22 observations about Budapest

My two-week visit to this supremely relaxed city began here. Blog-wise, it ends on this page.



One for every year Hungarians have been able to utter Imre Nagy's name in public:

1. Does any city have more phone booths?

2. The pizza here is good!

3. Andras Torok's observation, in his quirky "Budapest: A Critical Guide," that one shouldn't try to ride a bicycle in the city except on Sundays before 9 a.m., is sorely of date. I can't think of a better urban European bike experience outside of the Lowlands. Motorists on the Pest side, in particular, are quite sporting.

4. If you find the touristed areas of Prague and Vienna a bit precious, you may find Budapest's griminess refreshing. I do. Once the sun goes down, however, the night sky acts as a concealer and it's pretty much a fairyland.



5. Hungarians smoke a lot. Aside from public conveyances, you can pretty much light up anywhere.

6. When paying in a restaurant, don't thank the waiter when he takes your money. Doing so can be construed as completing the transaction, and you won't get your change.

7. Using the trams and subway, you can reach any place in the city center in 15 minutes, tops. It's easy to overestimate how much time you'll need. The 14-day pass requires a passport-size photo. Individual tickets are good for 60 minutes -- enough time to get halfway to Zagreb.

8. The notion that English is widely spoken is something of a canard. The podcasts at LetsLearnHungarian.net are a fun way to learn basic phrases. And making the effort is universally appreciated.

9. Channel 53 is the greatest sports channel ever. At 2 a.m. one morning, I watched Hal Sutton hold off a charge by the Golden Bear in the 1983 PGA at Riviera, narrated by John Facenda.

10. District Six (Oktogon and environs) has outlawed package-liquor sales after 11 p.m. Most corner stores ignore it.

11. Soproni tastes like peaches. Dreher tastes like ass juice. Stick to the Czech beers.

12. Even the cheap white wine is drinkable. The cheap reds are turpentine. With notable exceptions, this is white-wine country.

13. My neighborhood bar, Kiado Kocsma, has good music (Pixies right now) and a tasty menu. Try the winecream soup and the smoked-cheese mashed potatoes.

14. The recession/depression has taken its toll, of course. Even well-dressed, clean-shaven retirees may politely ask for a few forints. But in the city center there are surprisingly few shuttered storefronts.

15. If Sandra Bernhard were a city, she would be Budapest. Striking but not pretty.

16. Budapest is chizzeap! My apartment is centrally located with Wi-Fi, cable TV and bicycles, all for 35E a night.

17. The center-right goverment is worth watching, in a whatchoo-talkin'-'bout-Willis kind of way. Sure, the Socialists were a disaster, but now all Hungarian print, broadcast and online media have been placed under the control of a "National Media Authority." These are not European values. Just cut it out.

18. The prostitutes here approach you and say, "Sex," without any inflection of a question, as if they were saying "chair," or "tree" or "muffin." Sure, hon, what could possibly go wrong?

19. In Hungary, like Korea, last names come first. Liszt Ferenc (Franz), Bartok Bela and the like.

20. The one website I wish I'd discovered before I came here.

21. Worried about transpo to and from the airport? Try Alajos Pulai. Dude's a machine.

22. Think I hear him pulling up now. Fiddlesticks.

End

This fleeting tour

“If you live to be a hundred,
I want to live to be a hundred minus one day
so I never have to live without you.”
―Winnie the Pooh

Like no place else

Temperatures in the high 40s and a sky straight out of a Dutch seascape. The previous night I began to notice these enormous piles of junk blocking the sidewalk at regular intervals. Not potato-peel-variety garbage, but architectural materials, 1960s televisions, framed pictures of Lenin. Some good picking, if you’re so inclined.


By daylight, the piles are still there. Both sides of the river are awash in scrap metal and other oddments.


I’m biking today in the hills of Buda, where most streets will funnel you eventually into Moscow Square, an enormous transit center populated by lost people, day laborers looking for work, and the occasional gangster and Gypsy. This is just a tiny slice of the square's northern edge.


Violent crime is almost unheard of in Budapest, but petty theft happens, as everywhere, in crowded trams, train stations and fast-food restaurants. The most menacing spots I’ve encountered have been the neighborhoods east of the Millennium City Center and around the Keleti Palyaudvar, or East Train Station. The dead-end kids here drink a bright yellow beverage out of big plastic containers. I guess it’s wine, but it’s the color of piss, and after several swigs they can get a little unpredictable.

