I cannot resist quoting from a beautifully written article that I read after my recent trip to Budapest :-
"midnight in the enchanting décor of the Rudas Turkish baths. Half asleep we slip among languid bodies in the red marble octagonal basin. …..…it's easy to relax into the ambient hubbub ... Read review
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Advantages: Great for adults, cheap, cultural Disadvantages: Not much for Kids, the language.
...after my recent trip to Budapest :-
"midnight in the enchanting décor of the Rudas Turkish baths. Half asleep we slip among languid bodies in the red marble octagonal basin. …..…it's easy to relax into the ambient hubbub which you can muffle by sinking up to your ears.……and we float lost in daydreams."
Budapest has a turbulent history with its greatest period arguably being the 19th Century when it emulated ... ...a good job of gutting Budapest and when they were forced to leave by the oncoming Russian army, they blew up all the bridges, including the famous Chain Bridge, which was originally based on the idea of the chain bridge in Marley, Buckinghamshire. Luckily most of the city has now been beautifully renovated including the Chain Bridge, and the Jewish quarter. Budapest used to have a larger Jewish population of around 450,000 before WW2 but the Germans ... more
I cannot resist quoting from a beautifully written article that I read after my recent trip to Budapest :-
"midnight in the enchanting décor of the Rudas Turkish baths. Half asleep we slip among languid bodies in the red marble octagonal basin. …..…it's easy to relax into the ambient hubbub which you can muffle by sinking up to your ears.……and we float lost in daydreams."
Budapest has a turbulent history with its greatest period arguably being the 19th Century when it emulated Vienna as one of Europe's greatest cities.
However, during World War 2, the Germans did a good job of gutting Budapest and when they were forced to leave by the oncoming Russian army, they blew up all the bridges, including the famous Chain Bridge, which was originally based on the idea of the chain bridge in Marley, Buckinghamshire. Luckily most of the city has now been beautifully renovated including the Chain Bridge, and the Jewish quarter. Budapest used to have a larger Jewish population of around 450,000 before WW2 but the Germans managed to exterminate three-quarters of them in Auschwitz, Dachau etc., including Einstein's wife who wasn't even Jewish but had family connections. Only 100,000 remained in 1945.
Budapest like many capitals, is the very soul of Hungary and to foreigners like me, other Hungarian towns simply don't exist. Who has heard of Debrecen for example, the second largest city, with a population nearly the size of Southampton and with a far more interesting history that goes back well before the year 1400? Hardly anyone outside of Hungary that's for sure but it's really there and the photographs look lovely.
I spent a snowy week here in Budapest in 1989 and it was indeed a great pleasure to return. At that time I recall only three things,
Firstly going somewhat reluctantly with a colleague to the casino in Buda. The Casino would only accept hard currency, the most popular then being German Deutchmarks. I had a 50 pfennig piece and put it in the first machine I saw and couldn't believe it when I won the jackpot This machine was one of those old mechanical handle jobs and the money just spewed all over the floor in one horrible puke, about £200 worth. . Secondly I remember the simply beautiful elegant ladies in long evening dresses who were unrolling themselves in the sumptuous armchairs of my hotel reception area. I was naïve enough to ask my Hungarian host why they were there - not what you might think - well sort of - but their families had clubbed together to have their elegant dresses made in the hope that they might lure them into a marriage which would get them out of what then was the gloomy prospect of an immediately post-communist Hungary
Thirdly I remember eating superbly in a restaurant with only three tables and a 5-piece band playing ferocious gypsy music. My three companions and I were being plied with the equally ferocious local fire water, a kind of clear pear brandy and smashing the emptied glasses of whatever it was into their glowing fireplace - oh the excesses of a mis-spent middle age!! The invoice I remember in total was about £10 a head.
AND TODAY?
FORGET Buda!! Buda is a pretty but sleepy rather dull town except for the baths.
