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.