As in most big cities (Budapest is the size of Phoenix or Philadelphia), homelessness and beggary are also big problems here. Asking for money and pawing through trash cans is now outlawed in the Eighth District. Aside from being unenforceable and appearing to have a racial component, this seems like bad policy. Do you really want to fan these flames? The political rhetoric coming from the right-wing Hungary-first crowd is hot enough.

This time I attack Castle Hill from the northwest. Well, actually, I push my bike up Ostrum Utca, which seems like a 40-degree climb. First thing I see is the Magdalena Tower, which is all that’s left of a 13th-century Franciscan church destroyed in World War II.


Not sure if Allied bombing or the battle for Buda knocked her down. When the Turks ruled here in the 16th century, this was the only place Christians were permitted to worship. At the bottom of the photo, a garbage truck solves the sidewalk-trash mystery. It’s brush-and-bulky day!

Next door is the Military History Museum, a former army barracks constructed in the 1830s. Visitors are invited to handle a lot of the weapons. I now know that a Tokarev pistol is too small for my hands. The “light” machine guns must weigh 50 pounds.


The cockpit of a MiG-21 Soviet fighter.


The museum has some outstanding propaganda posters. This fist appears to crash through the roof of a newspaper office. The caption reads “Bastards! Is this what you wanted?” The context escapes me. I wish the gift shop carried some of these.


The street-by-street tank battles in Budapest were some of the fiercest of the war. Nearly 40,000 civilians died in a seven-week span. Pity, because the Germans were in nearly full retreat and the whole European conflict was practically over. Only 11 years later, the city would be wrecked again. Budapest is a sad, sad place.


Pages from a Life magazine in 1956.


Time magazine’s 1956 Man of the Year.


The Matthias Church anchors Szentharomsag Square. Doesn’t do much for me. Parts of it date to the 1200s, but it’s been heavily worked on since. Unfortunately, it was closed for a wedding.


The Fishermen’s Bastion (1900 or so) looks cool, but doesn’t appear to have much utility or historical value, nor does it have any obvious link to fishermen. In medieval times, the fish market was nearby. A fun place for kids to clamber about.


I always wondered what a “hussar” was, and this statue of Andras Hadak fills me in. It’s a Hungarian cavalryman. At exam time, college students climb the statue to touch the horse’s testicles for good luck.


Because Castle Hill so resembles a movie set, it’s arresting to realize people actually live here.


A palinka (fruit brandy)-and-sausage festival is taking place, but the whole thing seems … too organized. The festival workers are all wearing the same green windbreakers and admission is $10. Ten dollars for the privilege of spending more once you’re inside. Mrs. Sibley didn’t raise a fool. But I’m not done climbin’.

First I coast down Attila Utca at a million miles an hour. Wait. What’s Haydn doing here?


Turns out he lived in Hungary for 20 years. (Cue Johnny Carson voice) I did not know that.

A bit to the southeast I now ascend Gellert Hill, intent on reaching the highest spot in Budapest, where the Nazis were able to significantly slow the Russian advance. Holy shit. A panorama I will never forget.


I zoom in on my Pest neighborhood.


When I say my goodbyes to this idiosyncratic city, as I must in a couple of days, I shall have to return here and do it properly.

Guy walks in to a bar

Orders an Achel brown, some crispy fries and a bucket of mussels floating in a garlic and white wine sauce.


Sorry. No punch line.

Mosselen Belgian Beer Cafe
Pannonia Utca 14, Pest
12-12, daily

Bongo the baby gorilla

My good-weather luck ran out today. And what a string it was! Eleven straight days of cloudless skies and unseasonable temperatures in the 70s. But temps have crashed 30 degrees and rain now falls steadily.

Before the storm hit, I ventured forth in search of some Hungarian countryside cuisine. At highly recommended Alfoldi Vendeglo in central Pest, I ordered the ropogos libacomb burgonya parolt kaposzta. Maybe I’m just sick of my own cooking, but after the first couple bites I started thinking, let’s play two!


The menu had no translations, but my belly does: roasted goose with warm pickled cabbage and potatoes mashed with onions. Bet I’m close! Dessert was a bouncy, citrusy, unsweetened Hungarian cake made from a stringy cheese. I'm in!


Four thousand calories later, I wandered aimlessly around this Kalvin Ter-area neighborhood, which has lots of retro shops featuring Hungarian-designed stuff. I need to be less intent on seeing things and just stroll. It felt great.


