Europe 24 - Budapest, Day 1

Budapest is a surprisingly lovely city.

I really should have anticipated this after my experiences in Prague last year, but as a historian my worldview tends to be colored by the past and where it led so I wasn’t sure of what to expect from a city that spent half a century under Soviet domination and currently hosts the neo-Fascist Christian nationalist regime of Viktor Orbán, who – in a surprise development that I am sure people will find shocking – is a role model for the modern American GOP. He was a featured speaker at the CPAC conference in 2022, for example. But most people just go about their lives without much reference to such things, and the city really is a great place to visit. We had a very good time there and with the notable exception of one bus driver everyone we met was friendly and welcoming.

We got out of our taxi to find ourselves in the heart of the tourist district. St. Stephen’s Basilica was two blocks to our right, and our apartment was half a block to the left with the Danube maybe two or three blocks further down. Bus and tram stops were everywhere, and the Metro was just two blocks back the way we came. The whole street where our apartment was had been blocked off to vehicular traffic and more cities should do that in more places, really. There were people walking around enjoying the sunshine – it was summery but not uncomfortably so while we were in Budapest – and you didn’t have to fight for space with cars. Win all around, I say.

Our apartment was above a coffeeshop so it was easy to find, and we met our host Klara who welcomed us warmly and was happy to talk with us about all sorts of things – she was one of the few people I met who brought up American politics, a subject I tend to avoid on vacations, and I was glad to find an ally in a far off country. She showed us how the various entryways worked, which was not necessarily intuitive – there were two different keys to get in and out of the five doors and gates, though the outer gates to the street had a code to get in and you could just hit a button on the way out.  It would beep at you when it was open to let you know you could go. There was an elevator that was rated for four Hungarians or, as it turned out, two Americans. We learned to go up in shifts – Hungarian floors are rather tall in our experience and we were on what in Europe is called the second floor but which in the US would be the third, and if three of us got into the elevator it would just sit there until we got the hint and one of us left – but coming down the stairs was easy. There was a nice courtyard as well. The apartment itself was lovely and if we ever go back to Budapest we will certainly check in with Klara again!

After a dropping off our bags we headed back out to find some lunch. This turned out to be harder than you’d think.

We need to find places that are safe for people with nut allergies, and we know that this generally means avoiding Chinese restaurants, for example – way too many nuts in the kitchen for safety – and coffeeshops and bakeries. Vietnamese and Japanese food is usually safe, as is most Italian food, and for the rest we just ask. This is where the Equal Eats cards come in handy.

Why do Hungarians put nuts in their hamburgers?

We figured that a burger place would be pretty safe and usually they are but every single burger place we tried in Budapest told us that they could not guarantee safety because one or more of their burgers was made with nuts. Not vegan “replace the meat with another form of protein” nut burgers, either – actual beef burgers with ground nuts added into the patties. It was a discovery, I suppose, but it’s better that they tell us so we can move on.

Eventually we ended up at the little grocery on the corner about a block and a half away.

I love grocery stores in new places. There is no better or faster way to get to know a culture than seeing what they consider to be normal food and everywhere I go I try to get to the nearest grocery to explore. It was a crowded little shop with a single path through it – you had to go through a turnstile at one end and then past the cash registers at the other – but it was full of all sorts of interesting things. We stocked up on fruit, meats (some great salamis), cheeses, and all manner of snack foods because we were on vacation and nutrition is something we could worry about when we got home.

And since there was a park directly across the street, we went over and sat in the grass and enjoyed our lunch there. Mostly. Kim ended up getting stung on the hand by a bee and I had to go back to the grocery for something frozen to use as an icepack, but aside from that we enjoyed our lunch.

It’s a pretty park, full of people every time we walked by no matter what the hour. There’s a Metro stop right there, a kiosk full of locks for those inclined to advertise their relationship status (some of which were clearly antiques – the locks, though perhaps the people as well), and it is the home of the Ferris Wheel of Budapest to which we would return. It’s a lovely thing to see a city park in full use as a center for a community. 

 

 

 

Our goal was to stay up until a reasonable hour in order to minimize jet lag, a mission that also entailed staying out in the sun as much as possible to trick our bodies into resetting our internal clocks, so we dropped off our remaining groceries at the apartment and then walked down to the Danube where the 2 Tram runs. We figured that this would be a good way to get a quick handle on the city, as the 2 follows the river for its entire length.

