It will be nice to spend a week in Hungary as a complete tourist, and it will be nice to show Pete a city he’s never visited before. We got a great deal on flights with BA, booked months and months ago in a moment of utter certainty that we would still be an item at the end of August.
The only trouble is that I think I have already seen and done everything, and it’s hard to know where to start. For the first few nights we’re staying on the banks of the Danube in some luxury, because Marriott do pretty good weekend deals. Nick is disgusted that we should stay somewhere so blandly international, but in the city there is a dearth of charming Hungarian-style pensions.
We arrive late at night, but first thing the next morning, we’re going out to get breakfast in a cukraszda and then cross the river to the Buda side of the city and take the funicular up to the Castle District, from where we’ll be able to look down on our charming concrete hotel. Fortunately I still have half a block of BKV tickets, which will do until I can bravely approach a ticket counter and try out my rusty and never-particularly-good-anyway Hungarian, at which point Pete will be able to observe the charming customer service skills that characterise the Hungarian ticket desk person, who will refuse to understand me until I wave the old block of tickets at her and push money under the little window.
Castle District has a lot of museums, but the best thing about it is certainly the colourful cobbled streets, the amazing tiled roof and circular window of the Mátyás Church, and the wedding-cake effect Fisherman’s Bastion, which, outrageously, they charge you to climb on. And it smells of wee. But it does offer a great photograph opportunity of the Houses of Parliament opposite.
From the Castle, we can walk down to Batthyány Ter and along the river to the Margit Bridge, the centre of which offers my favourite view of the city – here is where your panoramic camera comes in handy.
The centre of Margit Bridge is also the place where you can get on to Margit Island, which is probably the coolest place in the city, surrounded by water and covered with trees. The problem with Margit Island is the danger of being run over by children in pedal carts and idiots on two-person-side-by-side bikes.
We’ll walk, or take the tram perhaps, if it’s hot, over the rest of the bridge and back into the Pest side of the city, where more stuff is happening. The main street runs in an arc from Margit Bridge round to another bridge (Erzsebet Bridge?) further down the river, and you can get a tram all the way round, because it’s much too far to walk. Here is where all the shops and most of the restaurants are, and the leafy squares full of cafés and bars, and the sudden yellow buildings and the tourist tat markets. Here is where we will escape into the air-conditioned Westend shopping centre if it’s too hot, or into the Kossuth cinema opposite, if it’s raining.
Of course, when you’re really a tourist, going to the cinema to watch a mainstream movie with subtitles is the wrong thing to do. Instead we can go to the one museum in the city that I am still curious about, the Terror House. This delightfully named cultural edifice is at the end of the street where I used to live. I could see the word TERROR emblazoned on its walls from my bedroom window. It’s the former headquarters of the Hungarian secret police, and last time I checked, charged foreigners ten times as much as Hungarians to get in. My curiosity has yet to reach the level where I don’t find this outrageous.
Another thing that is really nice to do in the rain is sit in the thermal baths; in fact, rain or no rain, this is probably the top of my list of must-do Budapest experiences. The novelty of hot sticky mineral water under blue skies or grey will never wear off for me. The wrinkly old germans standing under the fountains, the enormous women in the sauna, the ancient crowd of chess players who never move from one visit to the next. You just have to be there in the soup with them, to know what I’m raving about.
After we have taken the waters, we will walk over to the funfair, which boasts the oldest roller coaster in Europe. Really, it boasts about this. You should see it, it’s frightening. The wooden struts creak as the cars hurtle around. There’s no way that thing is safe. Next door to this is the zoo, the best bit of which is the Elephant Gate, which you can admire without going inside, thank you very much. Animal lovers would not particularly enjoy that zoo.
Moving swiftly on, we’ll walk back round the park to Heroes Square, where I once tried to stand up on rollerblades. But these days I have to be careful not to break my wrist again, so sadly I have to retire from rollerblading. In the winter, the boating lake nearby is turned into an ice rink, and I’ve never yet managed to skate on it; I don’t suppose I ever will, now.
The one other thing that I always show tourists in Budapest is the city market, which is an amazing building both inside and out. We will need to go here to buy kolbasz and paprika to bring home with us. We will also have to go and look at the sad-eyed fish in the tanks downstairs, and the bright-coloured jars of pickled peppers [obvious joke, I’m not gonna make it].
When we have thoroughly done the city we will venture out of it a little way. We might take the chairlift up to the lookout, because that’s so calm and quiet and pleasant. Or if Pete wants to, we will go to the Szobor Park where all the statues of Marx and Lenin and Glory Of The Working Man kinda thing were put, after the fall of Communism. I like it there, but I’ve been twice and there’s not that much to see, but it is quite impressive and extremely photogenic.
Then we will venture further, and I’m thinking maybe Balatonfured with Tihany as a daytrip. I’ve never been to either of these places, but they’re on the shores of Lake Balaton, a couple of hours out of the city by train. There we can stay in the charming rustic pension, and there we will have to try out our Hungarian, because we’re more likely to encounter German speakers than English speakers, and my German is worse than my Hungarian.
And then there’s one of the main reasons that I ever travel anywhere: food and drink. In Hungary, goulash is a soup. A very good soup, if you eat it in the right place. You can live on soup in Hungary. Cream of garlic soup…. Chicken and tarragon soup… onion soup in a roll… cold fruit soup. Or you can have a proper meal, which will consist mostly of meat and potatoes, with a chilli and some pickled cabbage making up your eight portions of fruit and veg. And if you try really hard, you might find some drinkable wine, but you know I’ll only be there for the Bloody Mary.
