the elderly into insecure poorly-paid work in the so-called "gig economy" like these tuk-tuk drivers and touts and scammers. The right-wingers claim that any job is better than no job at all and that there is greater dignity in working in such precarious, demeaning work than in being on the dole queue.

Bullshit.

There is far greater dignity in being paid a social security allowance from a system you pay into when you are healthy and able to find work. There is no dignity at all in being forced to lie, cheat, steal and harass innocent strangers by an unjust economic system that refuses to provide secure, adequately paid, dignified work to every citizen. No human being should be forced to degrade themselves and their morals just to put food on the family table and a roof over their heads. If you want to see a place that doesn't have a comprehensive welfare state, come to an underdeveloped country. You will then appreciate social security a bit more. The welfare state, built by the generation that suffered through the Great Depression and defeated fascism, is our most prized heritage. Defend it with all your might.

Only about a hundred metres north of the closed Chinese restaurant at the other end of the bus station was a whole row of restaurants where I could eat delicious rice and curry and drink coffee to my heart's content. Which is exactly what I did. I told the restaurant owner that I wanted to visit Buduruwagala. She told me to wait and got on the phone, presumably to a relative or friend. Soon a friendly man, Savan, appeared. He quoted me thirteen hundred rupees for a tour to Buduruwagala. My Lonely Planet said the going rate was seven hundred. I decided to meet him halfway at one thousand but he wouldn't budge. So we settled on thirteen hundred.

Here's my attitude to bargaining - I come from a country where it simply isn't done and is seen as massively disrespectful to the person providing a service. I do not have the confidence to bargain and I find it stressful. So I try and avoid it. Besides, what is the difference between Rs. 1300 and Rs. 700? It's A$10.35 versus A$5.60. What is A$4.75 to me? I am stingy but not that stingy. It's about what I pay for a cup of coffee with the boys at work every morning. But what's A$4.75 to a Sri Lankan? It's food for a whole family for a day. The marginal utility of A$4.75 is microscopically tiny to me. The marginal utility of A$4.75 to a Sri Lankan is many orders of magnitude greater. So by paying the extra six hundred rupees above what my Lonely Planet said, I am actually increasing the amount of utility within the human race. Jeremy Bentham would be proud of me.

I got in the back of Savan's tuk-tuk and we headed south out of Wellawaya. We stopped at a rice paddy. He ran into the field and harvested a mature stalk of grain for me. I looked at the rice stalk with interest, rubbed the grains between my fingers, even ate some. The grains were hard but not as hard as uncooked rice from the supermarket; the grains are oven-dried during processing before retail sale. They tasted like rice but fresher and more fragrant. It's as rice should be.

We then turned west off the busy A2 highway and down a bumpy gravel track fringed with lakes, rocky hills and more rice paddies. Savan stopped the taxi again so we could look at the teeming schools of flat, black, bulge-eyed fish in a lake.

Soon we arrived at a ticket booth and I paid my Rs. 368 admission. Savan parked the taxi in a car park and I walked a hundred metres to Buduruwagala. Buduruwagala consisted of a cliff on the side of a hill, and on the cliff a large standing Buddha was carved into the stone. The Buddha is fifteen metres tall and is the tallest carved standing Buddha in Sri Lanka. On each side of the Buddha is a group of three smaller figures each representing various figures from Buddhist theology.

Buduruwagala was csrved in about the tenth century AD. As an Australian, seeing such antiquities never ceases to strike me with reverential awe. I come from a country that was first colonised by Europeans in 1788. I work next to a UNESCO World Heritage-listed building that was built in 1817, one of the oldest buildings in Australia. Sydneysiders think this building is extremely old and treat it in much the same respect as Athenians treat the Parthenon. But really, 1817 is nothing. I've slept in a building twice as old on this trip.

Buduruwagala was interesting and I recommend it but it's the kind of thing that takes less than ten minutes to see. I went back to Savan and his tuk-tuk and we made our way back to the Wellawaya bus station. He pulled up outside my next bus and we exchanged hearty farewells. As I said, just when you get sick of the touts and rip-offs, you meet people here who stun you with their friendliness and warm humanity.

The next bus was, to put it mildly, a bit eccentric. My route 998 bus from Matara to Badula was bright pink all over. Pink exterior, pink interior, pink seats, pink frilly curtains, pink ceiling. I felt like I was stuck in a six-year-old girl's doll house minus the Barbie dolls. This bus was also a little bit fancy - it wasn't just playing hideous Sri Lankan pop music but hideous Sri Lankan pop music videos on the screen at the front of the bus.