Because the heart and soul of the capital rests in Pest on the Danube's left bank
Buda is still yawning while Pest is still buzzing with activity. Yellow streetcars screech along the quays. Like Buda and Pest, the barges and streetcars move at two different speeds, parallel and incompatible.
But Buda has the baths. It was the Romans who discovered the hot waters that bubble away under the city. Today the Hungarians have inherited their bath culture. There are two main baths in Buda, the Art Nouveau masterpiece of Gellert with 36deg C water under a huge glass roof. Szechenyl has an extravagant neo-baroque canary yellow décor around an outdoor pool . Nothing has really changed in these baths since the times of the Ottoman pashas.
( Incidentally, a little tip for pronouncing Hungarian words, the "Z" in Sz words, reduces the "S" to the sound we would use in English in Sausage for example. On its own, in Hungarian it has a "Ch" sound.)
SO TO MY OWN CRITIQUE BASED REALLY ON A LONG WALK.
To be perfectly frank I had had no desire to look around Budapest. I had decided to stay in my hotel in the city centre for the Friday afternoon and evening and leave as scheduled for the airport first thing Saturday morning. However, I soon became restless and after lunch, decided to take a stroll through the city.
Well you can read all the factual details in any Internet article, with far more precision. However I am going to say how it FEELS and let me thus say without any hesitation - BUDAPEST IS AN ABSOLUTELY GREAT CITY.
Its architecture is out of this world with a mix of London and Paris all in one and it has a far mightier waterfront. The Danube is simply one big river. The opera house inside with its painted vaulted ceilings is to die for; it has an active regularly changing repertoire. There are the bronze statues, the parks, the buildings, the genuinely cheap designer boutiques, the little tramways. It also has a modern metro. And to cap it all most of it costs a third of the price (of London or Paris).
Like in the heady days of yesteryear when students could afford to live in apartments on the banks of the Seine in Paris, they still do in Budapest, and you can actually buy a one bed apartment overlooking the Danube for Euros 78,000 - I know because I saw several at around this price in the estate agent windows.
The city has a Bohemian highly active café culture and there appear to be taverns of great character all over the place. I don't drink beer much any more, but I forced myself to go down into one of these caverns and have a litre glass of delicious local draft beer - it cost me 400 Forint, about £1.10. And yes they do smoke in the taverns but not in the restaurants; they are smarter than us, they are allowed to choose for themselves.
I actually met a middle aged English couple who had moved to Hungary two years ago from Norfolk because they were fed up with our nanny state and were having a wonderful retirement for half the price and half the hassle.
I know I was only here a very short time but I must say the place had a lasting impression on me and I would like to come back. I have read up about all the things I have missed.
I missed Varosliget and the apparently beautiful City Park with its fairy tale castle, I missed the zoo, I missed a tram ride, I missed most importantly the Szechenyo baths, I missed the Citadel and the Acadamy of Art, the new Concert Hall….the list goes on.
So when I come back , here's what I'd do.)
MY GREAT BUDAPEST HOLIDAY,
Firstly, I don't like that many operas so I'd check the programmes on the internet to make sure that during my stay in Budapest I could go to the opera and see something I would enjoy, top whack , best seats were about £45.
Then, dates sorted, fly to Budapest, hopefully avoiding the London airports. Bristol, Bournemouth or Exeter would be better. We would have also looked for deals on the internet for hotel accommodation. It would have to be 3 nights overlooking the Danube - all the big hotels are there like Sofitel or the Sheraton.
We would walk the city and the riverside, we would do the trams, the parks, the opera, the boutiques, the cafes and even throw in a museum or two and we would without any doubt do the baths of Buda at midnight. . After 3 nights there, we would take the hydrofoil that operates from April to October down the Danube. In 5½ hrs and 140 miles later you are in Vienna, one night there, well that's another city , then fly home the following day, about 6 days in all.
Hungary is a now a stable country politically, but is going through a hard patch economically with high unemployment, - their capital city deserves to be seen by more people than go there now, so give it a go!!!!
