Budapest

As I see that Budapest is in the celebrity news due to Angelina Jolie filming there, I'd like to assert that we were there first. Flashback to October, our first travel week. Which in many ways feels like a year ago, considering that I’ve been in Prague, London, Delhi, the Punjab, Barcelona and Venice since then.  And lived to tell the tale quite happily, I hasten to add. According to my camera’s built-in calendar, it was Oct 2 through 9. I consider that a reliable and well-informed source. Better than I am, at least.

Budapest was fun, but a mixed bag, all in all. Mike and I could probably have fun anywhere, I acknowledge, but some places are more conducive, more awe-inspiring, more quirky or somehow have their own unique addition to one’s view of life that they naturally add to a good time.  Budapest has a dual personality disorder which it has not effectively resolved, and which got in the way.

You see, Budapest would like you to believe that it is a shining, cosmopolitan, modern city with an ancient and rich history, all of which you really want to see. But the reality is that it is a recently recovered Communist bloc city, with dark, gray, seamy, and grimy sectors way too close to the thin veneer of chic shops and pedestrian malls in the old town.  Don’t scratch the surface too deeply, it will not hold. 

We were commenting on the morning that I took this that the predominant color in Budapest was gray. The weather came color-coordinated as well. This is on Andrassy Korut, the main drag from the river up to the Szechenyi baths, near our hotel. We decided to capture the going mode.

And the reality behind the “Ancient and Rich History” is that Budapest came into its hay-day in the 1890s, as the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most of the beautiful, splashy buildings date to 1896 or thereabouts. Whereas in Italy and Spain one encounters cathedrals and civic buildings dating from the 1300s to the 1500s that are built from quarried marble and limestone, and ornamented with statuary carved from real stone by Renaissance Masters, in Budapest, many of the neoclassical mansions and public buildings are plaster-over-brick, adorned with cement statues, and are starting to show the ravages of cheap construction and 100+ years. It’s a little like seeing  a fresh young maid in her national ethnic costume, only to discover on close inspection that she’s actually 48, her costume is made of nylon and polyester, done poorly, and her underthings are Soviet-issued dingy woolen longjohns.

Naturally enough, I didn’t take photos of the seamy underbelly of Budapest, just the pretty and interesting stuff. Go figure. 

We walked many miles while there, as is our wont. There are a couple of very long bridges over the Danube, which connect the Buda and the Pest halves of the city, and we walked them a few times.  We found but one reliably good vegetarian restaurant, Govinda’s – hardly native, but it had consistently very good and inexpensive food, and we ate there every day. There is something odd about being served food by a Hungarian wearing a sari.

A record of the Budapest penchant for neoclassical statuary.

This is the Chain Bridge, the bridge crossing the Danube near central Pest.

Same bridge at night, all lit up, with Parliament Building on the opposite side of the Danube.

If you have not yet gotten the sense that the Hungarians reveled in neo-classicism, you certainly will soon! We got tickets to see a ballet one evening, scoring very good seats at a very reasonable price. The ballet was performed in the Opera House, a beautiful and impressive example of the aforementioned style. Note the genuine marble.

Entry staircase within the Opera House.

Cloakroom at the Opera.

Box seats within the performance hall. One can easily imagine the place in its prime, with Austro-Hungarians in full regalia, furs, jewels, top hats, and dress military uniforms. It also has to be a great place to shoot period piece films. Fun to sit and check it all out, too.

This is where one goes for Intermission. The Snack Bar? Our unschooled couthless minds fall short. Someone out there is more couth than we and can help, without a doubt. The Fancy Snack Bar!

So, the ballet was set to music by Dvorak, a Czech, to a libretto based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell - you guessed it - Gone with the Wind. An interesting juxtaposition. The dancing was actually very good, and truly conveyed the story quite well. Something that we could not fail to "notice" was that there were no African-Hungarian or otherwise descended dancers, so the parts of Mammy and the other O'Hara slaves were played by European descended dancers in blackface. Doing some very un-PC moves. Mike does a good version, you can have him demonstrate. A multicultural experience, all told, yes indeed.

We had an evening tea here. This is the back room of a modern book store on Andrassy.

The interior of the Szechenyi spa entry foyer.

No visit to Budapest is complete without at least one visit to at least one of the many hot spring spas throughout the city. Word is, if one digs a hole for planting a tree anywhere in Budapest, one has a hot spring on one's hands. There are dozens here. We went to Szechenyi because Rick Steves said that it was where the natives were more likely to go. It's also really big and cool-looking - we saw it from the airplane as we approached Budapest. There are three outdoor pools with fun features like fountains that pour onto one's head, bubbles and jets that arise from the pool floor and walls, a circular walled section within the major pool that had its own, strongly compelling current - folks just make their way into the area (due to strong currents at the mouth of the entry, this was no small feat) and get carried around and around in circles by the current. It's really fun, for some reason. There were two stone chess boards as permanent fixtures of one pool, with constant chess competitions, complete with bystanders and their comments.

Indoors there are more pools than I managed to count, with temperatures varying from a chilly 17 C to 42 C, and heated rooms for getting heat prostration, apparently - temps of 45 to70 C! Seriously. (As reference points, 17 C is 63 F, body temp is 37.1 or so, 50 C is 122 F, 60 = 140.) We walked into the coolest and turned around and walked out. But the pools were great, and I always like having a cool dunk to finish off. The clientele seemed split between your average Hungarian 63 year old and the college aged tourists. We spent about two and a half hours at Szechenyi and felt limply relaxed as we left. An afternoon well spent.

We indulged in an evening's entertainment of Folklore Dancing. Yes, it did sound a tad hokey, and the audience consisted entirely of tourists, but it turned out to be genuinely entertaining. One likes to think that some of the tourist dollars go toward keeping hungry Hungarian folk dancers off the streets.

Unlike this poor Hurdy-Gurdy busker:

This is a class act busker- complete with native costume, hat and boots, and playing a tekerolant- the Hungarian hurdy gurdy.

Folkloric Dance performance hall, full of American and English tourists.

As no flash was allowed, I tried to capture the dancers to limited success. These guys were wearing Fedoras, vests, boots, and shirts with puffy sleeves, over big skirts. I know these clothing items have very masculine sounding names in Hungarian, but that's what they appeared to be, in English. They also had long sticks and swords. Very masculine, indeed.

I probably shouldn't even include this one, but it shows that the guys also danced with women and that they were doing some very fast moves. Tight little circles, stomping, clapping - all very energetic and fun to watch.

That's all from Budapest, folks! Happy Thanksgiving to you all!