Easter in Budapest
Airports always make you forget who you really are and encourage you to feel glamorous for a few hours. The goods on sale, the environment, everything about the experience tells you 'you're special, leading this jet-set life-style – what an exciting life you have'. Of course the truth is that you can't afford any of the shiny things on offer and will spend an hour and a half queuing to get through the x-ray machine. They do a very good job of helping you forget this but airports are essentially a sterile environment.
Coach stations always have the opposite effect – you feel the lowest of the low. Coaches always seem to leave at inhumanely early or late hours. People are vulnerable and defensive at coach stations, and the environment is somehow hostile. Certainly not glamorous.
Train stations however are to me the most alluring of places. Though major train stations are often run down, in bad parts of town, and busy, shuffling places, there is something incredibly exciting about the possibilities offered by that huge Departures board. This is especially true on the Continent where the destinations offered include far flung corners of Europe and beyond.
In England we are used to trains going as far as Scotland or Cornwall, but to stand in Paris and see in front of you the opportunity to hop on a train for Berlin, Naples, Istanbul, Moscow.........it feels like a real adventure could begin. Perhaps it's that knowledge that you could just pick your destination and run away.
Hlavni Nadrazi Station buffet
Friday night I took the sleeper train from Prague's crumbling Art Nouveau Hlavni Nadrazi station to Budapest, a journey of 9 hours. I've never taken a sleeper train before. They always seem extra glamorous – something of a James Bond film, escaping across the border about them.
Modern sleepers are a masterpiece of space and design. Three people stacked in a space just over six foot long, less than four foot wide and eight or nine feet high. Sounds like hell, but the design is so good it is pretty comfortable.
The third berth is on a shelf out of sight above
I shared my cabin with two young lads from Mexico over inter-railing on the Continent for a month. It wasn't the best night's sleep of my life – you tend to wake up every time the train stops – but I've had much worse. It was certainly an easy way to eat up the miles and arrive in Budapest in time for breakfast.
Having seen Prague and Vienna, I was very keen to take up the opportunity to visit Jeff on tour again and see the third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was also keen to see the Art-Nouveau architecture for which the city is so famous.
Arriving in Budapest you are aware that you have certainly travelled East and that the lingering influence of the former Communist regime is stronger even than in the grey parts of Prague. The city is quite run down in many places and redevelopment spreading only very slowly.
There were not quite the number or quality of Art Nouveau buildings that I had hoped for - though some beautiful examples certainly - but it is a city with some good buildings generally and the wide straight boulevards lined by huge classical edifices remind one of many Italian cities.
One thing is sure - whilst budding architects in the West were playing with building bricks made up of squares, rectangles and circles, the Magyars had their hands in a whole different toy box. Parallelograms abound and all sorts of strange un-classical shapes are thrown into the mix.
The Gresham Insurance Building
The main sight of Budapest is 'that view' looking over the Danube to the magical Parliament Building, and it certainly is wonderful.
A view from the castle over to the Parliament.
The 'Blue Danube' is actually quite green up close.
The area around the castle in Buda is older than the rest of the city and reminds me of the similar spot in Prague. It is much less tourist oriented than Prague which was refreshing.
Elderly busker playing his inventively supported zither
It was Easter weekend when I was there and there was a jolly Spring Market in the centre of town, with folk music and really lovely craft stalls. Also good fast food. I eyed up this interesting looking stew...
...then saw it's main ingredient.....
........and settled instead upon fried potatoes and onions and a huge solid sausage red with paprika. Really delicious.
On Easter Sunday I became an opera tourist and went to a morning performance of Kodaly's The Spinning Room – a piece I had never heard of. The opera, based on Transylvanian Folklore, was largely en excuse for lots of happy dancing peasants in matching costume but with a bit of dramatic misery thrown in. A very old-fashioned production, it was nonetheless rather wonderful and performed with love and conviction. I enjoyed it much more than many of the productions I have seen in Central Europe which have tried to be more contemporary.
The Opera House is beautiful inside - ok many are, but this one is perfect in scale and grand without being overwhelming. One of the nicest theatres I have ever been in.
I paid about a pound for my ticket in an Upper Circle Box, which I shared with a lovely old Hungarian couple and with whom I communicated with lots of smiles and broken German (theirs as broken as mine).
An unexpected pleasure was discovering the Tutankhamen exhibition in Budapest. I had missed it in London yet have found the images of the boy king's treasures totally absorbing since spending many hours as a small child in the early 70's pouring over the catalogue from the first London exhibition.
The exhibition in Budapest was in a set of vaulted labyrinthine cellars which added to the magic. I couldn't believe how close one could get to all the main treasures. Only small objects were behind glass, and the rest were right there in easy reach. Really stunning.
The outer and middle coffins
The solid gold inner coffin
So a brief two-day visit to an interesting city, but one which has an air of sadness.
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