No more 3x5

Everyone has their level of travel snobbery. Some people are like Philippe, from the awesome travel guide parody Molvania:

A professional traveller since his youth, there is not a city or town Philippe has not recently been disappointed by. No matter how obscure the destination you can bet he has been there before you and found it was not half as good as it was in the 1970s.

I’m no Philippe – my snob line falls somewhere between buying snow globes of places where it doesn’t snow, and leaving my camera at home. I like photography, and I’m not above looking like a dorky tourist to do it. In fact, I find that just being in photography mode makes me more observant. The incentive of being able to capture something unique forever makes me look for the little details in my surroundings. Like the Hungarian postboxes that reminded me of those chicken walkers in Return of the Jedi.

So I was somewhat bummed when my camera ran out of battery only halfway through my first day in Budapest. The Magyar capital is a beautiful city, and the weather was perfect for photography. To top it off, I’d forgotten to pack my charger, so I was forcibly snap-sad for the rest of the weekend.

I spent the rest of the day trying to store up as much as I could in my memory and my notebook – the decadent grandeur of Buda Castle, the peaceful, green hike up St Gellert Hill to the 360-degree views of the communist-era citadel. Not to mention the countless gorgeous art nouveau buildings. Budapest’s most famous architect, Ödön Lechner, liked to intricately decorate the roofs of his buildings, even they were invisible to the observer the street. “Birds can see it, though,” he reasoned.

This was the last pretty roof I got before my camera died, of the St Matyas Church in Buda:

The next morning, I headed to one of Pest’s famous old kafehaz (coffeehouses) for breakfast. The city centre is dotted with these venerable establishments, lined with sumptuous wood panelling, and profuse with gilded, embossed arches, intricately painted ceilings and delicate chandeliers. I was so busy gawking that a couple of times I forgot that I was meant to be drinking and eating.

It was really starting to bug me that as much as I tried, I would never have any proper reminder of all the beautiful things around me. At some point, I instinctively reached for my notebook and started trying to copy the sinuous vines and flowers painted on the ceiling above me. Here’s what I ended up with.

It would be clear to anyone who saw the original ceiling pattern that I have all the artistic talent of a sink plunger. But I enjoyed the way that, like photography, drawing something could draw me deeper into its details. I loved the first coffee house so much that I ducked into two more during the course of the day, and sketched in all of them, pretending to myself that I was a cultured artsy-fartsy type. If only I’d brought my beret on this trip.

By the time I visited Memento Park, the Communist sculpture park on the outskirts of the city, I had gotten a little more audacious. Memento Park is a curated selection of communist-era sculptures that were removed from around Budapest after the fall of communism.

It was really interesting to walk around and see the relics of the past century, and to imagine them in the context of a living, breathing city. A stone fresco of soldiers lay horizontally on the ground surrounded by grass. With their hands over their hearts and legs splayed in a synchronised march, they looked a bit like they were sunbathing. I got to see Stalin’s massive boots, the only thing left standing after his statue was toppled in the people’s revolution of 1956.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

I was really wishing I had my camera to capture the scale of some of these figures. Making do, I decided to make the leap from the abstract patterns of Art Nouveau ceilings to the much harder-to-master human form.

I know, ROFLMAO. My imaginary stick figure lady looks like she’s standing underneath a giant statue of Superman after butt liposuction. But I did manage to convey the scale, and give myself a good chuckle. The statue I was actually trying to draw was this one.

(From www.mementopark.hu)

One of the really cool things about Memento Park is the museum next door. Apart from a crash course in 20th century Hungarian history (which I sorely needed), it also has a little cinema looping a series of training films produced back in Communist times by the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The illuminating topics include “How to search a house”, “How to recruit informers”, and “How to hide bugs”. As you can imagine, the films are incredibly paranoid in tone and, with the benefit of decades passed, rather amusing. Some of my favourite excerpts:

• During the tutorial on conducting home searches, a man carefully makes incisions into the upholstery of a chair with a knife and pokes into the springs of the seat, accompanied by the following voiceover: “The dissection of furniture is only advised on a very well-founded suspicion.”
• Mission control to a spy outside someone’s window: “Any difference between before and now?”
  Spy: “There used to be one piece of pottery on the shelf, now there are two.”
  Mission control: “Ok. We’ll check behind it next time.”
• Spy: “Oh god, they’re hugging now. Probably just for show. I think I’m going to puke. Dirty traitors.”

Speaking of feeling like puking, I think one of the only things I didn’t like about Budapest was the food I had there. I’d heard a lot about Hungarian food being one of the jewels of Central European cuisine, so I was pretty excited when I showed up at a little hole-in-the-wall Magyar restaurant known for its cheap and cheerful three-course dinners. I ordered their standard house menu, which got off to an auspicious start with a scrummy dumpling soup. It wasn’t too different to the Knödel soup you get in the restaurants in Munich.

The main course was a different ball game. My eyes almost popped out of my head when I received a plate piled high with deep-fried onion rings, over a dozen fried goose livers, and about three baby lettuce leaves masquerading as a side salad. It was the kind of meal that would make Craig Ballantyne weep. Now, I’m all for onion rings about once a year, but after about three bites of goose liver I was done with the whole plate. It was just excessively oily and rich, in the same way that foie gras is – except that when you order foie gras, it usually isn’t served in a pile rivalling Mont Blanc.

It made me feel awful and embarrassed to leave my food untouched, especially since it was clearly a regional specialty. I tried to redeem myself the next day by enjoying a really nice bowl of goulash. The goulash in Hungary is very different from what I’ve had in Germany and the Czech Republic – it’s prepared as a brothy soup, not a thick stew. And it’s red and paprika-y, not brown and peppery.

My train left Budapest at 9pm, so I spent my final hour wandering in the late afternoon light along the Pest side of the Danube. One of the things I walked past was the Hungarian Parliament, which is an architectural tribute to the Houses of Westminster in London. They even put it right by the river to be matchy-matchy.

Only a few hundred metres south of the Parliament is a smaller, but equally powerful monument. Centimetres from the edge of the stone embankment is a higgledy-piggledy row of shoes sculpted by two Hungarian artists. The work is a memorial to ordinary people who were ruthlessly shot into the Danube by Fascist militia in the closing chapters of World War 2. Clearly this was an time of the world gone mad, and the mix of shoes – work boots, court shoes, tiny children’s sandals – is a sobering reminder of the terrible price of intolerance and war. One of those tiny, easily-missed slices of quiet contemplation that I am always glad to discover in a big bustling city.