The mobile doll house left Wellawaya and climbed north into the hills. The bus roared, swerved and honked its way up a twisty mountain highway with few guard rails protecting fifty people from a fiery death in the ravine far, far below. I just tried to concentrate on the glorious mountain scenery and looked away from the road.

After about an hour I arrived in Ella where I quickly disembarked on the main street. I found a lovely, bustling little village surrounded by steep, cloud-fringed hills. It is also very tourist-oriented, most of the people on the streets are foreign backpackers. There has not been such a large concentration of smelly dirty feral hippies in one place since Occupy Wall Street.

It was a ten-minute walk to my guest house, Up Country, which just so happens to be located opposite Ella railway station. Not that I would intentionally pick a hotel opposite a railway station. Oh no! Perish the thought!

Ella is a very steep town. At street level is a small café and shop, and the guest rooms are out the back down the hill behind the café. The station road is on a ridge and it was a great place to relax with complimentary pancakes stuffed with coconut and treacle and a soothing cup of black Ceylon tea while enjoying the recuperative breeze. Ella is 1010 metres above sea level and the weather here is marvellous - mid-twenties, moderately humid but not sweaty, cloudy. I worked on my blog as I watched the occssional train go past.

Ella is famous for its array of cookery classes and I booked one at a restaurant, Nanda's, on the corner of the station road and the main highway. For eighteen hundred rupees I and six other tourists were taught the fine art of how to cook a rice and curry. We all participated in the preparation - grinding the coconut, soaking the dhal, kneading the coconut roti dough, cutting the pumpkin and such like - and we were handsomely rewarded with a magnificent meal of our own making - garlic and pandanus rice, coconut roti, coconut sambal, and three curries (green bean, pumpkin and dhal).

Afterwards I retired to a nearby pub with a thatched roof, open sides and log pillars of the sort you find all around the world in every tropical tourist destination. I am not a party animal so I picked a nice, quiet one a bit off the main drag where I could work on my blog and catch up with friends online.

Soon I fell in with an English chap, Jason. I do have a rule - meeting people is preferable to my writing project; my blog is just a spare-time, chill-out endeavour. So I put away my Samsung Galaxy tablet and got to talking with Jason. This loud but affable fellow is thirty-three, he owns a campsite back home that closes in winter, and so he spends three months a year travelling overseas to a warmer climate with his young family. This year they are staying in Sri Lanka. I am so jealous of those kids. Why couldn't I have a childhood like that? Not fair!

We got to chatting, compared notes, made some terrible jokes, laughed. The Lion beer was way too warm - there had been a blackout for most of the day, the Ceylon Electricity Board was doing maintenance work on power lines in the neighbourhood. I remarked that the beer was a bit warm but that Jason being a Pommy bastard should be used to it, and he just laughed and gave me the finger.

Soon we were joined by a mad fat drunk Czech bastard aged in his fifties who knew we couldn't speak Czech but insisted on speaking only Czech. He would hug me without asking for my leave and would sometimes bring his face right up to mine when he spoke. I found this when I was in Prague in 2017 - Czechs are aloof and gloomy when sober but terrifyingly convivial when drunk. This guy got a bit too huggy, he wouldn't stop laughing and making lewd gestures (I guess while telling bawdy jokes in Czech), and though we tried to use Google Translate to understand what he was saying the translations only came out all garbled.

Later we were joined by a local whose name I forget, a young, sharp-eyed guy with a scar on his forehead who claimed to be in the Sri Lankan mafia and to have served time in prison for murder. I have been in enough pubs in my life to know that they are full of people whose relationship with the truth is rather flexible. But it was enough to make me worried.

"Doesn't this guy give you the creeps?" I asked Jason when the young local had gone to the toilet.

"Just a bit. Yeah, just a little bit," he said.

It was time for me to leave. It was eleven o'clock and though I had had only one gin and tonic and two beers, I was rather tired, had planned an early start for the next morning and the Czech weirdo and Sri Lankan wannabe-mafioso were annoying me. I walked the hundred metres back to my room through the marauding packs of street dogs, occasionally turning to make sure I wasn't being followed.

Lake near Buduruwagala

Buddha carving at Buduruwagala

Pink bus

Savan and a rice stalk

Bus from Thanamalwila to Wellawaya

Complimentary welcome snack at guest house in Ella

Dinner is served at Sri Lankan cooking class

Ella railway station

The beginning of the Hill Country north of Wellawaya

Pink bus at Ella

Tambourine-playing beggar on the bus at Thanamalwila

Sri Lankan cookery class at Ella