We had a private walking tour booked for mid morning, which started just round the corner from our hotel, so a gentle start to the day.
Our guide was an extremely enthusiastic young man called Kristof. It was just us and him so it was very intense. The tour was supposed to last three hours but it overran by ninety minutes, with him talking nonstop and no breaks for drinks or even toilet stops. He was very knowledgeable and there was so much he wanted to tell us, it was interesting too so we asked a lot of questions. I learnt a lot although I’m glad there wasn’t an exit exam because I’d get most of the kings mixed up I think. Hungary certainly has had an eventful past, and sadly is only a shadow of what it once was.
I’ll try to summarise as much as my memory allows. There were Romans here but they never did much more than built forts along the river. It was settled by nomadic tribes of horsemen late in the first millennium. There was a King Stephen who was crowned by the Pope after the Pope saw it in a dream. Stephen’s right hand is a holy relic that you can see in the Basilica today. Stephen was made a saint after he died.
The country thrived, the neighbours got jealous, the Habsburgs came and went, the Ottomans came and went, the Austrians were bullies, there were a couple of glorious failed uprisings. After the last of these in the middle of the 1800’s, a peace deal was signed which triggered a fifty year long golden era in Hungary’s history which ended with the close of the First World War. Hungary was forced (according to Kristof) to fight with the Germans in both the World Wars and they suffered greatly both times. After WW1 they had two thirds of the country stripped from them, including all access to the sea. During WW2 there was a siege and great destruction, mostly from the Russians.
I’m even more hazy on the details after that. There was a brutal dictatorship for many years, which was followed by Communist rule which didn’t end until the end of the USSR around 1990. They even have a statue of the American President Ronald Reagan who was in charge when Hungary became independent again.
There seems to be a campaign from the government to bring back the golden years by remaking many of the city’s landmark buildings to how they were in their heyday. The Communists did some rebuilding but in that nasty Soviet era concrete block brutalist style of last century. It’s going to be lovely but it seems strangely backwards looking. There’s not much around in the way of modern art, for example.
We took a metro to go under the Danube and then a bus to the top of the hill on the Buda side where there are some even more amazing churches and palaces. We inadvertently saw the changing of the guard, and there were also two Hussars on horseback being very tolerant of all the tourists taking photos. Our guide told us the country is heavily promoting tourism, I wonder how long that attitude is going to last? I know they (we) bring in money but the famous sites seem pretty overrun.
We walked past the Harry Houdini museum, I hadn’t realised he was Hungarian. We asked Kristoff if there were any other famous Hungarians we would know, he seemed surprised and said “Of course!” and reeled off the names of many famous scientists and various Nobel prize winners, none of whom we’d ever heard of. I have heard of Mr Biro, who invented the ball point pen, and also Mr Rubik, who gave us the eponymous cube. Also Liszt the composer. Simon asked about the Gabor sisters, Zsa Zsa and Eva, but our guide didn’t seem to hear him.
Kristoff finally ran out of steam around 3pm but not before singing us a traditional song in farewell and asking us for a favourable review. Simon and I argued about where to have lunch but I suspect his unreasonable behaviour was due to hypoglycaemia. Anyway I won and we had lunch at the oldest restaurant in Budapest in the midst of the castle district in Buda. In fact the food was very good and not too pricey. I had a traditional dish of chicken in paprika sauce with a gnocchi variant.
We walked back home down the hill and across the bridge of chains, Simon went back to the hotel while I popped round the corner to buy some shoes I had spotted. Now the weather is colder I only have my blister inducing fashionable white sneakers to wear, and I need to augment even further my footwear collection. Luckily fashion doesn’t seem so important here compared to other countries we’ve visited, possibly a remnant of the Soviet era. It takes the pressure off somewhat and means I can dress for comfort. I plan to buy some nice knee high boots when I get back to Italy but for now, another comfortable pair of walking shoes is what I need.
My shopping experience was not a success which was an unfortunate combination of my indecisiveness and the unsmiling ‘assistance’ afforded to me. I tried on the shoes I wanted but was unsure of what size to get. There were around five shop assistants in the store, all young women. I had two with me. One said with conviction that she thought I needed the next size up, the other said the size I had on were fine. The first woman insisted though, and went to get a bigger pair and got me to try them on. At no point did she explain why she thought the first pair were too small, she certainly never touched them when they were on my feet. When I had one foot in each size she asked which were the more comfortable but I really couldn’t say by then. I ended up opting for the smaller pair, the same size as the ones I’ve been wearing that give me blisters. It was an odd experience, like being gaslit. When I got them home, I told Simon the story and put them on for him, and he also told me he thought they were too small. Now I don’t know what to do. We popped briefly back into the shop before going out to dinner to ask if I could change them but they were just about to close so after initially saying no because I’d already worn them outside, and then looking at me blankly when I said I hadn’t, they said to come back tomorrow because they were about to close. What I haven’t told you is that I’d already been back earlier to exchange the T shirt I’d bought for a different colour ( because you get 30% off the second item if you buy two together, a combination I can never resist, even though I wasn’t looking for a T shirt). That process had been fraught and involved a lot of redoing of paperwork and computer time. So, I can’t really blame them for looking at me like I was mad when I returned for the second time. And in the end I still don’t know what the correct size is. At least I love the sneakers. And I’ll never see any of these women again. At least, until tomorrow.
It was after 9 pm by now so we went back to the popular restaurant that had the queue the night before for dinner. It’s a tiny traditional place, it was Hungarian home style cooking I think, the waitresses were very motherly. We certainly felt their disapproval at being out so late, and asking for dessert when they were just about to close. Nice enough but not particularly cheap, I’m not sure what all the rave reviews were about? Authenticity I suppose.