Jazz band
I have fallen in love with Budapest. At first, I was finding it hard to work up enthusiasm to come here. Previous cities: Kocise, Bratislava and Vienna had not impressed, sucking money for only sporadic satisfaction. In contrast, romping around tiny towns in the Slovakian mountains had been magnificent. On hot buses and waiting for late trains, I had wondered what was the point of travelling Eastern Europe. It's twice as difficult as in Western Europe, and, while half the cost, is still a lot of money to my voluntarily impoverished self. Why, I wondered, am paying to see second rate things? The Tatras do not compare to the Alps, no church can compare to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and no castle can compete with the sublime wonder of Neushwanstein in Germany (although I will admit the sprawling, decaying hulk of Sprisky Hrad was amazing). They're famous because they're the best. Eastern Europe has its own flavor, yes, but they're all just variations on a theme that I live with in Ukraine every day.
And so it went with Budapest. The guide promised only more churches and castles and Central European architecture. I had seen plenty of all and the farther west I went, the more money was required. Money was never a problem before: I lived on a teacher's salary but a college student's budget, had no debt and only one unused credit card with a zero balance. But as my pre-Peace Corps savings began to deplete, I wondered why I wasn't spending the money on Thailand or Egypt or Turkey, something radically different and utterly new.
Chain Bridge, with the Hungarian Parliment building in the background
Guards preparing for a parade
A statue by the Danube
But thank you Budapest. It is a New York City with history: none of the skyscrapers but still the compressed humanity that leads to the critical mass needed for vitality. The streets were an explosion of vendors and art. Booths cooking up hundreds of cuisines lined the streets and the closed-to-traffic chain bridge. The buildings were an amazing conglomeration of centuries of styles.
Budapest archetecture
A statue in front of Budapest's opera house
A vendor pulled me aside and offered me a couple free shots with a sling shot at a wooden targets spun around by a man pedalling a bike. The walnuts I shot missed and cracked on the back wall, but the crowd surged in after to take their try. Both ends of the chain bridge had live performances of every kind of music, all for free.
A girl tries the sling shot
Traditional dancers performing near the Chain Bridge
And behind me, as I drain the last of the cold Pepsi on a warm summer night, is Buda castle, on a hill and lit up and, having explored it today, can confirm it is a really cool castle. And past it, its Gothic spires reaching up into the blue deepening to black, is Mathias Cathedral and it's a damn beautiful cathedral and both were better than the dry words of the guide book and my own cynical expectations.
A turrent of Buda Castle
People relaxing in Buda Castle
Mathias Cathedral
And before me that Hungarian jazz band jams, its lead female singer having come onstage and giving a throaty and heavily-accented rendition of "I Love You Porgy", the crowd watching with steady eyes and tapping feet and I'm in Budapest and all is right with the world...