< Magazine Index > < Index For This Edition > < Subscribe >

When living abroad, it is important to see local religious and cultural traditions with the proper reverence. This means that when the Hungarians parade a 1,000-year-old severed hand through Budapest as they do each August to honor St. Stephen, the founder of the Magyar nation, you should not drunkenly laugh among your friends and scream out, “Dear God, they’re carrying a 1,000-year-old severed hand through the streets of the capital!” You may think you’re being sly, by screaming this in English, but the people of modern Budapest frequently know English and a lot of other languages. Ever since they settled in Central Europe’s Carpathian Basin some 1,200 years ago, after murderously rampaging through Central Europe, they’ve had to deal with the handicap of speaking a language nobody else on Earth can comprehend.  There was no beating in the streets after a certain visiting friend of mine yelped her insensitive

Budapest - Paris of the East - The Pearl of the Danube, The Little Paris, The City of Baths: Budapest has many names and many personalities... Buda and Pest, two cities situated on each side of the Danube River,  Budapest is a highly cultured city with a fine populace and it is also one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Expatriates from many nations enjoy the pleasures of living in Budapest. Everyone we have talked to gives Budapest an unquestioned five-star rating - there is much to do there, and the cost of living is very low considering the excellent cultural ambiance the city has to offer.

There’s James O’Leary, a lockjawed Princeton type who looks like a secret-service agent and knows Budapest’s underbelly so well that he’s been pounded by angry taxi drivers in the industrial suburbs, cuffed by Russian pimps in the city’s many “sexy clubs,” and threatened with various forms of dismemberment by corrupt, former Communist entrepreneurs who didn’t like his hardball reporting for a local English-language business newspaper.
Jim Lowney, a kind and generous New Jersey Irishman, once got beat up inside a downtown phone booth at 3 a.m.  He still doesn’t know why—an angry Hungarian drunk simply attacked him—but the cops found it funny.

Helpful local law enforcement

You can forgive the cops in this former Soviet-bloc country for seeking a little humor. Their pay is awful, and they are curiously ineffective at any duty except collecting bribes.  When a French radio journalist I know had her battered little Citroën stolen, the policemen made it clear they’d never locate the car, but they helpfully advised her to commit fraud in filling out the theft report.  She did what they told her and got her insurance company to pay for all sorts of expensive, nonexistent items she had stored in the vehicle—computers, cameras, diamonds, fine art, what have you.

A city made for wandering

Budapest is a strange and sometimes wonderful city. It has the bustle and scam artists of Moscow without that crumbling capital’s daily gruesome murders, political anarchy, and intolerable weather. The city was made for wandering and discovery, and everyone I’ve known there has made random exploration a regular habit at all hours. On summer nights, it’s good to hike around the Castle District overlooking Pest, or on Margit Island, a polluted woodland park in the middle of the Danube—the river that adds much of the drama and beauty to Budapest.

Budapest’s crime is worth just a few words of explanation. While car bombings and a handful of Mafia executions made the news in the late 1990s, there is more an essence of criminal seediness than any actual danger for those outside the international crime business. One sometimes sees a trio of bulky bodyguards with shaven heads, watching for trouble while their boss departs a Mercedes outside a four-star hotel. At a lousy café, it’s not rare to see low-level Slavic gangsters with their tight-fitting suits and telltale white socks worn with loafers, chain smoking and sipping Turkish coffee while checking out Budapest’s notoriously underdressed girls of summer. Enjoy the Elmore Leonard feel of these scenes, but don’t allow such things to obsess you; they’re not of concern unless you’re looking for trouble. There have been racist attacks on Gypsies and Africans, and a single tourist killing four years ago, but such grim incidents are far more common in the United States. The only crime a Western traveler is likely to experience is pickpocketing. When a bunch of scuzzy-looking kids piles into a metro train around you, watch out. The usual common sense applies. The other major crime involves restaurants with German menus and $60 entrees.

Sprawling Buda, urban Pest

As any $18.95 tourist guidebook will tell you, Buda and Pest were separate cities and the Danube was their frontier. Since 1874, the two parts—the lovely Buda hills to the west and the sprawling urban plain of Pest to the east—have been connected by municipal government and more recently by a series of shockingly ornate bridges. 

The best arrangement I ever had in this city of 2 million was living a block from the river off Szabadság Bridge, just west of the Hotel Gellért on Bartók Bela. It was an elaborate, dusty three-bedroom apartment with 18-foot-tall ceilings and a living room the size of a fine restaurant, and I got the luxury of walking across the Danube each morning on my way to work. I shared the place with two colleagues, for a total of $160 a month. On warm spring nights, we would open the huge windows to the street below, an endless circus of squeaking trams and honking Ladas, and let the Danubian breeze flow through while we conjured the ghost of Bartók and let his spooky Gypsy string quartets play through the boom box. On $800 a month, I lived better than I have in San Francisco, New Orleans, or Washington on $3,000.

Living well in general isn’t expensive in Budapest. If you avoid the standard tourist restaurants, a decent night out won’t cost more than $30, and even when the cab drivers double the fare, it’s still far cheaper than taxiing around Berlin. Some of the best entertainment in Budapest is either free or close to Communist-era prices, such as the museums, symphonies, operas, and fantastic Roman-Turkish baths.

