City of soggy lungs and statues
(First published in The Weekender, August 2007)
THE air was crisp, the ground soggy as I tumbled through the open doors of the rickety yellow bus, onto the muddy pavement.
I looked around. An empty warehouse behind me, some houses in the distance. No sign of human life. I was 9000km from home and about to walk among the nightmares of some of Hungary’s millions of Cold War survivors. Clutching my map I made for the giant brick wall that marked the entrance.
A few days earlier I’d thought about how stereotypically eastern Europe Budapest is. It’s almost as if the architects, residents, restaurateurs, border guards and hotels have all conspired to make sure that it is everything that your imagination expects it to be. If you feel like you’re stepping into the middle of a Bond film set in the Cold War, it’s because everyone wants you to.
Having said that, if you can forgive them the weather, the mafia-controlled taxi drivers and surly service staff, the country is very travelable.
There are plenty of trinkets to blow your euros on; the city is relatively safe for the late-night map-clutching tourist; and the public transport system is quick, cheap, clean and efficient once you get past the indecipherable station names and Romanian buskers resident in the subways.
But back to my trip out into the hills around the capital. All my maps had an intriguing arrow pointing west-ish of the city, labelled Szoborpark (Statue Park, for those who battle with Hungarian — and just about everyone except for the Hungarians does), the implication being that it was too far out of town to bother detailing the route. A bit more reading and I learned that the park was the Hungarian equivalent of the Apartheid Museum, a dumping ground for the sinister, overbearing statues favoured by the Soviet regime when the country was still on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. By placing it on the outskirts of the city, the residents were making a clear statement about their past: it’s gone, but not forgotten.
On this day I was the only person in the park, the sense of creepiness intensified by tinny communist anthems echoing from old speakers. The entrance comprises a pair of dramatic gates flanked by a statue of an open-palmed Lenin and the park is laid out along a neat path lined by all the statues that used to preside over the streets and public avenues of Hungary.
And the communists did like their statues. There are dozens of them — all deathly serious and most with triumphant fists aloft. The fact that they have all been exiled to the outer edge of the city makes it a strangely comical sight — and one can’t help feeling slightly sorry for the subjects of the statues, as one might a former dictator toppled from his pedestal and made to mix once more with the people he oppressed (it is almost always a “he”.)
While its location is a clue to the horror these images hold for the average Hungarian, what I found most unsettling was that people had bought houses right on the edge of the park, with windows overlooking the collection of former dictators and calls to communist glory. What horror they must feel each morning when they step out to pick up the morning paper and bottle of milk. Perhaps they shrug it off as part of growing up and moving forward.
I found the whole experience slightly surreal, statues presiding stony-faced and humourless over an empty, muddy field, probably slightly bewildered at their fall from grace.
For a country that gave us Rubik’s Cube, the ballpoint pen and the helicopter, the Hungarians are surprisingly uncelebratory. It’s as if everything is just a bit too much trouble — and this is as true of the five-star hotels as it is of the restaurants and metro ticket offices. I stayed at the boutique Andrassy Hotel, a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World group, which has very classy rooms at a relatively reasonable rate. A hotel’s location is usually one of the most important factors when choosing where to stay and the Andrassy satisfies; it is on the Pest side of the river just a short stroll to the nearest metro station or a relaxing wander through tree-lined avenues which will get you to the heart of the city.
It was a comfortable base, and quite often a welcome relief from the cold and hardness of the city. The food in the hotel was disappointing, though — congealed scrambled eggs and hard-centred potatoes didn’t give me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Luckily my self-guided walking tour of Budapest gave me reason enough. Unquestionably it is by travelling on foot that one gets the best feel for a city, and this one is fascinating. Despite Statue Park’s best efforts at resettlement, there are still reminders of the country’s communist past with every step — the most obvious being its architecture, usually stern and full of foreboding. The austere and unrelenting Military Court of Justice gave me goosebumps as I walked past, and I found the Hungarian National Museum simply too intimidating to go near. More tranquil, but slightly sinister, is Margaret Island, a 2,5km-long island in the middle of the Danube. I had an eerily quiet walk along it, a stroll that took nearly an hour with just the occasional bicycle or bus rushing past.
Equally sedate but less chilling — in more than one sense — are the famous Hungarian baths. You will have seen, in most photos of eastern Europe, pictures of elderly men playing chess in a swimming pool. These pictures are usually taken at the Szechenyi baths housed in a stunning neo-Baroque building opened in 1913. The city was recovering from a snowstorm when I decided to go for a swim in the Baths, and I did question my sanity as I stepped out from the warmth of the Andrassy to trek down the icy main road.
After navigating the stern bureaucracy at Szechenyi’s entrance — a surly exchange of money for a grubby ticket and a shrugged answer to my questions about what to do next, I slipped on my hired swimming costume (at the time it seemed like a good idea), ventured outside and lowered myself into what is essentially a steaming swimming pool. It’s slightly bizarre sitting in a pool, surrounded by snow, watching someone play chess, but that’s what I did for an hour or two, together with a few dozen locals and Americans.
The most challenging part of a journey to Hungary has to be the language — it is notoriously difficult to learn, belonging to the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Finnish and Estonian. Its closest relatives are several obscure languages spoken in Siberia. All of this makes travel in the country slightly exhausting, but when a waiter puts a bowl of steaming chicken in front of you on a snowy day, you’ll forgive him the last three meals of unspeakable innards and off-cuts you were served after pointing to something at random on the menu.
The language becomes largely irrelevant when, sitting in a restaurant called Fatal, you observe someone being served a giant bowl filled with Lung in Sour Sauce. Bill please!
Hungarians are generally unadventurous in their cuisine and it’s a case of paprika with everything. If you enjoy Gulyas — a peppery soup with sour cream, beef and potatoes — you’ll be fine. If you don’t, you’ll be hard-pressed to survive. Unless, of course, you clamber through the cowardly tourist’s escape hatches of Burger King, Pizza Hut and KFC.
Budapest is, in most respects, a fascinating city. It is relatively inexpensive and is one of those places you’ll never regret visiting. Unless you eat the lung. In which case you deserve whatever you get.
