If you hope to dine like a local, in central Europe, you start by accepting one condition:

You must order a beer with your meal.

Or else you are an even bigger poseur than most of the rest of the tourists visiting the region.

Which has led me to drink beer for nine consecutive days now. That includes a couple of days with more than one bottle, and total consumption on the high side of a quart.

And I don’t particularly like beer.

Thing is, most everyone around here does.

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We liked Budapest. Quite a bit. We wish we were staying longer.

But a couple of basic issues pertaining to Hungary and its capital city threatened to trip us up every time we left the apartment.

Talking about money … and talking about talk. [Read more →]

I get it. Some might consider it silly, ridiculous even, to be headed for a sports bar on a Wednesday night while visiting an exotic capital city.

But keep in mind that 1) the sports bar is about 50 yards away from where we are staying; 2) the bar serves food as well as beer and 3) the place has three big TVs and the European Champions League had eight games kicking off at 8:45 tonight.

Doesn’t that allow for some skimping on the cultural and artistic and gastronomic fronts?

Maybe that should go unanswered. But I did learn something interesting.

At this time and place, a Wednesday night in Budapest, September 2017, the English club Liverpool is the runaway choice for TV exposure from the eight matches on tap.

Did not see that coming.

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I was in Budapest for a few days, in March of 1990, to cover the U.S. national soccer team in a pre-World Cup friendly loss, 2-0, to Hungary.

(A few days later I covered the Yanks in East Berlin; East Germany won 3-0.)

So this was all just the other day.

Back then, Hungary already was sidling away from the Soviet Union’s eastern European gulag and the Warsaw Pact, and the Berlin Wall had come down in Germany the previous year.

The Cold War was ending as the Soviet side of the confrontation fell to pieces. The USSR itself went to pieces in 1991.

Even those of us who were already adults when all this happened sometimes can forget, a bit, just how momentous this all was.

Which is where the statue of Ronald Reagan comes in, here in Budapest, capital of Hungary.

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We spent most of the day on a train. From Prague to Brno (in the Czech Republic) to Bratislava (in Slovakia) to the marvelously named Szob (in Hungary) to Vac to Budapest.

It was fairly direct. Not a “crow flies” kinda straight line but one that takes into account that people might actually want to go through Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, even if it makes for a nearly seven-hour train ride, from Prague to Budapest.

The air was cool, in Prague, and a bit wet, but by the time we reached Budapest, the capital of Hungary, the sun was out and it was almost steamy. High 80s. It is still summer, after all, though we were soon told, “This will be the last day of summer.”

At the Budapest train station we were met by the owner of the apartment we are renting; he practically insisted on picking us up, at no extra charge because, he said, “cab drivers in Budapest are not nice to tourists.”

We had a positive first impression of the place. Very energetic. People moving with a purpose. The city seems big and sprawling. And we had no sense that we were part of a conquering tourist horde, which we had felt throughout our stay in Prague.

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On October 31, 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther posted on a church door a list of 95 issues he thought the Roman Catholic church should address.

That act, just short of 500 years ago, led to the Protestant Reformation — an event which changed Europe irrevocably and next month will be observed in several parts of the continent and North America.

Luther lived and worked largely in the German state of Saxony, and the capital of Saxony is Dresden — barely a two-hour bus ride from Prague.

Dresden has some remarkable history of its own, some of it relating to the Lutheran church, in which I was raised.

That is why I made a point of making the journey north to see one of the best-known Lutheran churches which, along with the city, rose from the ashes of one of the most destructive bombing raids of World War II.

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Much can be said for Prague.

It is a jewel of a city, small enough that most of the most popular bits of it can be seen in a single day, on foot, by the energetic visitor.

It offers castles, museums, dramatic vistas from hilltop perches, a wide river, shopping from one end of the price spectrum to the other and a well-deserved reputation for being inexpensive, when compared to most of Europe’s major cities.

It has culture, history, energy … and one success so complete that it has turned into a negative:

Prague’s exploding popularity has brought so many tourists to the city that the crowds threaten to ruin the place.

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So, here we are in Prague, and we have no idea what anyone is saying.

The locals, in the Czech Republic, speak Czech. Fair enough.

It is a Slavic language spoken by about 10 million people, though it probably is closer to 6 million if 5 million speakers of Slovakian (mutually intelligible but not quite the same language) are subtracted out.

The major Slavic languages, in terms of  numbers of native speakers, would be Russian (about 150 million) and Polish (about 40 million). Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Serbian … quite a bit smaller.

Being innocent of any of the information floating about us (conversation, street signs, advertisements) is an unusual sensation, given that we understand (or can puzzle out) lots and lots of stuff from the Romance or Germanic languages of western and northern Europe. Especially French, German, Italian, Spanish …

Not knowing what is going on around us is no surprise. But to completely appreciate your helpless ignorance, it helps to be fully immersed in a language from an alien linguistic family.

Luckily, as is the case through so much of the world …

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Not much time today in the Czech capital, given that we flew out of the south of France in mid-afternoon, changed planes in Paris and landed in Prague at about 8:30.

(Where the airport is perhaps best known for being named after a poet, Vaclav Havel, who was president of the Czech Republic after the downfall of the Soviet empire.)

By the time we picked up a bag and got a cab ride into the heart of the city (and on into an eastern suburb) it was after 9 p.m.

Just in time to find out another interesting bit of information about the historic Czech capital.

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So, the NFL.

The pain begins anew, tomorrow, with the New England Patriots and the not annually concussed Tom Brady playing the Kansas City Chiefs.

The initial round of maiming for the 2017 iteration of a dead-end sport will be in prime time.

Which prompts me to think about the two teams in greater Los Angeles, up from zero just two years ago. The Rams and the Chargers.

And I wonder, from the other side of the globe, if Angelenos are paying any attention to the guys who risk life and limb and brain for our viewing pleasure.

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