High on Budapest

My father as a boy in Ujpest; menu poem; view from Erzsebet Lookout; chairlift to Erzsebet Lookout; trying to hitchhike up to the Lookout; Courtney and Nori at Nancsi Ninni Restaurant.


Today was a surprise for us. We expected to take it pretty easy since the temperatures are now in the high 80s and just hang around the Island and see Nori and Zsolt for lunch at our favorite restaurant, Foldesz Joszef (Zsolt's last name is Foledesz so I thought it would be a cute idea.). But my cousins had other plans.

They took us north and to the west of Budapest to this delightful restaurant called Nancsi Ninni, which I believe means Old Lady Nancy or something to that effect. On the menu (in English and of course, Hungarian) was a poem that pretty much describes the Hungarian attitude toward food. The meal was delicious, from the unusual soups to the main course, to the huge Gumball (Gumbolz?) for dessert, a fried pastry in the shape of a gumball covered with a sweet sour cream.

We all felt the need to walk after all that food, and apparently exercise was scheduled next. Zsolt and Nori drove us further west and up, high in the Buda hills. We discovered that we were about to go on a skilift that would take us to a lookout with stunning views of Budapest and the surrounding area in 360 degrees. After a 20-minute ride up the hill, we then climbed a steep road (Nori and I tried to hitchhike, but no takers) to the Castle Tower built for the queen of Hungary so that she could see her estates.

The spiral staircases up the Tower led us to exquisite views of the city: we could see the Danube, Parliament, and all the places we had visited in the city, many miles away. The air was warm but the breezes were a delightful constant. The ride back down the skilift was almost mesmerizing in the late afternoon sun--I could have fallen asleep.

We headed back to the city where Courtney, Zsolt and Nori took the rest of the afternoon off--Nori and Zsolt's synagogue is a 5-minute car trip from the hotel so they lounged around the pools until they had to leave. I took a cab to the Ujpest Synagogue instead, to do something I had always wanted to do in Budapest but had always missed the opportunity.

I sat through a Sabbath service in the prayer room where my father had received Jewish training and had been bar mitzvahed in the 1930s. One man in particular was very welcoming to me, Mr. George Mate', who spoke good enough English to help everyone understand what I was doing there. He promised to ask the oldest lady in Ujpest if she had any recollection of the Munk family from long ago.

This is a much smaller, older, and poorer congregation than that of my cousins. The Ujpest synagogue is now part of a retirement complex and home for the mentally retarded. The service was led by a substitute rabbi who prayed in a fashion familiar to me from my youth but without the zeal and joy of the service at Obuda. While others held their prayer books, I held my book of photos of my dad and his family in happy times in Ujpest and thought about him while the rabbi welcomed the Sabbath.

The congregation insisted I stay for some wine and bread and cake, so I did. What lovely, kind people. They were so happy to have me visit. And I was happy to be able to finally sit quietly where I knew my father had been a student (and probably not sitting so quietly) more than 75 years ago.