Budapest
Last night Shawn and I arrived back in Prague after spending three in Budapest, two of them with Greg (who is from Orange County, NY, "the real one", to quote him). We stayed at Carpe Noctem hostel, a great hostel I would recommend to anyone. It was very clean and tidy, safe, in a great location, and the staff was a lot of fun. We bussed into Budapest with Student Agency, the round trip costing us under $40CAD, but lasting just about eight hours. They showed movies and gave us free drinks however, and the seats were very comfortable. As for Budapest, there's a lot to say so I'm going to divide this post into a few sections with obvious titles.
First Impressions
The city was recognizably dissimilar from Prague the second we exited the big yellow bus. The streets and buildings are less maintained, and dirtier. It's true that we were far away from the popular tourist locations, but nonetheless it wasn't as clean as Prague (which happens to be the cleanest big city I've even seen). We had a bit of an adventure finding a bankomat to take out some Forints and buy Metro tickets, but we managed OK. The metro station felt bigger than most in Prague, there were shops and little food booths just like in Prague, but there were quite a bit of homeless sleeping down there on a collection of cardboard, clothing and blankets. We also saw the first 'obvious' gypsies begging for money there. The actual trains are also older than the ones in Prague, and they creak and groan their way under the city. Every single part of the train was also covered in ugly, Eastern Europen style grafitti (as was the entire Metro station, and many, many structures throught the city). The handlebars inside the tram were moist and clammy and the doors slammed shut like a guillotine. So on first impression, the city felt a little scary and less unsafe than Prague, but I was wrong.The City
Budapest (pronounced Budapesht) is actually made up of two cities: Buda and Pest. Buda is on the west bank of the Donau (I am perfectly aware that in English it's called the 'Danube', but I think that doesn't sound nice enough. I would say Dunarea but that's too confusing so I'll use the German word for it.), and it's the oldest part of the city. It's covered in hills and is very beautiful. Buda castle is here, which includes the Royal Palace. The Royal Palace was actually less than 10% untouched in World War Two, so most of the buildings there have been renovated since. In some cases where a building was too damaged they built new ones, and it's very odd to see two buildings side by side but centuries apart. Pest is very flat and it's where the majority of the 'stuff to do' lies. Our hostel was in Pest, close to the main international train station Nyugati, as were most of the places we visited. Pest is much newer but spans many architectural styles. Most of the buildings are 'eclectic', meaning a combination of different architectural styles. The city isn't as colourful as Prague, it's mostly beige, white and gray. The trams in Pest also look very nice, they're all yellow, and the new ones are enormous. The driving there also seems less chaotic than in Prague, the streets are a lot wider and they actually make sense. The Donau is the largest river I have ever seen, it's at least twice the width of the Vltava, which makes the engineering of the bridges impressive to say the least.
Chain Bridge over the Donau
What We Did
The first afternoon we got there we walked down Andrassy from Oktagon, a really beautiful street that gets larger the closer it is to Varosliget Park. Closer to the Danube it is very commercial, and the Opera House is there, then it turns residential, then almost palatial - there are a couple of embassies there and the buildings are huge and lavishly decorated and even have front and back yards. Just before Varosliget lies Hero's Square, an enormous square bordered by two museums and an impressive monument. We walked through the square to take a look at the 'fake castle' in the Park, and found an outdoor skating rink right in front of it. We took a stroll along the Danube by the Parliament building, also very impressive, and saw the many lit up bridges spanning the river. We also walked through Freedom Square which ironically sports the last Soviet monument in the city (besides the collection of monuments collected in a special park).
Hero's Square
The next day we went on a free walking tour of the city. I loved the tour since it wasn't just about looking at the famous buildings and statues, but the tour guide (Gabor) explained a lot about what Budapest is really like and what Hungarians are. Gabor talked a bit about the history of Hungary, mentioning that the ancestors of the Hungarians were a mixture of different tribes mostly from east of the Urals, and that they are the same ancestors as those of the Finns. Hungary was also under constant occupation from the 1500s until the fall of the Soviet Union. First by the Ottomans, then the Hapsburgs. At the start of WWII, the Hungarians, like most Eastern European countries the tour guide said, sided with Nazi Germany, but at the end of the war were occupied by the Red Army. The era of Stalin was brutal for Hungarians, and in 1956, a few years after Stalin's death, they tried to break away from Russia. This led in a massacre of the Hungarians, who didn't dare to speak out again until 1989. During the revolution in '89 and slightly after the country was in a state of mass euphoria, there was gigantic optimism for the future, but the people of Hungary were unaware that democracy isn't just about the rights, it also has many responsibilities. Today a lot of people have lost faith in the government and especially in the EU since everything is moving too slowly. Gabor said that everyone evades taxes because nobody trusts the bureaucracy of the government. However, he said that even while many young people are thinking about emmigrating, some still have faith and are waiting for the older generations to pass and the new to grab the torch. I could keep going on about what he told us, so I'll move on. The tour took us through both Pest and Buda, and it was very educational. The guide also told us where we could eat for cheap, and it's interesting how the only two places he mentioned were malls - he said in the mall you don't have to pay unnecessary fees for service and that most Hungarians eat at the mall if they eat out. That evening we went to the Szechenyi Baths in Varosliget Park. They were awesome!!! It felt very Roman, although it was the Ottomans who introduced the idea to the country. There were many pools of different temperatures, ranging from 20C to 38C. The hottest pools were outside, which was really cool, you could see the steam rising from the pools. There were a lot of people of all ages, and some were even playing chess in the pool. After the baths we went on a pub crawl around the city, which was really fun. I left early because I wanted to be up the next day, but I went to the first two places (I left when we got to the third and found it closed). The bars were really awesome - one was in a building's covered courtyard, it was very spacious vertically but packed horizontally. It had a backyard BBQ sort of atmosphere. The second was exactly the oposite - low ceiling but lots of room to move around. Both are places I'd want to go back to next time I'm in the city, they had a unique charm I hadn't seen anywhere else. The next day I went to the Terror House and the National Museum. Both were interesting, but there was not enough English and therefore not enough information to know what I was looking at. Later that day I stopped at a souvenir shop to buy a chess set and talked to the guy there for a long time. His name was Szolt and he spoke great English, surprisingly learnt while he was in Japan. We looked up Halmaghi in the dictionary since we were talking about Transylvania and how I had a Hungarian sounding last name, and we found about ten Halmagyis. I wonder if we're related?
