Greetings from Barcelona. After a week by myself up in Malgrat del Mar about 30 miles east of the city, I decided to head to a hostel in town to stay from the 1st until June 11th, the day I catch my ship to New Orleans. A cheap hostel opened up in the Gracia neighborhood, I’d just gotten paid, and the restful solitude I had sought in Malgrat del Mar wasn’t quite as restful as I had hoped. A certain mix of low key solitude and interaction with others in a more active environment sounded better. I suppose there will be a blog post about all this or something, so I’ll just continue the story from from where I left off in Bratislava.
I made it to Budapest in two days, including a nice ride stopping at the small town of Györ on the way.
Here is the Strava link. After Györ, I completed my seventh century ride into Budapest.
Now remember, I was coming into the city feeling a distinct lack of mojo after my encounter with the cycling chicks in Austria and getting told I was too old to stay in a hostel. God threw me a bone, though, and my first encounter in Budapest was with these two awesome German girls who had come into the city for the weekend that I was fortunate enough to have as roommates in the hostel in this new megapolis. The sun was out in this amazing city, the vistas were incredible, and I had a great time with these two young girls, one of which didn’t want her picture online. I took them on a train ride around a couple of the sites and, wait for it, afterward I bought them lunch! Yup! They accepted!
Lookie there how happy our dear OG is with the little sweethearts. Methinks he has some kind of hole in his soul that gets plugged with the affections of young ladies. Certainly he does not like being a member of a demographic (“older male”) who is the object of fear and suspicion by another demographic (“younger female”) by default. I don’t know who would want to live in a world like that.
On this note, and in the interest of continuity with the previous Bratislava story, I’ll say that I did get in touch with one of those cycling girls later on Strava. The two had followed me there, and the app has a built in chat feature. I had just written the Bratislava post, and since I had mentioned them in it, I sent them a message with the link to the post.
I still haven’t heard anything from Anna, but Julia read the post and quite a few others. Noticing that they were reading my blog, I commented that I hoped they liked it, as the last time a group of cycling chicks read my blog had been in Los Angeles, and those cycling girls promptly blocked me everywhere and gave me the pariah treatment. The response was not as I had hoped. Julia agreed that the California cyclist ladies should indeed have blocked and ostracized me, called me a misogynist, and told me I was a male predator. That’s what she came up with after reading my tales of getting accused of sexual harassment for telling people I didn’t want to have sex with them and the other utter violations of the law of probability that my inner world of being hated by women seemed to be manifesting around me.
This in itself is an interesting conclusion to that whole story. I was riding with a pair of cycling chicks that reminded me of California. Just when I thought they might be thinking I was weird, one of them comments that I’m weird. They decline my lunch offer, and off I go to get rejected by a youth hostel for being too much of an old man. Then, weeks later, I find out that they, or at least one of them, does in fact share in the California gender relations mentality that they reminded me of. I wonder what Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Isaac Luria would have thought of all this. My world tends to unfold according to certain patterns, and the patterns I see tend to be correct. If only I saw more wonderful things…
Anyway, though, the splendid day with my roommates would be the highlight of my few days in Hungary, which would ultimately end up being where I decided to call the trip quits. Being by myself in Bratislava and Györ, and after spending a delightful day with a couple of teenagers, I decided to head out on a pub crawl that the hostel was offering. Things did not go well. They went badly enough to stop me in my tracks.
I’ve had some bad luck on pub crawls. Actually, the first place I ever got a phone stolen was here in Barcelona on a pub crawl in 2022. And I’d just gotten personally and spiritually walloped hanging around the red light district in Frankfurt and stumbling into a kind of seedy, gypsy-owned “spa” in Munich. None of these episodes were specifically nights out clubbing, but it looks on the one hand like poor judgment mixed with a bit of booze makes the old Bailey guy into a rather foolish, and perhaps vulnerable, individual.
One could say that the catastrophes in Germany were not a special demonstration of a personal holocaust given by God, but rather just me getting into trouble at night. If the trials in Germany were a unique message, then they shouldn’t be continuing all over the place, but I got into trouble yet again. However, there were some things about this particular misadventure that have turned out to be very interesting, and so I will try to preface the description with a bit of setup.
