Budapest Streets

The streets of Budapest are filled with fascinating and sometimes very idiosyncratic architecture.   Budapest's glory days were in the last few decades before WW1, and the Art Nouveau (Secession) movement was very big here.   And, although there was a lot of destruction in WW2, most of the city was reconstructed to look the same way.

One of the most striking buildings is the conservatory of music.  The interiors are amazing, not quite like any conservatory of music I have ever seen:

Inside:

We also saw the apartment where Liszt lived for a period of time.   I liked his desk:

Budapest was the second city in the world to have a subway.  The original subway line still works, and the stations might have looked like this a hundred years ago:

This is the museum for applied arts, closed for renovation:

Apartment building:

One of Budapest's markets, beautifully restored:

A bridge and street:

More apartments:

A statue on the Neo-Gothic House of Parliament:

One of the train stations:

Some buildings are still in a state of decay, but not as extreme as in Bucharest:

This is the photography museum;

Detail:

This is the opera house, which was staging an outdoor preview of its upcoming season:

This is an amazing theater:

Detail of the top:

Fisherman's Bastion, an architectural folly with a viewpoint of the river:

View:

One more building:

And an idea for my garden:

To Budapest!

We took the overnight train from Bucharest to Budapest, bypassing both Buchapest and Budarest.   I have fond memories of overnight train rides, of looking out the window at 3 AM and seeing a deserted train station in the middle of nowhere.  I love the sensation of lying in my couchette as the train speeds through the night, with all the sounds and motions buffeting you.   Unfortunately, I usually can't sleep because of that.   The trip took 16 hours, and at the beginning we had a wonderful view of the Carpathian Mountains, and at the end a view of the extensive Hungarian plains.

I took this picture through the train window at the train station at Ploiesti, an oil town.

My first impressions of the streets of Budapest were that the city seemed much more in the in the European-Americam mainstream than Bucharest.   You see the same shops you see everywhere.   I also didn't realize how much Budapest is a tourist attraction.   There are many souvenir shops and signs in English everywhere.   Because virtually no one besides Hungarians speaks Hungarian, English is the defacto language for signs and retail transactions wherever foreigners might be.

As always, we walked the streets to get a feel for the city.

I realized I haven't mentioned the food in this trip.   We ate extremely well in Romania, focusing on the traditional dishes such as stuffed cabbage, sour soups, and grilled spiced meats.  There are interesting things happening in Romanian cooking now, as people are reinventing the more obscure peasant dishes and others from the past.   I had a dish of minced goose meat stuffed in vine leaves that was extraordinary, and we ate other things that our daughter doesn't want to know about.   In Budapest, we were taken to lunch at a superb Hungarian restaurant by our friends Louise and Attila.   Hungarian cuisine is excellent, beyond the usual goulashes, etc.  We had several extraordinary meals in French influenced Hungarian restaurants.   And dining out is very cheap, because of the low exchange rate.   Foodies should go to Hungary!   (And, of course, there are Hungarian pastries!)

By the end of our stay I was absolutely won over by the city of Budapest.   There are many fascinating neighborhoods to explore, and the overall streetscape looks something like a cross between Vienna as it was, Paris, and something which is uniquely Budapest.   In 1867, the Emperor declared Budapest the equal of Vienna, and he might still be right.

Posts to follow with pictures.