✈️ Budapest: day 3
The city that makes you feel small
Picture Dump
Vacation Day 1/3
So I actually took a few days off work and decided to have an actual vacation doing only what I feel like:
sleeping long,
wandering around aimlessly,
chatting up strangers,
getting a haircut
talking to my psychologist
sleeping (again)
writing this article
Funnily enough, “walking around aimlessly” got me – I kid you not – back to the café I visited on Monday.
Today was a better day for approaching strangers!
What I love the most: no small talk!
Tomorrow I’ll go back to Madal and speak to more people, seems like the cool crowd is hanging out there.
Impressions from wandering around
So many monuments, designed to make you feel small
I believe it is no accident that there are a lot of majestic, colossal, imposing buildings all around the center, projecting the splendor of the forgotten empire.
So many of the buildings here are incredibly ornate, their facades encrusted with countless little details.
You can’t help but feel small and insignificant next to them.
Just like you were supposed to feel in 1900.
Budapest has its own Telliskivi, but it’s a street
Pozsonyi út appears to be Budapest’s Telliskivi area with boutique cafés, laptop hipsters, and an artsy vibe.
Will definitely come back!
Haircut adventures
Finding a barbershop that was open turned out to be surprisingly difficult because the information on Google Maps wasn’t terribly accurate.
In the end, I walked into a random barber shop that advertised the service in the following languages: English, Arabic, and Turkish.
The barber was very nice, but his English was not.
Still, we managed to communicate and he was very kind.
What shocked me was that he has 23 years of experience.
At the age of 33.
He started working when he was 10 years old 🤯
I was happy to hear that he’s enjoying life in Budapest and Hungary is treating him well.
Bolt is changing lives
A Bolt taxi got me back home from the Telliskivi-like area and the taxi driver was the coolest I’ve seen in a long time:
He looked basically like this and is heavily into calisthenics, just like Alex Lorenz in the picture above.
When I asked him about his earnings, he was very pleased to report that he’s making a decent living driving a Bolt!
In fact, he seems to have a really chill life: driving taxis most of the days, resting a bit, and then training body and mind.
He takes weekends off to spend time with his family and other than that is really deep into the biohacking rabbit hole:
he’s on a keto diet,
going to a Wim Hof workshop next weekend,
exercising a lot using just calisthenics,
and is working on getting his English to a level where he can effortlessly use it
Literally, his only problem appeared to be that he can’t speak English and only understands it when it’s spoken slowly.
I actually felt really proud about working at Bolt and contributing to his freedom 🚀
Managing the whole conversation in Hungarian was the 🍒 on top.
Off to more adventures
Signing off for today, some of the polyglots attending the conference have already arrived and are hanging out just around the corner, so time to pop by and say hello!