As a footnote I must touch on a difficult subject namely the Hungarian language. Luckily more and more Hungarians in Budapest speak English these days.
Having been with a group of Hungarians who spoke no English, as I had been for the previous three weeks is a big problem. You can speak French German Spanish, Farsi Malay or Arabic at them - wasting your time!
For those interested in languages, Hungarian is not an Indo-European language but an Uralic language and has no connections with any other European language except to a very small degree with Finnish.
It is an agglutinative language, that is to say it uses a number of affixes including suffixes, prefixes and a circumfix to define the meaning of the grammatical function. Instead of prepositions which are common in English (by, to, from, with etc) it only uses post positions. It is one of the most difficult languages in the world and is spoken by a total of around 14m people, around 10.5m of whom are in Hungary and around its many borders including an isolated enclave in Romania.
Advantages: Beautiful architecture, loads to do Disadvantages: Prices rising steadily, fairly expensive accommodation
...fascinating and exotic cities?
Budapest is often described as one of the "great European capitals" and mentioned in the same breath as Vienna or Paris. However, mention the city to most people and they will associate it with the Communist era rather than the "belle epoque".
In September 2003 I was lucky enough to travel round central and eastern Europe by train taking in 5 countries, all of which were formerly under the Soviet sphere of influence, ... ...all the places I saw, Budapest was most like the cities of western Europe and seemed to have that cosmopolitan air that the grand European cities possess.
This is for the most part due to it's history - it was the second city of the Habsburg empire and, up to the turn of the twentieth century, Budapest was close behind Paris with a reputation for hedonism and style. This is evident in the architecture of the Pest part of the city with wide, tree-lined ...
fizzytom 09.01.2004 (29.04.2004)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Budapest (Hungary)
Advantages: a good mixture of western and eastern europe, inexpensive, not overcrowded with tourists Disadvantages: sights are not overwhelmingly impressive, less westernized, and less clean, than e.g. Prague
...prepared me for how westernized Budapest actually is in the present day. The only remnant of Communism I could immediately distinguish was the rather large proportion of shabby Lada cars on the streets of the Hungarian capital, probably dating back to pre-1990 days (for I doubt Hungarian Lada sales are all that significant now).
Tourism has, of course, expanded rapidly since the Soviet Union’s decline, and we were given ample indication of ... ...by young representatives of the Budapest Tourist Board (or something of the sort). Another representative of the same organization, after finding out that we had already reserved a quad room at the Hostel Landler, directed us to their free minibus service outside the train station. This entailed a journey across Budapest in a rundown 9-seater van, with an unresponsive driver; but we could not complain, since the trip was free, and saved us a great ...
Marechal_Grouchy 04.09.2001
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Budapest (Hungary)
Advantages: Attractive old buildings Disadvantages: Little English spoken. (How's your Hungarian)
I visited Budapest for a long weekend just recently with fellow Ciao-ite Discobunny. I had inter-railed around much of Europe the summer before and was expecting a city much like Prague but was very much surprised at what I found.
Budapest you probably know is two beautiful cities for the price of one. Buda and Pest are joined by numerous bridges and an act of unification only dating back to 1878.
Buda, on the left bank of the mighty Danube is ... ...treat for all visitors to Budapest is a trip to one of its numerous thermal spas the most famous being the very ornate Gellert. All are well worth a trip but couples should be wary of segregation. We visited the communal Szechenyl baths in the north east of Pest (and conveniently about a minute’s walk from a metro stop) which are one of the largest in Europe and get a definite recommendation. Don't miss out on the whirl pool effect in the far ...
roons_y 25.03.2001
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Budapest (Hungary)
Advantages: Culture, cost and the Danube Disadvantages: Gypsy violinists in your soup
...the peaceful Buda side of Budapest overlooking the glorious River Danube.