To begin with, Hungary and Budapest, while a place I have only been to just a little, are not insignificant for me. So let’s start with the connection to the past. Budapest was where I spent New Years Eve 1995. 1995 and 1996 were some of the wildest years of my life. After quite a bit of seeking during my younger years, I ended up becoming a Christian in Dallas, Texas on January 1st, 1995, after the Mother of All New Years Eve parties. In fact, I thought I was going to die that night long ago when I cried out to God for rescue. Then I went off to Germany with the US Army and entered a world of crazy parties and adventure, two wonderful lovers and a variety of encounters with the ladies, lots of booze, bars, and barracks parties, trips to France and Spain, lots of time in Prague, all that.
At the end of that year my friend Alex Hontchar came to visit me from the USA. We ended up spending most of December in the Czech Republic and decided to head to Budapest to see what was going on there for New Years Eve. I’d been going through a lot spiritually and was starting to think that a life of parties was not exactly the end state I was looking for. Partying in Czech seemed to always wind up with drunken forays into the realm of spirituality, and I was starting to feel a certain tug toward moving to new spiritual levels. It was with this perspective, in that phase of life, that I had a “spiritual” experience that I remember to this day.
We had just shown up at some New Years Eve party and were standing at the edge of a crowd of clubbers waiting for a show to start, all wearing their most attractive club attire. It was there that I saw a beautiful girl look up and off to her side, toward me. When I looked back at her, I asked myself, is she going to accept me? Am I going to get a signal to come over and pour out my usual charming infantry philosopher kid self? That’s when she looked at me, shook her head in disapproval, and turn away. I was not being given the uncool old guy treatment. I was not then old, and I wasn’t ugly or anything in those days.
I got the impression then that if I wasn’t going to be satisfied with a life of wild parties, and if I wasn’t going to devote myself to God and spirituality, then the life that I had been living as an infantryman in Germany wasn’t going to be for me. But more than that, I got the impression that this whole world wasn’t going to be for me. That is, if I was just going to focus on filling this or that desire, of doing whatever it took to make myself happy in at any given moment for the duration of that moment, I could do so, but if I was going to serve God, well, God isn’t too popular in this world, and so this world, this life, isn’t going to be for me. This seemed to resonate with something that I had been confronted with for a long time, as the post linked explains. That post describes a life event in middle school, long before I became Christian or Jewish or anything. It seems to speak of a primordial truth. At least for me. So for this thought, just keep in mind that Budapest, for me, from my past, was the place where I got the impression that “this world is not for me” by getting the sense from a hot chick that I would not be welcome at the party she was going to. Just keep that in mind for later.
Now, the next thing about Budapest that was significant for me comes from the George Ezra song “Budapest.”
I first heard this song on a playlist from Noah van Ouwerkerk back in 2019. Years later, just before taking this trip, while riding around Carefree, Arizona, I heard it again at an open air market.
The singer played that song just before playing “Faith” by George Michael. At that time, the song ended up being a sort of a signal telling me, “it’s time to get up and go…” I had been failing at the bureaucratic game of trying to get documents for the Jewish Agency for months, unable to get anything until I literally went across the country to get them in person, and it was at this time that I was thinking that in order to get the German criminal background check required by the Jewish Agency, I was going to have to get it in person. And that is how this bike trip began.
So for me, Budapest represents on the one hand getting the message that I will not quite be accepted by this world given the path that I am on, but it also represents a certain joy of giving up my house in Budapest (giving up the typical goals of ease) in order to go for something better. Just like the song says.
Finally, there is one other thing about Budapest that was important to me going there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was slapped with arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court, such that if he went to the countries beholden that court, he would be in danger. Now the Prime Minister and I share a name, and the last five plus years of my life have been consumed with difficulties getting to the place that I am trying to go: Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, from his house in Israel, seems to have problems going nearly anywhere else. He has made it safely to the USA and to Hungary. That’s it, as far as I know. Hungary let the guy in and actually withdrew from the ICC as a part of their standing with Netanyahu, presumably because of the country’s connection to conservatism and Donald Trump, though I won’t pretend to be terribly well-informed as to the goings on there.
So keep in mind then, though I had only been to Hungary for a couple of days, decades ago, the place was significant for me because it was where I got a strong taste that I was going to be unaccepted by and rejected by the world, and because of a song about leaving a comfortable world behind for someone or something special, and because the country took in the Israeli Prime Minister when the world at large wanted nothing but to eat the guy’s heart raw with a spoon.
