The things I will miss about Budapest
- Sunday night bloody marys with my brother, in Cafe Aloe. We never had time to make it into a long-standing tradition, but we know that we would, given half a chance. It was great, for a little while, to spend so much time in his company, having moved further and further away from each other, geographically, since I left home. It’s nice to be so closely related to such a good friend.
- The sense of achievement that follows a successful exchange in hungarian, or when I understand an overheard conversation, or when I figure out what a shop sign or a translated film title is. I could have spoken good hungarian. I never tried.
- The weather, and checking the temperature display every time I pass Nyugati on the tram, to see just how hot or cold it is. The long hot summer, being able to sit outside a cafe in a tree-lined square from March until November, sleeping with all the windows open. The cold, cold winter, with – literally – heaps of snow. Icicles hanging from the windowsills, and great big fat snowflakes on the last shopping day before Christmas.
- The food. Most of it, anyway. Especially the parolt kaposzta, or stewed red cabbage, as you might prefer to think of it. Deep orange gulyas soup. Gyulai kolbasz. Seasonal vegetables, non-EU lumpy and discoloured, but actually tasting the way they should.
- The music. It’s everywhere. The sound of a piano from an open window as you walk down the street. Singers practising scales. The musicians at the music academy tuning up, when we lived nearby. Two gypsies walking down our street playing accordions, one day last summer.
- The view down the Danube from the centre of Margit Bridge, with the Houses of Parliament on the left, then the Chain Bridge with Gellert Hill above it, and the Palace, and the Castle District, and all those colourful churches and apartment blocks along the Buda side. Especially at night when each one is individually illuminated and you can’t see that the river isn’t blue.
- The novelty of living abroad, experiencing new things every day and learning how to cope with them. Strange foreign things in the supermarkets, not being able to get cheddar cheese, grumpy checkout staff, horrendous bureaucracy, dirty pavements, busy trams, shit wine, dealing with painters and plumbers and kitchen fitters who all want to rip off the westerners, the non-existence of a facility to pay bills by direct debit, cockroaches, and the most incomprehensible language in the western hemisphere.
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