Nothing we had read about Budapest prepared us for the delights we were about to see and experience in this fascinating city. Expectations were entirely different from the reality. Why did we imagine we were visiting an oppressed Eastern-Bloc country? The very mention of Budapest conjured up images of the 1956 Uprising against Communist rule, the Soviet tanks mowing people ... ...I found the history of Budapest very moving as it is related to the visitor in its proud displays of statues and monuments of war heroes, museums, palaces and art galleries.
There are over sixty museums and art galleries in Budapest ranging from international collections (Why do I still get excited when I see an original Turner or a Van Gogh?) and others such as the Hungarian National Museum and more local interests. The city is a feast to wonder ...
mornev 25.11.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Budapest (Hungary)
Advantages: Excellent Service, nice People Disadvantages: Price
...I found particularly funny in Budapest that the carpet on the floors was very imaginatively arranged there. With dominos. On the first floor was one point on the domino. On the second floor, two points. On the third floor, three points etc.. Was equipped the hotel of the American artist Donald Sultan.
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The Art`otel has 165 rooms and is directly at the foot of the castle quarter from four former ... ...to 200 persons - conference technique - garage ******************************************************
For all once to visit Budapest I woul recommend them to stay the nights in the Art`otel Budapest. If I go once again to Budapest, I will stay in this Hotel.
Thanks for reading!
Love, Andrea :-) ...
Sternschnuppe2002 07.02.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Budapest (Hungary)
Value for Money
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Advantages: Beatiful sights, lots to see Disadvantages: Some of the shops were quite expensive, many of the shops were high street stores like what we have in the UK
As many of you know, I have just returned from Budapest. It is one of my life's ambitions to visit all the capital cities of Europe so I was thrilled when my parents said we could go to Budapest. Budapest is the capital city of Hungary. Hungary is located in Central Europe, bordered by Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Hungary developed closer ties with Western Europe, and joined the European Union on May 1, 2004. Budapest is the seventh largest city in the European Union.
Buda and Pest became united as Budapest in 1873. Buda and Pest are located on opposite banks of the River Danube, with Buda on the west and Pest on the East. The hotel I was staying in was located on the riverside of Pest.
~ Airport ~
There is only one airport ...
Advantages: Easy to get around. Plenty to see. Luckily, most people in tourism speak English Disadvantages: Unfathomable language
were there 10 seconds after the Iron Curtain came down - I expect it's ruined now, all MacDonalds and KFC".
Well Budapest isn't 'ruined' - yes of course it's got a MacDonalds; after all, with the exception of Barbados (and now Twickenham, wooo-hooo!) where Golden Arches had to close down through lack of interest, where hasn't?
I dare say it's true that a lot of western money has poured into smarten the place up, but Hungary was looking west long before the final 'iron curtain'. Hungarians were holidaying in Austria and aspiring to imported cars well before the break up of the Soviet bloc.
Budapest, the capital of Hungary, is really a pair of twin cities, i.e. Buda and Pest, lying on either side of the mighty Danube River, here known as the Duna, and which flows from North to South through the city.
As a quick way to remember ...
Advantages: Reasonable prices, Great cultural city, Excellent public transport Disadvantages: Ummm...the obsession with paprika?
that Hungary had at this time after centuries of defeat and occupation (Várhegy has actually been damaged by war some 86 times over the course of it's history). The streets of the surrounding Castle District do however still follow their medieval courses, and if you can look beyond the Tourist Information, souvenir shops and boutiques you can still see some rather lovely Gothic and Baroque architecture. There is also a folk market here selling local crafts to tourists, although be aware that prices are inflated due to the location (Castle Hill is a hotspot for foreign tourists).
Although Várhegy offers several museums to the tourists who throng here, I restricted myself to the Budapest Történeti Múzeum (Budapest Historical Museum), which provides a decent introduction to the city for 500HUF. Set across three floors, it starts ...
![Global Treasures Budapest Buda&Pesth Budapest, Hungary [DVD] [NTSC]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/104465218.jpg "Global Treasures Budapest Buda&Pesth Budapest, Hungary [DVD] [NTSC]")
