Promenades and Comrades

On our first full day we took it easy and got the feel of the city by walking around. Much of present day Budapest dates from late 19th/early 20th century, and there are fine Art Nouveau buildings in varying degree of repair and serviceability. A particularly fine turn-of-the-century shopping arcade is just now being restored and returned to life.




Down to the Danube Embankment, our first view of this river of legend. The Embankment makes a fine promenade with international hotels, sidewalk cafes, gardens, and views of Buda castle across the river.




Downtown is pierced by long and pleasant pedestrian ways that host upscale tourist shops, gelato stands, and restaurants. There is a pleasing mixture of the traditional and the modern. Though a tourist promenade today, the area has hidden historical significance. This street, Vaci Utca, was a showcase of western luxury goods when Hungary was the most advanced and liberal of the Iron Curtain countries. Good communists came from all over the Soviet sphere to drool over the decadent spoils of capitalism. Even the Golden Arches had significance in those days, being the only McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain. Eating a Big Mac was an act of defiance, a political statement giving real meaning to "freedom fries". Today McDonald's gives its nod to Eurotastes with an adjoining "McCafe".




Another landmark in the area is the Great Market, a free-market hall surviving the depredations of two world wars and central planning. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher gave a historic address on its steps, heralding the coming of the open society. Little did any know how soon it would come.




We were pleased to find not all traces of the people's collectivist paradise erased. There are many exemplary buildings built by the Communists still (barely) standing in downtown Budapest. Some are in progress demolition, but enough remain to provide instructive contrasts.

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Arrival in Budapest

We flew KLM from Houston to Amsterdam, and Air Malev (KLM partner) to Budapest. The flight was as comfortable as 13 hours in coach can be, and completed without remark.

Our first contact with Budapest was quite favorable. The airport is comfortingly modern, efficient, and secure.
A polite taxi driver dropped us at our hotel, the Leo Panzio, centrally located on the Pest side of the Danube. Fairly modern rooms situated in an old building. The rickety open-cage elevator welcomes the guest on entry with a loud crack and a jolting drop of an inch, a most satisfying frisson.

We celebrated arrival in a nearby restaurant/beer-hall with cream of asparagus soup, gundel pancakes, cottage cheese dumplings, and Austrian beer. On leaving the restaurant we were arrested by an elderly Hungarian lady, well and expensively dressed, who informed us that her family had at one time owned most of the commercial buildings along the street. She claimed current residence in Miami and Palm Springs, and assured us (repeatedly) that she was a "lady of means". Not releasing us, she commandeered a prominent table in the restaurant and proceeded to write out with painfully slow but clear script the particulars of her life, addresses, personal references, and friends in the United States. She seemed to be urgently trying to establish her place and her significance. Why this Magyar ancient mariner latched onto two jet-lagged travelers to hear her tale was never explained. Perhaps a local "character", a victim of terminal nostalgia bordering on dementia. We extricated ourselves with difficulty and left, she to her memories and we with our first mystery of the east.

Why Eastern Europe?

People often ask us with apparent puzzlement, "Why did you choose ___?" where ___ is the destination of our vacation in any given year. That is somewhat like the archetypal Jewish mother who gives her son two neckties for his birthday. When he puts on the first one, she asks in a voice of practiced suffering, "You didn't like the other one?" There are many countries, and we have but one vacation a year. So choices must be made. And this year, it is Eastern Europe.

It seems a good time to go. More than a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain -- time enough for hotels, cuisine, and travel services to reflect the values of the free world, but not time enough for the former Soviet "clients" to become homogenized into Euroculture. We hoped to find still a whiff of the exotic, the forbidden, a distant echo of Graham Greene or le Carre. But washed down with good Austrian beer and well served by T-Mobile.