Sometimes deciding to go somewhere can be as simple as tracing a spinning a globe with a pointed finger, or tossing a dart at a map. This trip happened very much that way, and as we’ve repeatedly discovered, the most underplayed destinations often make for the most unexpected and memorable surprises. On a whim we decided to meet a friend here for a few days of absent minded wandering and discovery.
The main boulevard in front of our apartment that leads to and from the river was closed off to traffic that first night. Shortly after the sun went down we joined into a sea of people marching towards the water. Echoing in the distance we could hear Viennese waltz music. Behind ornate Austro-Hungarian buildings a constant cannon fire rippled off cement and stone. As the crowds grew thicker from more people pouring in from side streets, the cacophony rose in tandem. At the end of the block where the buildings gave way to unobstructed views up, down, and across Danube the the music crescendoed, while overhead, synchronized bombs of color exploded in the sky dancing to the rhythm. Glittering streamers of fire raced down into the water off the sides of the bridges. Ash and smoke twirled through the crowds standing on the shore. With our eyes closed and craned skywards, and jaws slack, it didn’t take any imagination to fall back in time to when the flashes in the sky were real bombs, and the march music was coming from real instruments. Budapest, it turns out, has a magical ability to drop her visitors into a semi-permanent time warp.
Five minutes of walking through her streets is all it takes as a reminder that this place once housed one of the greatest and longest European empires in history. The buildings display an intricate grandness that is the product of a bygone era, that has been regifted back to the people who walk through her streets now. It’s impossible to stroll along the riverbank, the great separator of two great cities conjoined as one, and not experience the same lighthearted butterflies you’d have from a first kiss. It left us breathless, awestruck, and euphoric. Sometimes that same breathlessness was a gut punch that knocked the wind out of us. Behind a chain link fence a world war two memorial of bronzed empty shoes were scattered on the river’s edge. Concert speakers lining the sidewalk for an event later that night played an ironically poignant song about the bonds of humanity.
We crossed a chain bridge guarded by two stoney lions and weaved through the crowds on the opposite riverbank where all the sights and smells of a celebration drifted in the air. Cold beers and homemade apricot liquor poured from taps. A folky band played on a stage and people danced. Giant charcoal baked apple breads dusted in cinnamon rolled off the grill into hungry hands. Sometime later, over satiated and exhausted we lost ourselves in one of Budapest’s great institutions; a bathhouse. Inside, fancifully tiled pools were tucked away in and endless maze of rooms. Locals seemed to have a purpose for each one; lap swimming, lounging for hours on end conversing, and water stretching, depending on their size and temperature. Outside, rows of lounge chairs surrounded a wave pool that would draw splashing crowds every thirty minutes. The three of us found our place in an adjacent hot spring and did like the locals do; soaked ourselves until our fingers were wrinkled and any worldly worries were sufficiently washed away.
By night, the palatial persona of the city fades to black its eastern European hard edge cuts through the darkness. Crowds from restaurants and bars spill out onto broken sidewalks smoking cigarets and clanking bottles. Ruins of buildings decimated by a long finished war, have been deliberately un-maintained and transformed into one of several infamous ruins bars in which we sipped drinks on shrapnel tables with twisted rusty plane parts hanging from the ceiling. Just before the sun begins to poke through the horizon as we strapped on our backpacks and left our apartment that next morning a few groups of friends sat still swirling the dredges of last nights beers, half an unopened pack still in front of them and no intention of going anywhere anytime soon; still lost in the alluring vortex of Budapest. So are we.
