Travel Diary 3: Budapest
Two cities pretending to be one.
Wednesday 3rd July, we trained to Budapest Deli station. If you are going into Budapest proper, ignore the banks of ticket machines in front of you as you get off the train. Take the stairs down and to the left. The purple ticket machines provide the Budapest tickets.
Budapest is a less prosperous city than Vienna or Prague. There are more tatty buildings and the city is a little less clean. It is still a very functional city with excellent public transport, including the second oldest subway system (after London). It is also well set up for bicycles.
Budapest is a very pretty city, both because of its excellent position on the Danube, with the hills of Buda on one bank and the architecture of late C19th and early C20th golden age on the other. Buda was the royal city and Pest the mercantile one.
That most of the core of the city was built in about 50 years in the later C19th and early C20th gives Budapest an architectural unity that adds to its aesthetic appeal. The lack of modernist architecture is notable, as this is before the catastrophe of the Great War. Budapest is a creation of the Proud Tower of European self-confidence.
The architecture has more curves, and more balconies, than in Vienna or Prague. EU flags are also less prominent. Compared to Vienna in particular, there are far fewer eagles. Lions, however, are a recurring motif.
The most obvious exception to the “lions rather than eagles” principle was the statue of Hungary’s first prominent Catholic martyr in the hills of Buda below the Citadel. (Apparently, he was rolled down the hill in a barrel full of spikes.) The Citadel was closed for renovations, so we did not get to it. The military museum was also closed as it is being re-located, so we did not get to it either.
We walked around both Buda and Pest a great deal: walking around a city is a great way to get a feel for a city. Buda—the royal/Habsburg capital—and Pest—the commercial centre—are fairly clearly only rather notionally a single city. It is not merely that Buda is on the hilly side and literally looks down on Pest on the flat side, and that they are separated by the wide Danube, it is that they have quite different histories and represent rather different aspects of Hungary.
The Habsburg palace in the Buda castle complex visually dominates the city. The magnificent neo-medieval Parliament building, finished early in the C20th, which so dominate Pest’s river frontage, looks like a very deliberate architectural counterpoint to the Habsburg palace.
Budapest is a city of small parks and random public gardens. Also, of statues. The plaques saying someone significant lived here are also rather larger than those in London. This is a city very concerned with history.
On Thursday we walked around the outside of, and partly through, Buda Castle. There is a lot of reconstruction of buildings going on in the castle precincts. The billboards explaining the series of projects included the resonant line of it being a matter of returning the castle precinct to the Hungarians (after the destruction during the Second World War and the neglect of the Communist period).
We then walked down to the commercial markets in Pest. A larger and more stylish Queen Victoria markets. While walking around, we discovered what turned out to be the only place to have a decent coffee in Budapest: Mantra specialty coffee. The giveaway was the sign on the window “coffee is not bitter”. I had an excellent dirty chai, my favourite hot drink—caffeine, cinnamon, rich spice flavour, what is there not to like?
Mid-afternoon, we met social psychologist Prof. Joe Forgas, from UNSW, at the Astoria cafe, which has a lovely ambiance. From a Hungarian refugee family, he was the key organiser of a conference to be held the following week in Visegrad, on the psychology of false beliefs: a subject for our time. We chatted for hours, contemplating the woes of the world and swapping personal histories. After the Professor left, Nigel and I had dinner at the Astoria: the food was workmanlike but not memorable.
That evening, my kidney stone played up until Nigel produced a couple of very effective pain killers and I was finally able to get some sleep.
Friday we mostly chilled. We found Hid Bistro (Bridge Bistro), which was a short walk from the Grand Jules boat hotel we were staying at, at the base of Margrit Hid (Marguerite Bridge), with excellent food, very reasonably priced, so we kept coming back. The excellent food included the bbq pork ribs I have had. I correctly inferred, from observing it being served with lemon, that Edelweiss is a wheat beer, so it became my beer of choice.
Hid Bistro also did an excellent Tom Kha, a lovely lychee cocktail and a rather good lychee gin and tonic. Rather amusingly, their idea of a mango lassi was not a drink, but yoghurt with mango as a desert: which was fine. Nigel reported that their carbonara was also excellent and he became fond of their seafood pizza.
Saturday, we did a segway tour of Buda castle. This was my first segway experience. For Nigel—who has had a lot of segway experience—it was his first segway experience in traffic. It turns out, some of the streets along the river are closed to ordinary traffic for parts of the weekend, so that was less alarming than it sounds.
Sunday we took ourselves back up to the castle precinct, exploring the palace museum, the Matthias Church, and the underground hospital and museum. The underground hospital, built inside the caves under the Castle, was used during the December 1944 to February 1945 siege of Budapest and during the 1956 Revolution. It was also set up as a nuclear bomb shelter, which the museum uses to talk of the dangers of nuclear war, with Nagasaki and Hiroshima as illustrations. It was very effectively done.
The Budapest Museum in the palace conveyed a real sense of Hungarian identity. Hungarian history can be summarised as constant repeats of the pattern “we were getting things together and then this horrible thing happened.”
That evening, did a Zoom chat for paid subscribers.
Monday, walked around Budapest some more, did laundry, met writer Lana Starkey at Mantra, where we chatted for hours.
Like Prague and Vienna, Budapest conveys a strong sense of place. Walking around, the most obvious marks of globalisation were corporate franchises—the McDonalds, Burger Kings, Starbucks—and popular entertainment, with versions of pop songs and references to films, both past and present.
Viktor Orban clearly fails fascist dictator 101: 6 days in Budapest and did not see a picture of him anywhere. The most political comment we came across from a local was supporting keeping out Muslim migration and saying that at least now the corruption stays inside the country.
On Tuesday, a hire car drove us to Esztergom and then to Bratislava.
Love a Tom Kha, but you knew that.
Absolutely love Budapest