My Budapest

Sightseeing

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:48:32 -0400

There are people who collect places and people who collect the way places feel...their soul, their gestalt, their geist. There are destination tourists and lifestyle tourists. Most major capitols provide ample grist for the destination mill; some few also have something special to offer those seeking the ineffable. Some present their destinations as wondrous, when in fact it's really about something deeper and less tangible.

Budapest is a bit like Oz. For the destination tourist, it has plenty of wonders to check off and bring home digitized, but that’s really just a facade; the place is actually about its pace, its rhythm, its spirit. My advice to you is to treat your entire visit as though it were a trip to a thermal bath: ease yourself down into the water, allow yourself to adjust to its temperature and density, become one with it. Immerse yourself in it.

Visiting sights won’t get in your way, but be aware that doing so involves a willing suspension of disbelief. Unlike most places in Europe and Asia, Budapest offers very few sights that are more than 150 years old. While much of the city feels as though it’s been there forever, the odds are that that classical building you are staring at was built for the Millennial Exposition in 1896. The period from 1880 - 1930 must have been an incredible time in Budapest, with all those architecturally oldstyle instant landmarks going up not quite swiftly enough to avoid being displaced by remarkable examples of starkly modern Deco and Bauhaus pioneers.

And, a bit like Disneyworld, the scale is subtly off, both physically and metaphysically. Walt Disney, taking a page from Frank Lloyd Wright (who built entry halls with low ceilings so that visitors would feel a rush of expansiveness as they walked out of them into his very high-ceilinged living spaces), built the entry to his parks (simulating early 20th Century America) at 5/6 scale, so that children would feel larger and more empowered than in their everyday world.

All the major sights in Budapest are based on something like this philosophy, though with an opposite spin (perhaps again more like Oz): they are large, awe-inspiring, lavish, grand. And yet, they seem somewhat understated. Budapest is filled with an unusual number of almosts ...

Here is the second oldest Metro in Europe (of course, you’ll be reminded that it’s the oldest in Continental Europe, trumped only by London’s offshore outpost).

Or the second largest synagogue in the world (after NYC’s Temple Emanu-El; though some will point out that it actually seats more congregants and is therefore in one sense at least, larger).

There is a Parliament building rather like England’s, indeed larger than it, but sections have never been used and its size doesn’t prevent it from being more homage than edifice.

And the Castle, in fact, the entire Castle District, is so huge and expansive that one hardly is conscious of the fact that no one ever really lived there, that Hungary has been almost continuously an occupied country not the seat of an Empire (while bristling at their occupiers, Hungarians nevertheless have acted more like hosts than like vanquished subjects, except, perhaps, towards the Russians).

Budapest has a kind of modest grandiosity, a self-deprecating self-assurance. It contrasts vividly, for me at least, to Tokyo. In Tokyo I always feel effusively greeted but never welcomed. In Budapest the welcome is pervasive and warm.

Buying Gifts in budapest

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:45:07 -0400

The truth is, there ain’t much in the trinket shops that’s distinctively Budapest and what there is lies far afield from the kitschy knickknacks that pass for souvenirs in the tourist venues.

If you stick to the tourist shops, there’s an odd momentum that builds as you walk down Vaci utca from Vörösmarty ter passing one shop after another selling identical geegaws, one stand after another with the same baubles. The galleries of not-quite-art and almost-antiques at prices that are sobering for Budapest (but still low enough to allow them to pass for bargains for travelers used to Tokyo, Paris, and London). The fashion shop of not-really-branded could-be-designer goods, and the small branches of large international chains that seem not to have gotten this year’s shipment of goods.

As you walk, the need to find something to bring back for the kids, the dog-sitter, or the in-laws accelerates, expands, consumes, and then one explodes past the Burger King into the Central Markethall. There, upstairs on the mezzanine, the bazaar repeats in microcosm: exactly the same articles, one notch (maybe more) down in quality and several down in price, that permeated Vaci. Knock-offs of wannabes.

There are gems and bargains in Budapest, but they tend not to be really gift-y sorts of things. Custom-made shoes. Shearling coats. Whole lobes of foie gras that won’t make it through the armed and policedog-accompanied Agriculture Inspectors at the border of your home country. Antique furniture. Costly but extraordinary bottles of rare Tokaji wine.

And yet, for many, the hunt is as exciting as the conquest, and Budapest rewards the diligent and patient and daring (and those willing to elbow their way determinedly through the language impasse)

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:46:52 -0500

Budapest has a slightly tattered quality; it's a bit frayed around the edges like the most comfortable chair in a private club, and this pervasive shabbiness disguises the fact that renovation and construction are constantly taking place everywhere. The streets are being torn up and repaved, cranes dot the skyline, the Parliament is perennially hidden by scaffolding