With these things in your head, let’s talk about the rest of my stay. Thankful to God for the lovely afternoon with the wonderful young ladies who did not treat him like a creepy old man, Bailey goes on a pub crawl. Let’s see how that turned out.
So we met up at a local bar to meet our hostesses, one from Jordan, I remember, who would be taking us from club to club. Everyone on the pub crawl was a guy, like maybe ten of us, except for some blonde chick in a crop top who instantly bonded on to the physically largest guy in the group. They would be all over each other before we hit the third bar. There were some Moroccans there who hated Israel. There was also this Irish guy with a latino last name who will become a significant player in this story.
Of course I was there in some bicycle outfit or another. I think is was even a shorts/jersy combination. Not typical club attire. As usual, it started conversations, but I was getting kind of tired of those at this point. I said just enough to explain my lack of normal clothing.
I was getting fairly inebriated before leaving the place, being particularly enchanted by this pair of locals, a blonde-haired guy with a pony tail in loose fitting Miami Vice style clothing, and his absolutely ravishing girlfriend who was the spitting image of a girl I met in Israel, Mante Jasilonyte. Mante is Lithuanian. Lithuanians are not a part of the Finno-Ugric language and racial group that the Hungarians are, but Estonia, which is, is close by, and I wondered if some ancient genetic pattern had made its way between the two countries to produce these two women who could have been twins. At any rate, a reminder of Israel would turn up at this pub crawl.
Now at the club we would go to next, it would seem patterns of the past would catch up to me. I was getting fairly intoxicated and overwhelmed by all the noise, so I decided to go out front for some air. I talked a bit there out front with some folks, not much, and then decided to head back in and find our group leaders. However, the entry guard at the club wouldn’t let me back in!
I really don’t know why. I may have stumbled here or there, but I hadn’t made any scenes or anything, and really avoided any extensive interaction. Perhaps an American at a club in bicycle shorts was just too uncool to be allowed in? If that were the case, I would have been stopped the first time I entered, right?
But then there is the pattern to be aware of. My mojo had been harmed in Bratislava. Perhaps I was writing myself into a world of being rejected as uncool? Could be. But then there is also the fact that I have that significant memory from long ago that this was not the place for me. I’d gotten the cold shoulder from a chick about going to a party, and here I was decades later not getting let into a club (that I had just been in). And now I was on a trip to Israel, giving up my house in Budapest to go to her. That was interesting. At any rate, it would seem that there was a kind of a theme attached to Budapest about not being let into parties…
The rest of the night I don’t remember. I mean, I remember thinking that I was drunk, that I wasn’t really feeling it, and I had just been turned away at the door of the club my pub crawl guides had taken me to for a good time. So I decided to walk home by myself. That’s the last thing I remember. However, I had some details filled in for me by that Irish guy with the latino name. Several of us had exchanged Instagram info, and a week later he would contact me with some interesting information. Apparently he was following me, and he sent a video of what he saw me doing.
I had a conversation with him on Instagram. I don’t think it’s worth actually pasting the thing here. He told me he saw me outside and followed me, and when he saw me talking to this guy at an ATM he hid behind a tree and took a video (for which he was apparently providing commentary). He said that there was another guy not far off on one of those rental scooters you find all over Europe who was in a group with the guy I was talking to.
This guy who took the video, he seemed to know a lot about the situation beyond what the video shows. I also thought it was weird that when he saw me, he thought to himself, “I’ll hide behind a tree and video this!” And then he leaves commentary. Like he was surveilling me. Pretty creepy, on the one hand. But, he did hunt me down, give me the video, and explain everything to me. So I can’t fault him too much.
At the end of my conversation with him, after trying to piece together what happened with the information he gave, he commented to me, giving me somewhat the “old guy treatment,” he commented to me, “maybe you should be careful. It isn’t exactly Prague in 1995 anymore.” I’d told him a bit about my party days earlier at the pub. My response to him was: “No, it definitely isn’t. In Prague in 1995 I was never alone.”
I honestly don’t know what was going on in the scene that the video depicts. I can only conjecture that perhaps I was in some way dejected, and while in some kind of rejected drunken state, some guy mentioned to me some kind of club or bar or party somewhere, at the news of which I decided to pick up some more cash. Really, anything could have been happening or going through my mind. I can only guess.
