Somehow I always ignored visiting places close to home. Irrelevant what that home might be. I traveled from Ushuaia to Fairbanks and from the tip of Sri Lanka to northern Japan but I never went to Ruse, and implicitly to Bulgaria, 60 km from my original home town, Bucharest. The same happened with Kishinev, Belgrade or Budapest. At the beginning of the 1980s I spent probably around 8 hours in Budapest, a short stop between two trains while backpacking in Eastern Europe, the only countries we were allowed to visit in our extended jail, “the paradise of workers and peasants”
I remembered vaguely Budapest of those times with imposing buildings and decrepit facades, a gray city of communist poverty but way more opened to the western culture that our Romanian dictatorship would allow. And in those time this opening manifested through music and consumer goods completely lacking in Romania was obsessively more important for us that any other cultural aspects. So I wanted for many years to revisit Budapest and I kept postponing probably because …it was too close.
Coming from Vienna my old-life misconceptions shaped in my mind a toned down Budapest just to be startled by its new look. I found a monumental city with large boulevards lined up by lavish villas hidden behind leafy trees, houses owned once by the Hungarian bourgeoise, taken over later by the Communist apparatchik and now by the nouveau riche. A city that strives to prove that is still an important capital of a once powerful but now vanished empire, the capital of Hungary that history made it smaller and smaller, always choosing the wrong side of history as they chose today a path against the entire Europe.
However Budapest is amazing through its conservation effort, a city where old architecture is preserved with intense energy on an accelerated rhythm giving the feeling that everywhere people are working non-stop on renovating their city most probably with European funds. The newly opened museums like the Ethnographic Museum and the House of Music from the City Park are splendid newly built architectural jewels.
So a stroll in Pest, on the Eastern bank of the Danube, is a walk of discovery strolling the roof on the new ethnographic museum, to the cathedral and the gorgeously renovated palace that houses now the public library filled with students studyIng.
The sun setting behind Buda Hill drowns all Pest buildings by the river in a magical orange hue inviting for a stroll and admire the glory of the divine light.
In the godly hue of the sunset the shoes memorial of the Jews murdered towards the end of the war is even more powerful. They were executed along the river bank by the members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross party police around December 1944 and January 1945. More than 20,000 jews taken from the ghetto perished in that short period.
I found Budapest swamped by tourists buses, everywhere you went you could see groups after groups herded by guides telling stories in all languages. I was wondering how crowded may be the city in summer if it were packed like this in the whimsical April.
And nowhere you see more people that on the night Danube cruises – a must do in Budapest – that were fully packed.
And after such a long walk in Pest the best place to chill is in one of the Ruined Pub, great hang out places about which I heard lots of praises. These places are bars built in former abandoned buildings that became the cool places to go in Budapest, most of them developed in the Jewish Quarter. I read that the one such bar opened in 1999 but the one considered the first pioneer ruined bar in Budapest is Szimpla Kert opened in 2002.
The bar takes over an entire building that is large and mainly deep, on two or more floors embracing the building’s natural decay, decorated with old furnishing and bizarre decor, many times a pastiche of weird elements that are visually striking.
The chill images should be augmented with the music that pumps in each and every room, with people dancing and changing rooms depending on their mood. The electric atmosphere of the place kept me there till midnight in spite of the almost 20 miles that I walked that day.
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