Before the deluge, I also visited the Budapest Zoo, where a baby gorilla named Bongo lives. Don’t think I need to say more.

With that, a list of the world’s 10 greatest-to-crappiest zoos, starting with the best:

1. Pineridge Zoo, south of Grand Bend, Ontario. Renowned for its North American ape exhibit and unparalleled pigeon-and-rabbit enclosure. Sadly, now closed.
2. Apenheul Primate Park, outside Apeldoorn, Netherlands. No cages; just you and the apes. Monkey-proof bags and spray bottles optional.
3. San Diego Zoo. Bonobos galore.
4. Berlin Zoo. Knut.
5. St. Louis Zoo. Beats me; heard it’s swell.
6. Budapest Zoo. Bongo.
7. Every other zoo.
8. Any zoo yet to be built.
9. Reid Park Zoo, Tucson. Where giraffes are fed poisonous oleander leaves and die.
10. Arizona-Snoring Desert Museum. A bromide for insomniacs.

Budapest: a video

The putsch and shove of a grand capital.

Gil Scott-Heron, 1949-2011

We're not in Kansas any more

She is prayerful and profane. For percussive effect, she bounces a metal bar on the strings of her violin, squeezes turkey basters, shakes rattles, stamps her kitten heels and mouth-clicks like a Kalahari bushman. She speaks in tongues, shouts out questions and frequently appears to have been awakened from a nightmare.

She is Iva Bittova, the Czech Republic’s Yoko Ono, and on Wednesday she performed at Budapest’s riverside Palace of the Arts with longtime collaborator Vladimir Vaclavek.

The Palace of the Arts, just after sunset.


The pair don masks for the playing of "Sto Let."

A fine line exists between the creative free spirit and the spoiled brat who always gets her way. For Bittova, it is a highly strung tightrope. I assume the piece below is original, but it almost sounds like a cover of Steve Reich’s “America Before the War” from his 1988 “Different Trains.” Coincidentally, Reich will be performing in this building in three weeks. Sonny Rollins, too. What a place, this Budapest.

The genius within

Another monumental bike ride, this time deep into the Buda Hills to visit the last Hungarian home of composer and ethnomusicologist Bela Bartok.

To say Hungary punches above its weight musically is an understatement. Composers Kodaly, Bartok, Liszt and Ligeti hail from here. The number of top-flight conductors from this small nation is almost beyond belief: Szell, Ormandy, Dorati, Reiner, Solti.

Bartok chain-smoked, liked to wear sandals and collected bugs, shells and rocks. His work is often described as violent and dissonant. His only opera and ballet, “Bluebeard’s Castle” and “The Miraculous Mandarin,” respectively, are vortexes of bloodlust. Life in an increasingly fascist state will do that to you.

His chamber works, in particular, are infused with the folk music of the countryside. For years Bartok would walk the back roads of Hungary, Transylvania (now Romania) – even Turkey – with a phonograph strapped to his back, recording the music of peasants on wax cylinders. He needs were simple, almost monk-ish. Tobacco seemed to be his only vice. Perhaps the greatest musician of the 20th century, he remains underappreciated, though his Concerto for Orchestra and Piano Concerto No. 3 frequently crop up on radio playlists.

For the 90 minutes I visited, no car or tour bus pulled up. No other visitor came or left. The place is not easy to find, nor does it seem to invite traffic. You must ring a sidewalk bell and state through an intercom your intention to visit.


Once inside, I was given a private tour by Agnes. Recently in Europe I’ve had good fortune getting one-on-one treatment in this regard. It wasn't a tour per se. I was allowed to wander around freely, and any time I leaned forward to look at something, Agnes would describe it to me. For each of my questions she had a ready answer.


A chamber where concerts are still given. A piano trio will perform Mozart and Brahms here on Sunday. I’m thinking about it.


Bartok in youth and middle age. He was a sickly kid. For some reason, that tends to focus one’s energies later in life.


Bartok’s study. He wrote a lot in this room. Like Beethoven, he was a superb pianist. Just six years ago, one of his half-smoked cigarettes was found deep within this instrument.


Yes, he would strap this recording phonograph to his back while walking Central Europe’s muddy, rutted ox paths.


On less strenuous days, a horse-drawn cart did the work.


Folk instruments collected on his travels.


The detritus of a lifetime.


