“These are your cousins. You will probably be spending the night with them.”
These words came from our Slovakian translator as we stood outside a small yellow house in the village of Bytca - home of Brian’s grandfather. I should start from the beginning…
When Brian and I looked at where to go for our next European adventure, we knew we wanted to go to Eastern Europe. The dollar is so crushingly low against the Euro we needed to go somewhere we could afford on a tight budget. We had talked for a while about trying to look up his Slovakian roots, and decided this was the time.
We built the trip around a drive through Slovakia, and coerced Delta into actually letting us redeem our frequent flyer miles. We were at their mercy as to where to fly in and out of, though I strongly insisted on Budapest. Thus we planned a 9 day trip beginning in Hungary, and concluding in Vienna Austria. With the reality of our poor currency, we looked for even more ways to stretch our budget. We typically stay in small 1 star hotels or pensiones (private homes with rooms rented out) but even these were not at the kind of price we like. As we were planning the trip, we kept seeing headlines like “Slovakian Koruna reaches record high against US dollar”. So we turned to an alternative means… after reading a little online, we decided to try Priceline for Budapest. We bid the amount we’d pay for a small private room with a bath down the hall a 20 minute walk from the city center, and won a room at the Marriot on the Danube! This was encouraging. Plus it was prepaid in US dollars, so we were protected from further declines.
We checked Expedia for Krakow Poland, and found (drumroll please….) an actual palace! Outside the city, but we planned to have a car anyway, and it was a real, honest-to-goodness palace. We booked a basic room in their “granary” and hoped for an upgrade. Vienna was the most challenging… anything we could afford was listed in our guidebook as being in a “seedy area” over a sex shop, for example. They are on the euro, and as a major capital, prices are high. It occurred to us at one point that Brian had an awful lot of Hilton points from the last couple years of stays at Hamptons when he travels for work. We called Hilton, and couldn’t believe our luck when we learned he had enough points to book 3 free nights at the Hilton Vienna Danube - a value of 280 euros a night (though we could never dream of actually paying that much). So we were settled except for the overnight in Slovakia, but we decided for once to play it by ear and decide when we got there.
Looking for Slovakian family
With several months before our April 28 departure, we began to try to track down someone in Brian’s grandfather’s family. Born in a country village in Slovakia as Edmund Zental, out of wedlock, he was raised by his grandmother Maria Zental when his mother went to America as a mail order bride to a Hungarian man in Michigan. He grew up in poverty, frequently given food by his best friend Ivan Haranta, son in a wealthy family. As a teenager he left his grandmother and Slovakia behind and sailed alone to America, where he changed his name to Edmund Horvath, after his stepfather. He struggled in an America school where they placed him with small children because he didn’t speak English. He succeeded, however, in making a place for himself in the American dream, with a long career at the GM plant in Flint which allowed him to provide a modest, but sufficient income for his wife and four children - one of them Emily, Brian’s mother.
In the summer of 1972, shortly before Brian was born, Edmund traveled back to Slovakia with his wife Mentie. It was a long arduous ordeal to reach Bytca, but once there he visited his cousins and his long-time friend Ivan. The family was struggling under the communist regime, and by their standards, his factory job in America made him comparatively wealthy. He and his wife stayed with family for 2 weeks before returning home on a Cunard ship… becoming a grandfather to Brian before he even reached American shores. Edmund died when Brian was only ten, so when we began to look for his family, we turned to his grandmother, now 86. She has kept all the letters from over the years Edmund received from his friend Ivan, and we took the address from the last one and sent a letter to it, explaining our story. We had it translated after running an ad in the Slovak Spectator , asking for a volunteer for this purpose.
Two months went by, when a letter written in Slovak arrived. We were on pins and needles until the translation was complete. It was from Elena, daughter of Ivan Haranta, Edmund’s best friend. “I am an old woman at 73,” it said. She went on to warmly welcome us to Slovakia, and tell us how pleased she would be to meet us. Our excitement for the trip immediately doubled. Continuing to use a translator, we replied and told her the date we would visit, and received a letter in response again advising us to bring a translator. Finding a translator to accompany us to a small town in the middle of Slovakia was a bit of a challenge, but we finally accomplished it after I wrote emails to professors at nearby University of Zilinia, and a professor offered his daughter’s services. We arranged with her to meet in Bytca for our visit with Elena. Brian’s grandmother gave us a letter and box of chocolate to take to Elena. In the letter she named several relatives.
Two hours in Paris
Finally the day came to set out on our trip. We flew out of Cincinnati as usual and had a decent flight to Paris. With a 6 hour layover, we decided to go into Paris on the RER train, and enjoyed wandering around the Left Bank of the Seine. We made it back in plenty of time for our flight to Budapest, and landed a little before 6 pm local time. A taxi took us into the city. We noticed everywhere the overabundance of advertisements. Even to Welcome to Hungary sign was sponsored by T-mobile. Capitalism has really taken hold in a big, big, way there. At our Marriot , a big ugly Soviet looking building right on the Danube, we were happy to be upgraded. (Brian’s seven weeks in the Marriot apartments in Chicago last fall earned him “gold” status). We got a beautiful room overlooking the Danube on the top, executive, floor with access to free internet and a lounge full of goodies like free soft drinks, waters and cappuccinos! Also free breakfast. That really helped with the budget, as we drink a lot of water. We stocked our daybag with their Evian every day.
