💾 Archived View for spiritualinstinct.site › log › 2024-02-23.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:13:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Yesterday, I got back from a 5-day citytrip together with a friend of mine to Budapest, Hungary. The city is beautiful and has a rich history. At first I thought 5 days might be a bit too long for a citytrip, but there were plenty of things to do. The local food is good, too. I would really recommend trying Lángos, a kind of fried flatbread with sour cream and cheese, to anyone visiting Budapest.
My friend had booked an apartment in the jewish quarter, which is close to the city center and well-known for its high number of bars and cafés. We arrived on a saturday and left on a thursday, so we kind of missed the city's weekend nightlife, and many clubs and bars were closed or closed early on the days we went out. One of the bars that was open everyday until the wee hours of the morning was a place called Instant-Fogas, a club with dancefloors spread across five or six different rooms, each with their own DJ, joined in the middle by a small courtyard.
Despite the fact that my current taste in music mostly consists of different kinds of heavy metal and atmospheric rock, we spent most of the night in a room where the DJ played songs that were popular in, like, 2010-2014, when my friend and I were still in high school, and had a great time there. Nostalgia, I guess. I hadn't gone clubbing like we did that night for a while, so I was suprised by how many guys around us tried to dance with us. We had our strategies for shaking them off: standing in between the guy and the girl he's trying to impress, stubbornly ignoring him, sometimes simply pushing him away when he doesn't get the hint.
A night or two later, instead of going to the club, we went for a (very long) walk around Gellért Hill, and ended up in an Irish pub later that evening. We met two Canadian men there, of 50 and 43 years old, who tried to give us good advice. I think they were cousins, or the younger one was the older one's nephew? The 50-year-old was an insurance salesman, the 43-year-old was a carpenter, and both of them were clearly drunk. This became crystal clear when the carpenter kept repeating his life story over and over again.
"I work for 6 months a year and go travelling for 6 months a year. I've travelled all over the world", he said, "I've done everything anyone would ever want to do! I went skydiving, I went mounting climbing, I saw silverbacks in Kenya..." (he'd sum up some different things each time he repeated himself). "And now, I have nothing! Because I was selfish. Don't be like me! don't be selfish!" The carpenter explained that he, through his travels, had met plenty of women, but never settled down and had children in favor of travelling, and as a result, had no one to share things with. "I could meet someone again," he said, "but they would't be able to have children anymore, at my age.". His cousin (or uncle) agreed with him: "After my wife and I had our first daughter, we tried to have a second child. My wife was 37 at the time. We quit after she had had two miscarriages."
They tried to convince us to have children until the bar closed and we parted ways. My friend and I laughed it off at first, but then agreed that there was some truth to it: The window in which a woman can successfully have children is small, and both being 25 years old, we don't have much time left to decide if we want to have kids or not. Still, having kids seems so scary, even though reproducing is one of the most natural things to do. It's still an enormous responsability and it takes up a lot of time and money, and life for a middle class, western 20-something year old is full of fun things to see and to do.
I'm not sure if I want kids someday. My mom had me when she was 40, but she couldn't have children anymore after that, just like the salesman's wife. Hell, I don't even have a boyfriend yet. But what if I stay single until I'm 43? Will I become like the carpenter?