At that point, it looks like I got mugged once again, as the next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital getting a CT scan. I don’t know why the Irish guy with the Latin name didn’t get the rest of it on video, but from the story as explained to me, it looks like I for some reason got conned into going to an ATM machine and then got whacked over the head.
My phone, my S25 Ultra that I had just bought in Wiesbaden as a replacement for the S24 Ultra that had been ripped off my back in Frankfurt, was now added to the list of lost, stolen, and broken electronic devices that I have been building all throughout this trip, up to something like $3,500 in losses. My watch was gone too. There was no cash in my wallet, though my passport and card were still there. However, Bank of America would tell me there were a variety of suspicious charges from later that evening.
Now I have encountered a number of miracles on this trip, but none of them were so grand as getting back to the hostel from that hospital having no idea where I was, suffering a concussion most likely, and without any kind of money or phone. I made it, though, after a variety of hilarious attempts to communicate and get directions.
Upon waking up at the hospital, I didn’t see anyone paying attention to me. I didn’t ask if maybe they had taken my phone and watch in order to give me a CT scan. I pretty much just got off that table and started walking.
After telling some family and friends about the incident I came to a quick decision about a number of things. For one, I was going to be playing the part of the bicyclist who drinks nothing but carrot juice and goes to bed not long after sunset from here on out. Nightlife excursions had not been working well for me, obviously. Now I have had drinks on a number of occasions since then. Perhaps the funniest of them was in Marseille, which I hope to write about. But I have not been out at night since.
Second, things with the Jewish Agency had just been getting so crazy and difficult, I made the decision that I was just going to need to get somewhere I could stay, with an address, to try to take care of whatever other errands they were going to send me on. Since I had a ship leaving from Barcelona to New Orleans on June 11, it looked to me like I was going to make progress on my Aliyah packet from there. So, Greece was going to have to be cancelled. Or tabled for another day. As I was feeling it then, continuing on the Europe trip was just going to get me killed, and the fabulous fun-filled Europe tour had turned into nothing short of a long list of brushes with death and catastrophe on the one hand with the perennial problem of trying to satisfy the bureaucracy of the Jewish Agency overshadowing all other dimensions of the trip on the other hand.
The remainder of my days in Budapest consisted primarily of my recovering in the hostel, with the young German girls being so kind as to bring me cake and basically play Uno there while I stared blankly at the underside of the mattress of the bed above me.
I did go out here and there and see the city a bit. I didn’t leave immediately. All of these things I had being experiencing as I rode my bike through Europe after the Passover/Easter mugging had been taking place during the period of Shavuot, or the Pentecost season as Christians call it, and I was in Budapest for the Jewish holiday called Lag B’Omer, which is celebrated as a part of that whole biblical holiday cycle. And, of course, purely out of coincidence, my hostel was situated squarely in the middle of Budapest’s Jewish district.
My Aliyah advisor had given me some grief that my tour had not quite turned out to be the ode to Judaism that the both of us had hoped it would be. Armed with this bit of “Jewish Guilt,” I sought to spend a Shabbat during this holiday time at the local Chabad synagogue, but the technodemons foiled my attempts to reserve a seat for the weekend Seder.
It was looking like all roads were closed. Time to get out of dodge. One cool thing that happened, though, was that I met this guy at a bar, Jarrett, an American from Santa Barbara, who let slip that he had an apartment in Barcelona, which is where I was planning on heading. I would eventually meet up with him there, but that is a tale for another blog.
I’ll just say that meeting this guy was a part of a trend of “small world” phenomena that has been going on for me a lot lately.
Little coincidences of details like this have been showing up in my life to such a degree that they just cannot be chance. I almost expect that the next guy I sit down next to in a café is going to tell me that he rescued my mother from being raised by apes in the Congo or something. That’s the kind of bizarre detail of coincidence that I’ve been running into, and this guy from SoCal (remember, that’s the last place I lived) was also in Budapest, and was also going to Barcelona, where I was heading. Yeah. Spooky. This kind of thing is happening to me almost every day lately. Remember Holy Princess Neta who came from Netanya, bumped into me in Strasbourg, and who was going to Peru. Just too many coincidences to be chance.