Baths and Absinthe in Budapest
Though worn out by the long travel night and day, we were determined to stay up until local bedtime so as to get adjusted, and went out to Central Kavhaus, a café from the 1800s. We walked Vaci Utca to get there - their pedestrian-only boulevard. The next day, Friday, we went to the thermal baths early. Széchenyi baths are located in the city park just a few metro stops from our hotel. The system of pay and receipts and various people and entrance points was a bit confusing but we managed to get to our changing cabin and down to the soothing mineral baths. We went from one to the next, enjoying the warm mineral waters, and then discovered the outdoor pools. We each had a vigorous massage from strapping young Hungarian men… Brian’s first massage ever. It would be easy to spend the day at the baths, but we stayed just a couple hours and set out for the rest of the day.
We visited the great Market Hall for lunch, where Brian discovered his favorite new junk food - langos… a deep fried concoction of potato and bread dough, topped with a generous slathering of cheese and sour cream, all for about a buck. After attempting to cross the famous beauty Chain Bridge to get to the Buda side of Budapest - which was closed for a beer company to film a commercial or something (remember what I said about capitalism?) we took a long roundabout way by foot, tram and funicular up to Castle Hill where we enjoyed stunning view of the Pest side - including the fantastic parliament building.
We had a nice dinner in a restaurant all to ourselves early that evening before heading out on a pub crawl. Recommended by Rick Steves, it turned out to be a 6 hour progressively more intoxicating (due primarily to the ill-advised sample of absinthe) evening concluding with our guide deserting the remaining 7 of us at 2 am at our 5th pub. I still don’t know how, with no map, in the middle of the night we made it back to our hotel but we did. The night was fun, but it got us off to a rough and late start the next day, and we missed much of what we wanted to see and do in Budapest. So we decided just to return to the baths. When we left the baths, we encountered a huge festival/flea market/carnival which we wandered around for quite some time.
"Daddy Cool" on the train to BratislavaWe had an early morning the next day - we had to catch the 6:20 AM train to Bratislava. Unfortunately the lounge didn’t open that early so we had to leave with no coffee. We had the train practically to ourselves, in a 6 person compartment with no one else. Brian went to check out the dining car and returned to tell me he’d seen a rather large man sitting at a table in boxer shorts, shaving his underarms. He turned out to be our waiter - a very happy guy who liked to play Boney M ("Eurotrash" disco). Good thing we had a lot of Forints left over because they certainly price gouge on trains for food. Our waiter recommended one of the meat platters of course, and hung his head in disappointment when we explained “vegetarian”. I had a nice big plate of camembert cheese and bread - my first of many bread and cheese meals to come over the next few days.
It was a short train ride, just a couple of hours. We took a taxi to the Avis office and picked up our rental. We had selected an economy car with no AC, because the average temperature was supposed to be in the 60s. Of course the weather turned out to be hot and sunny. We couldn’t have the cute little Nissan Micra, because Avis doesn’t allow their Nissan to go into Poland, so we got the Opel Corsa, a bumpy, rough-riding little pokey car. We rolled down the windows, allowing the enormous quantities of fumes and emissions to come in, and headed out for Bytca. We had read that Slovakia has some of the highest death by auto rates in the EU and it was soon apparent why. Drivers pass with absolutely no regard for loss of life or limb, and it got even worse off the auto way.
We enjoyed the scenery though, and made it to Bytca by about noon. We had an hour before we were to meet our translator Sandra. So went into the cemetery, with a photo of Brian’s grandfather standing at his grandmother’s grave. Before long half a dozen Slovaks were clustered around, trying to help us, without a word of English. Sandra showed up and was able to tell us that one of the men knew where the grave was - it was at a nearby cemetery, and we all went over there. An older gentleman took us straight to the grave. Edmund had sent money over for the grave, so she had a very nice tombstone compared to other women of her time. We took photos to bring home to Brian’s grandmother, and left with Sandra to go meet Elena.
We meet the cousins
Her building was a sad, ugly block apartment building near the square in Bytca. We went in and took the elevator with no door to Elena’s floor. A smiling, happy older woman nicely dressed opened the door and greeted us enthusiastically, as the translator tried to keep up. She ushered us into her apartment - spotlessly clean, and about the size of my kitchen. She sat us down and immediately began bringing out food and drink. It kept coming the whole time we were there. She loves to entertain, and when her husband was alive, he was an important person at a local beer company, and she used to entertain a lot. She didn’t sit much - going back and forth from her hotplate and tiny refrigerator to the coffee table which doubled as a dining table, but in between we got some snatches of conversation. We learned that Edmund’s mother was a maid in Elena’s mother’s house. Elena was very kind and so welcoming. It was a little odd speaking through a translator, but not as strange as I’d feared. Her apartment was so tiny - the toilet was in a closet and there was no kitchen or bedroom. She was planning to move to Czech with her nephew, she explained, this apartment was only temporary. She presented us with a beautiful photo book about Slovakia, inscribed with her name and the date. She next brought out a lovely handmade embroidered tablecloth meant for Brian’s grandmother. We looked at the photos we had brought of Elena’s father with Edmund in 1972. And she told us the story of Edmund’s friendship with her father. page 2
