sunrise, sunrise, looks like morning in your eyes

it just occurred to me that i never wrote about the day we went to see the sunrise.

well, it was in one fine morning a number of weeks ago.

no, actually, it wasn't. 

it wasn't a fine morning at all. in fact, we were having chilly, wet days, the kind that makes you wonder whether it's autumn already and whether you slept through the whole of  the summer. it was the kind we are having nowadays. so that's why we had to sleep with both our fingers and toes crossed, hoping for some kind of a miracle, that it would not be raining and the sky would not be as cloudy as it had been in the previous days. so we could see at least a tiny bit of the sun rising above the city.

and then i woke up in the darkest hour of the day, at 3.30 am, after less than three hours of lying in my bed, twisting and turning that i would not even call sleeping. i quickly got dressed, washed my face, and even staightened my hair. now one thing is for sure, and it is that i had never straightened my hair at just after 3.30 in the morning. but you know, i was about to go and see the sunrise, one of the most pure & magical things in the entire world. and what deserves proper straight hair if a pure summer sunrise doesn't? i mean, hello, random half-waves in my hair totally crash those silent, solemn moments of the sunrise.

at 4.07 sharp we set off, and walked to örs vezér square, since the trollies were not running yet. now that time of the day is the crack of the dawn in the middle of the summer. and i don't mean just figuratively, like how people always say that they did this or that at the crack of the dawn. we really did see the dawn cracking. we did not hear it cracking though, since at this time of the day there's still a vast silence hanging over the city. it's not quite the kind of silence that takes over the world when virgin snow covers all grounds and surfaces and the night is orangy and homely and all, but the roaring kind of silence that rules the world before thunders start thundering and storms start storming all around.

and then we got to örs vezér square. we had wanted to be there before the very first metro of the day left the station, we had wanted to see the bkv guys unlocking the locks and pulling up the gates that look like enormous blinds at the entrance. but since we are the lazy kind and the girly kind who can't always set off at the planned time, we reached only the second metro. still, we found out quite a few things about the not-yet-5-am underground. did you know that there was a very unique morning crowd on the underground? before 5 am the underground does not quite resemble its usual self, as it's not completely stuffed yet, there's still fresh air lingering around the metro cars. there are people actually smiling at each other, greeting each other, saying proper good mornings to each other, nodding their same old how-do-you-dos nods that they have been doing for god only knows how many years. they even save a seat for each other. before 5 am the underground does not feel like big city underground at all, but like some sort of a small-but-comfy bus that commutes the grandmas to and from the market place from one tiny village at the end of the world to  another one. 

we got off at astoria, then changed to tram 47-49 and rode it as far as gellért fürdő. that's where we got off, and that's where we started climbing up the hill. and that is also where the whole morning started to resemble that scene from moszkva tér when it's the eve of may 1st, right before the open air swimming pools are being opened for the summer and when the pools are being filled with water. and the guys in the movie sneak into gellért fürdő, grease the security guide/the guy who's filling up the pools and have a fun night in the pool which is completely empty except for the four of them. then they get some old chairs from god only knows where, take them to the middle of szabadság bridge, sit on them, put their legs up to the railings of the bridge, and watch the sunrise while eating kifli and drinking zacskós tej. now that's what i call pure freedom, even though it was set in 1989, and they were right before taking their finale exams in secondary school.

well, at this point, i might as well tell you that, actually, that's where the original idea came from, i mean our going to see the sunrise. moszkva tér is my favorite hungarian movie, and i have watched it quite a few times this spring/summer, and somehow it popped into our head to reenact that sitting-on-szabadság-bridge-watching-the-sunrise-eating-kifli scene. so the real reason of our waking up at 3.30 am was moszkva tér. but then zsö told me that if we really wanted to see the sunrise we had to get to some place really high. and the highest reachable place at 5 in the morning was the top of gellért-hegy. so we climbed up, but not to the top top top, but to that hidden look-out spot that i found some time ago when i climbed the hill on my own on one truly fine day instead of going to some dull seminar, and where i read eat pray love by elizabeth gilbert. now this spot is a really hidden one, hardly anybody knows of it, or at least i like to belive that hardly anybody knows of it. 

anyway, it was about 5 o'clock by the time we got there,  and the crack of the dawn was long over. it was light all around, but the sun hadn't quite risen yet. the entire city, or at least most of it, was still asleep yet. so we sat down, got comfortable and all, and waited for the magic to happen. 

but, i'm afraid, it never really happened. eventually the sun did rise, the sky did clear out to a certain extent, the clouds moved, giving space to the sun to shine. but there was no real magical sunrise showering the sky in a thousand pretty shades of pink. 

still, it was pure, and even magical in that bittersweet hungarian way that we all know so well, as we were sitting there, on the top of budapest, watching the city wake up, while munching on a couple of slices of an ever so yummy blueberry pie that we had baked with our own two four hands the day before. we sat there for about two hours, then, when we could not take all that beauty and the crispyness of a perfect summer morning any more, we gathered ourselves, and walked down the hill.

we crossed szabadság bridge on foot, wandered around downtown, then ended up in károlyi-kert. although it was only 8 am yet, it felt it was the middle of the afternoon already. well, after all, by that time we had been up and running for almost 5 whole hours. it was high time for some good old napping. so we got the big yellow blanket out, layed it down on that oh-so-well-kept grass of károlyi-kert,  and laid around for an hour or two. now that's  another thing, i had never done before, lying in the grass on a nice yellow blanket in károlyi-kert on a fine tuesday morning, when it's not even 9 am yet, when so many people haven't even drunk their coffee or brushed their teeth yet. 

so that's how we ended up reenacting the szabadság bridge scene from moszkva tér. 

it wasn't quite authentic i had to admit. we did not have any kifli or zacskós tej with us, neither did we promise that we leszőnyegpadlózzuk a moszkva teret. yet, i guess, that the guys of the movie would be quite proud of us had they known about the whole thing.

 it was one fine 2011 edition, that's for sure.