The place is lousy with Irish pubs

The town is lousy with Irish pubs, electronica-blasting discos, strange Tahitian lounges, every sort of strip joint, riverboat bars, Chinese restaurants, Kansas City steakhouses, sushi bars, slick casinos, Mexican cantinas, Albanian pizzerias, and even a few surviving dark-paneled goulash joints where you can have—for less than $10—a big carafe of the sweet local red wine and breaded fried Camembert with a mysterious pork dish and a bowl of greasy goulash. 

If a restaurant offers foie gras, get it, love it, and don’t worry about the damned bird—most of France’s fatty goose-liver paté is grown in Hungary. Indulge also in a visit to at least one of the old domed hot-mineral-water bathhouses—the homosexual-leaning Rác, hip Király, and the fine Gellért, with its shocking and obscene Art Nouveau interior, are all wonderful in their ways—for a paltry $5-$10. (A massage runs about $30 extra, and it’s generally a severe beating.) 

Porn stars and cell-phone mobs

Nothing rivals just strolling the city. Get away from the tourist traps and gussied-up streetwalkers of Váci utca, where the local moms parade their sleek young daughters past couture shops, the strippers bark for customers, and a reasonably priced meal cannot be had. Watch for the Italian, French, and German pornography producers sitting in the cafés: Hungary provides more porn actresses than all the rest of Europe combined, and this is where many of the talent transactions take place, under the tree-lined shopping walks. Beware the cell-phone mobs who will walk right into you, because these fashion-conscious people have more cellular telephones per capita than the Americans.

But to walk by night across the massive Chain Bridge, through the fantastic, floodlit triumphal arches straddling the Danube, with the imposing Royal Palace topping the Buda hills, is to understand that the Magyars are obsessed with making an impression. You see it in the Budapest Stock Exchange, Europe’s biggest and most architecturally obnoxious trading room, built at the turn of the century like much of the city—this, in a nation that spent 46 years under Communist rule. You are dwarfed by this grandeur while walking down the Körút, Budapest’s great ringed boulevard. 

If you’ve got a taste for the music of Bartók and Liszt, a walk by the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music will make the soul feel good; it’s where Liszt lived and Bartók was a teacher. By now you’re near the Oktogon, a crazed gigantic intersection filled with traffic, promenading Hungarians, embassies, innumerable fast-food franchises, and, in the spring, lush shade trees around the cafés.

Very affordable...and increasingly pleasant

I first visited the city in 1992 and have been dropping by ever since. Friends like Lowney, a photojournalist who keeps leaving Budapest and moving right back, say the city has managed a rare feat in modern Central Europe: It still feels “weird” and is still cheap, yet daily living is significantly more pleasant than it was in the mid-1990s. He pays $200 monthly for his current fine apartment, with the only hassle being the annual ritual of the landlord’s coming to town from wherever and temporarily leaving the expatriate without a home. (This is completely normal; arrange standby accommodation.)

“I live here because after work, I can buy a cheap bottle of wine and stroll down some strange fog-shrouded Central European street I’ve never seen,” said Matt Welch, who worked for years in Budapest and wrote the introduction to the last Fodor’s guide to the town. “The suicide rate among Hungarians is among the world’s highest, yet Hungary is a pleasant place to live.”

The restaurants are better, Internet connections are finally cheap and reliable (about $30 monthly through Pronet.hu), ATMs are everywhere, metro lines have been extended and remodeled, and the local economy is making a dramatic swing upward after years of post-Communist doldrums. The latter means the often dour Hungarian character is getting a bit sunnier.

The trouble with “progress” 

Places don’t get better, as a rule. Beaches become more developed and more crowded, wilderness is ruined, traffic gets worse, prices skyrocket, local cultures die, and the tour buses crowd. But Budapest was already a big lunatic city, and its embrace of Western pop culture was already at a fever pitch when the Berlin Wall came down, even dozens of Dunkin’ Donuts and KFCs can’t change this city’s character.

And despite its Communist past, Hungary practiced “Goulash Communism,” basically meaning that it set up banking and industry to deal with the Western World when it seemed apparent the West was winning. While many Warsaw Pact nations were poor and backward, Hungary was rather well off and free, having learned from the Soviets’ horrid smashing of the 1956 Budapest rebellion that quiet revolutionaries live to tell about it. 
On Sept. 11, 1989, Hungary’s liberal government opened the border to the West. As it was a fellow Communist state, neighbors from other Warsaw Pact countries could drop by and, if they so desired, walk right into the promised land (Austria, at least). Hungary was ripe to make a seamless leap into Western Europe. It didn’t work as well as the George Soros establishment predicted, but it didn’t fall into neo-Stalinist nonsense the way its northern neighbor Slovakia did either.

Bordered by seven countries, with a capital recently invaded by young Chicago businessmen hustling cell-phone franchises, Hungary is a historically volatile nation that’s been on the wrong side of almost every war this millennium but finally has a decade of stability and political freedom behind it. The art of adaptation has been mastered in Budapest, and a bizarre, thrilling city awaits those with the inclination to discover it.

Ken Layne was formerly editor of Tabloid.net and new-media critic at Online Journalism Review. He worked throughout the 1990s as a journalist in Central Europe; he is currently an editor at United Press International’s foreign desk in Washington, D.C.