Budapest

Budapest is a wonderful city, I am considering dropping my overpriced Bay Area real estate and taking up the sweet life in central Europe. Fix bugs? I’d rather go soak in the thermal baths, thank you very much.

Photos:

1. Varosliget (City Park)
2. Around the hotel and in/near the contemporary art museum
3. Pest
4. Castle Hill, Szechenyi Bridge
5. Location: North Buda, Pest, Central Market

Eat: Cafe Vian, Cafe Moyo, Cafe Miro, Cafe Factory, Cyrano (Lunch); Mokka, Spoon, Dio, Avocado (Dinner). I would recommend all of these for meals to any US traveler save for Cafe Factory, but perhaps they’re just not a lunch sort of place — their beverages were excellent. The cafes around Liszt Ferenc ter seem to be the best place for lunch, the restaurants around Sas utca seem to be the best places for dinner, or so I determined in my week-or-so here. In general I don’t think I had a bad meal anywhere, but the meals that stood out the most were the dinners at Dio, Spoon, and Avocado. The lemonade here is outstanding and in general the restaurants here offer very solid, good food at tremendous value. Not a vegetable on a plate in sight unless you order a salad, though.

Sleep: We are at Zara Boutique Hotel, it’s very nice and the staff is very friendly, but you can tell that it’s a newish hotel as they seem surprised by some of my more odd requests, such as how to best mail cured salamis and goose liver paté back to the United States. The power went out on the whole block for several hours one day and it’s very hot here in June, it was madness.

Shop: Retrock & Retrock Deluxe, Eclectica. There are a number of great boutique-type shops showcasing the work of local artisans and designers but they must come and go frequently as a number of places we wanted to go as per a “young person’s guidebook”[1] were closed, while others were newly opened. Personally, I picked up some T-shirts, a pair of sandals (!) and a shoulder bag (ie, man purse), but Annika did a little better. West End is a waste unless you like shopping for world brands you can get at home at the same price, Vaci street is slightly less global commercial but not by much. One of my favorite games to play was to pick the store which had the best bad English slogans[2] on the clothes they sold and compare them against each other.

Info: We got the aforementioned “young person’s guidebook” when we checked into the hotel and it was pretty useful. In general we had a hard time finding a website like Yelp! for Budapest, but at least Google Maps works relatively well here.

Do: We did: wandering around downtown Pest, the Palace of Arts, the city park, the new Ludwig Contemporary Art Museum, Castle Hill and the funicular, Margaret Island and the Palatinus Baths, and lots of shopping. We spent a week here, probably could have filled a few more days with stuff to do, but maybe not another week.

Move around: The metro system is outstanding, always on time and easy to navigate. The above-ground trams are a little less reliable time-wise but also easy to use. We only took 1 bus to Margaret Island and we got a little lost. Everything was crowded since this is the high season. You would have to be a maniac to want to drive here.

Perhaps the most interesting thing here is this clash of cultures — you have hard-partying, seal-slick Russian girls down for the weekend vs. Birkenstocked, backpacked German tourists who are really intent on pushing you out of the way for the last yogurt in the minimarket vs. the English, who neither speak nor act forcefully enough to get what they want in this high-pressure environment. Ironically, as an American I felt pretty amused watching the Europeans go at each other, and tried to be polite and leave a nice tip.

At least from the perspective of a San Franciscan, Budapest is a bargain. I am seriously daydreaming about getting a vacation place here, I’ve gone as far as checking into some local real-estate websites. It’s really that much fun.

(Perhaps more updates as I collect my thoughts, and some more web links)

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1. You know what I’m talking about… urban tourist magazines with lots of ads from Furla and Leica and post-modern furniture stores and nightclubs. “Hello savvy young tourist without children! How would you like to spend your money on yourself today!”
2. “There are 52 week-ends per year, use them wisely”; “stripe code: red”; “Air Cup 1997″; “Famous sport club”