So my few days in Hungary were fairly action-packed. God sent me even more cool young chicks to help me get over the triggering pain with my daughter in December, I got another “small world” coincidence in meeting in Jarrett, and I was still having all sorts of problems connecting with Jews and Judaism and the Jewish Agency as a sort of point of frustration contrasting with the rest of the trip, and Budapest, a place where I had felt alienated from the world via a rejection at a New Year’s Eve party decades ago once again included getting excluded from a pub crawl that ultimately resulted in my getting mugged.
On this last point, I have a couple of observations to make. I mentioned above that on the one hand I look like a guy who just has issues getting into trouble when there is booze involved or something, and that this contrasted with the idea that the problems I had in Germany were a unique message from God about experiencing a personal holocaust on my journey to Israel and Judaism. I’ll say again, I can’t really portray the calamities of Frankfurt and Munich as a divinely ordained message from God about a Jew’s personal holocausts on his way to Israel if I am just an idiot who gets mugged every time he goes out after dark.
However, keep in mind that I went out partying with the Sweethearts of Strasbourg and their Brazilian Chaperones and had the time of my life. Austria was in no way a holocaust. So maybe there is some other way I should see this mugging in Budapest? I think there is.
And with that, I’ll say that I went out on that pub crawl on May 14th. I woke up in the hospital getting the CT scan in the hospital on May 15th. You know what else happened on that day? Yes, that same day, May 14th, Donald Trump legitimized the Alqaida-associated government of Syria and lifted sanctions on them.
Now in reading the news since then, I’ve seen Israel using Syrian airspace for military operations without much of a peep of resistance from that government. So maybe the Trump effect on Syria has had a bit of a positive effect for Israel in some behind the scenes ways that I am not aware of. But at that time, in those days, Trump’s treatment of Syria looked to all who were reading the news like the Donald picked May 14th as the day to punch Bibi in the face, kick him in the groin, and push him off cliff. I too am certain to grow and strengthen as a result of getting beaten over the head in Budapest. Misfortune does tend to wisen. Likewise, though, while Israel may be benefitting from Trump’s courtship of Syria now, Israel sure got hit over the head that day. So maybe the Prime Minister, Israel, and I really are sync’d in some way.
That’s not all, though. Trump legitimized Israel’s enemy, and I got mugged, all on May 14th, as I said above. My ex wife was born on May 14th, 1976. In all of my hundreds of thousands of words written about my own life, I have scarcely written a word about that woman. She is an indescribable weapon of mass destruction. That woman could drive her car through my living room and kill my kids and my dog in the process, and the cops would take me to jail for crying about it. But the ex wife rant is going to have to come another day. I’ll just leave it at that. It seems to form an interesting pattern, however, that Trump beat down Netanyahu on the same day that I got beat down in Budapest, on the birthday of the most dangerous enemy I have ever faced.
What we have here seems to be a certain merger of the ideas that we create our own reality with the idea that our lives are arranged by an infinitely intelligent God so that we can find meaning in the things that happen to us. In any event, whatever this event may mean, the number of unlikely and strange occurrences that in every case defy the laws of probability simply cannot be random chance.
A story is being told here, but not one that I am making up. I am a diarist. That’s the category of writer that I am. Like Carlos Castaneda or Anaïs Nin, I write about the things that happen to me. Although almost nobody believes Castaneda’s adventures at this point, and some of the things Nin wrote about were so amazing people don’t believe them either (her love affair with her dad being one example), we all claim that we are just writing about what was happening in our lives. For my part, I solemnly maintain that I am telling you the truth.
In my case, my trek to Israel seems to involve a yearning to escape the past by entering a new future of purpose while trying to put to bed demons from my past handed to me by the fairer sex, all the while seemingly dialed into the pattern of the quintessential Jew, suffering holocausts in Germany, of giving up my house in Budapest, and by suffering a beatdown on the same day that Benjamin Netanyahu did, on my ex wife’s birthday of all days.
No, I haven’t been visiting many synagogues on this trip. Too few, yes, I am entirely in agreement with my Aliyah counselor. But I do in fact seem to be receiving instruction about the life of a Jew, though not from any rabbi currently on this trip. My lessons seem to be coming from the universe, which seems to pretty obviously be directed by the hand of God.
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