You can buy a bus/tram/Metro pass on an app that they have, and we got the one that covered our time there. It’s not good for the airport bus, but it will get you around the city – like all major European cities, Budapest has an excellent public transportation system that American cities would do well to imitate.

The station is right by the Chain Bridge, one of the more picturesque bridges in Budapest. That’s the Budapest Castle on the left.

We picked a direction kind of at random (left) and when the 2 came by we got on

There’s a lot to see, and when we got to the end they threw us all off and made us get on a different 2 Tram heading the other way so we got to see it all again from a different angle. We went past our original stop a bit and ended up at the Hungarian Parliament building where there were tubas.

No, really. It makes sense. Hear me out.

The Hungarian Parliament is a fascinating structure, and it’s clearly a place where people gather for all sorts of things. We never did go inside – Hungarians are extraordinarily confident in the worth of their public buildings and paying the equivalent of a hundred dollars to see the inside of the place was a bit out of our comfort zone – but we had a great time walking around it. We did this on two separate days, in fact, so we like to think we got our fill of it. It’s definitely worth seeing.

On this particular day there was a concert being given on the steps of the building, right between the lions. There was a good crowd to see this concert, and it has to be said that the musicians were talented and – if the crowd reaction was anything to go by – the between-songs commentary was funny. The highlight for me was the Star Wars medley, but I suppose that says more about me than anything else.

But all good things come to an end and eventually the tubas oomphed their last note so we were once again set loose in the urban environment of Budapest to see what we could see. And what we saw a lot of was art.

Budapest is full of public art. Having now been to a grand total of three eastern European cities I can say that this is something that they all seem to have in common. They put a great deal of emphasis on such things – certainly more than in the US, and from my experience more than in western Europe as well. There are sculptures, there are paintings and murals, there are all sorts of things, and everywhere you go you stumble into more of it.

Some of it is more curious than the rest of it, to be honest. After walking around a bit looking for an ATM to get out some forints (Hungary is an EU member but does not yet use the euro) we found ourselves in a park where there were statues of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense if you think of it in geopolitical terms – Hungarians chafed under Soviet domination during the Cold War, to the point of actually rebelling against the Soviets in 1956, and Reagan and Bush Sr. were instrumental in bringing the Cold War in for a soft landing in the 1980s and early 90s. There were no statues of Gorbachev, but (vide supra, re: chafed) that’s probably understandable. It was just a bit odd to see in Budapest.

Some public artworks are more popular than others, though.

On the downside, there was a monument in one of the parks that was “ordered by the government of Hungary (or, to be more exact, by Premier Viktor Orbán of almost unlimited power) and erected stealthily, following numerous delays, under the cover of the night dawning on July 20th 2014,” according to the protest artwork and flyers that surround it.

The point of the protest is that the monument glosses over Hungary’s willing participation in World War II as a Nazi ally, “suggesting that the state of Hungary bears no responsibility for the genocide following the German occupation, including the deportation of nearly half a million Hungarian citizens (mostly Jews but also gypsies, gays and dissidents) to Nazi extermination camps.” The protest goes on to note that Hungary was the first country in 20th-century Europe to pass anti-Semitic laws, which they did in 1920, and that it welcomed the Nazis and fully participated in the Holocaust, even exceeding German demands in this regard. As such, the protest notes, this monument is a whitewashing of the Hungarian far right designed to make its political and ideological heirs in the Orbán government look less evil. “The monument is really a genuine symbol,” the protest concludes. “It is the monument of the government’s arrogance and the criminal steps it took. Its removal will also be symbolic, signaling that liberty has returned. The protesters have stated they will continue their protest actions and presence as long as this mendacious monument stands here.”

And three cheers for them, I say. That kind of courage in the face of authoritarianism represents the good in humanity and we should all be supporting it and doing whatever it takes to resist wherever authoritarianism raises its head.

On a more festive note, the statue was next to a fountain which had jets in the shape of a rectangle, and the surrounding flagstones were pressure sensitive so you could step on them and the jets would shut off and then you could walk into the rectangle and the jets would start up again behind you.

There was also this guy.

This was at the corner of our street, right about where the taxi let us off, and it was one of the more popular statues in Budapest as far as we could tell. There were always tour groups milling around it, and you can see that people like rubbing his belly. It probably brings you luck.

Eventually we wound our way back to our apartment and called it a night, ready to sleep off a long day of travel and start again in the morning.