In the bottom right corner of this box is a fork-shaped fountain pen Bartok would dip in ink and use to draw his musical staffs – the five horizontal lines on sheet music that contain notes, rests and other musical symbols.


“Everything I did in life, I did for Hungary,” he wrote. Or something like that.


In the foreground, not a pocket watch, but a pocket metronome. Priceless and highly unusual.

Bartok’s last composition, his Third Piano Concerto. At the bottom right he wrote with portent and emphasis "Vege," or "the end."


Bela Bartok died in New York City in 1945 without two forints to rub together. Fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral.


Bela Bartok Emlekhas
Csalan Utca 29, Buda
10-5 Tuesday-Sunday
Tram 56 north from Moszkva Ter will get you in the neighborhood after seven stops. Good luck with that.
1200 HUF

A brooding 'Boccanegra'

Verdi's overlooked masterpiece "Simon Boccanegra," staged Oct. 4, 2011, at the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest.

It was a traditional production. Two cloaked figures, each 30 feet high, framed the first act's set. Four mermaids with aquamarine hair lounged in a Genoa seascape to open Act 2. Two-legged lizards, remimiscent of "District 9" prawns, roamed the stage, messengers of the subconscious.

This opera is all about the music -- deep, dark, difficult and endlessly listenable, typified by Fiesco's great "Il lacerate spirito" aria. Tonight's cast appeared to be all-Hungarian save for Fiesco, played by Giacomo Prestia. In an opera house too frequently visited by has-beens and would-bes, it was great to see Prestia in person.

Please remind me never to skimp on opera tickets again. Sitting 30 feet from the stage with a clear view of the pit, everything looks and sounds 300 percent better.

Four nights ago for "Don Pasquale," I was in this box. Looks like Carmela Soprano is there tonight.


Some Oriental weirdness.


Greek gods on the ceiling, by Karoly Lotz.


The psychology of the character Paolo Albiani is interesting. He tries and fails to kidnap Amelia Grimaldi, played by Gyongyi Lukacs, below, and is not immediately caught. When Boccanegra demands everyone in his presence curse the would-be abductor, Paolo reluctantly chimes in, cursing himself.


Most people I know would be able to live with this. Hey, I was caught up in the moment, there was peer pressure, let's move on. But for a guy whose job is to effortlessly offer up limp platitudes, it really seems to eat at him between Acts 2 and 3, to the point where he poisons Boccanegra, as if that will lift the curse.

It is a mystifying opera, stately and majestic, served up with lofty bravado. Glad I went.

Terror Haza

Just wow. The Terror House, maybe 200 yards from my apartment, is where the communist political police tortured their political opponents. Before that, it was the party headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis -- the Arrow Cross Party. It has to be the world's most comprehensive museum devoted to political and military developments in post-WWII Europe. In some ways, the end of the war was just the beginning of mass collective persecution in Hungary, which, while a small nation, proved it was never powerless to resist.


Here I learned of a complex character named Imre Nagy, a lifelong communist who thought Stalin got it all wrong. He helped lead the 1956 uprising against the Soviet occupation. Demonstrations broke out in Budapest and several other cities on Oct. 23, 1956, and Nagy was swept into power as prime minister five days later. In just two weeks, Soviet tanks bore down on the city and that was that.

He was put on trial in a courtroom on Fo Utca along with a dozen others. A communist propaganda film in the museum shows extensive clips from the trial. One by one, the defendants plead for mercy, saying they had seen the light. "I have traveled a long distance to see the merits of socialism," says one. Another weeps when he recounts seeing the death of a Soviet soldier in combat.

Nagy, the last to speak in his defense, says, in a distinguished and respectful way, that this is all bullshit. Your case is based on systematic terror and the need for merciless reprisal, he told the court. In essence, you've proved nothing. He was sentenced to death, of course. After being hung a year and a half later, he was interred face-down, his hands and feet bound by barbed wire.

A listening and recording device of the State Security Department (AVO), the "fist of the party."

Many of the torturers and the districts attorney who abetted them, the leftist unionists who ratted out their own countrymen, the agents of the state security apparatus who killed without hesitation and elicited false confessions, and the informers who recorded the thinking of factory workers, journalists and clerics, are alive today and walk among us in Budapest. The Terror House is a chilling place and will leave you changed.

The last Soviet "advisers" in Hungary departed in 1989.

Terror House
60 Andrassy Blvd.
Tues.-Sun., 10-6
No photography; the guards are pretty nice about telling you to cut it out.
1800 HUF