What is the perfect city for a weekend? The infinite range of ages, interests, wealth and tastes can all be catered for within an hour or three's flight time from London or from most European cities to another courtesy of one or other cut price airline or, in the case of last weekend's trip to Budapest, less than inspiring British Airways. Do free plastic sandwiches and enough free drink to float a flight of stag and hen parties make make up for usually surly service and the feeling that yet another British brand is flying a very limp flag? Maybe or maybe any airline where your own nationality is on view in its worst let it all hang out holiday mode is unlikely to appeal. That having said, 'Grandpa's stag party' accompanying our sleep deprived early morning travel group to Budapest last Friday hadn't managed to pour enough brandy down their gullets in a couple of hours to be either incredibly loud or incredibly sick so all was well even if the chilled stuffed breakfast croissants were less than tempting.
Lighter enjoyment is offered by the Art Nouveau whimsy on show in the Museum of Applied Arts, designed in 1896 by Lechner, an important exponent of the Hungarian Secession movement who also designed the Postal Savings Bank building in Budapest. The outside of the Museum is traffic stoppingly surprising with its green and yellow Zsolnay tiled oriental dome and roofs. Inside there is a remarkable sense of space and light. The white painted girders of the great glass glazed and iron atrium are surrounded by cloister like galleries divided by indo-saracenic arches and filled with arts and crafts and art nouveau work including the most covetable Lalique and Tiffany pieces. Only recently rediscovered in a store, the architectural ceramics of Alexandre Bigot, bought by the Museum's director at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, are astonishingly powerful. Art Nouveau and secession architecture is everywhere in Budapest, grabbing the eye and the attention from the standard neo-classicism and neo-gothicism of formal 19th century institutional expectations and later reconstructions even if the Parliament Building and the endlessly rebuilt buildings of Buda Castle dominate the river views on either bank of the Danube as it runs through the city.
Exercise or relaxation means a bath or a swim in one of many spa water pools some of which, like the Gellert are part of huge complexes of hotels, saunas, hot and cold pools, massage and steam rooms. Turkish influence hangs on in several old and beautiful Turkish baths and the yellow and white painted walls of the Szechenyi Baths surround baths from the hottest and deepest thermal springs in the city. On Sunday morning the cafe there was the only place in the city over the weekend where I found pogacsa, the delicious buns flavoured with cheese, bacon, sour cream or paprika and probably a whole host of other possibilities. I couldn't buy one, no one serving on Sundays perhaps but these buns stick deliciously in my mind since another, teenage, Sunday morning decades ago when I drove into Budapest with a friend from Ceasescu's starving Romania. Budapest may have been communist too but it didn't show in cafes and restaurants where gypsy violinists played and there was food, good food even then. Romania was nothing but the smell of cabbage and cheap petrol in the air; illness, deformity and misery to match the sound of carts on cobbles haunting dark power cut nights in Vlad Dracul's Sighisoara; and, as for food, nasty tinned fish and, strangely, chocolate easter bunnies in the food shops. Could that possibly be a real memory? The first cafe we found open in Budapest had a basket of bacon filled pogacsa in the middle of the table and I think we ate the whole lot.
This Sunday, pogacsa- less but lunch in view, we strolled from the baths, past the turquoise tiled dome of the elephant house in the Budapest zoo, a large grey bottom just visible over the wall in the enclosure below. The zoo gate must be the most unusual anywhere in the world, a hindu inspired arched confection, complete with rampant tigers, resting on large stylised stone elephants. On past the Sunday model yacht enthusiasts at the Varosliget park boating pool, past the unfrozen ice rink and the misleadingly mediaeval turrets of the late 19th century Vajdahunyad Castle, back to the metro at Andrassy Ut and, bloody marys hoving into view, to Octogon and a short hungry walk to the sparkling haven of the New York Bar.
After that, floating to the airport on a cloud of wellbeing that survived even British Airways and delays. Memories and souvenirs of Budapest come in worth its weight in gold Herend porcelain, also available worldwide at no extra cost. Less costly is something edible from the wide range of Hungarian salamis on show in the neo-gothic Central Market - worth seeing with or without such purchases. Then there are all those fruity delicious alcohols in seductively elegant bottles in duty free and, for posterity, the indecipherable photographs.
So, a perfect weekend? All this and good company too? It will certainly do.....
Arriving in Budapest in the late morning meant smiling passport officers and relatively short immigration queues, check in luggage arriving with reasonable despatch other than one bag cleverly left behind somewhere between desk and aeroplane at Heathrow - astonishingly it did arrive later as promised. The sun was shining, practicing for Saturday's National Holiday celebrating the notably unsuccessful 1848 Revolution with passionate recitations of the National Song, marching hussars, flag waving, and the almost mandatory wearing of a rosette in the national colours - the Hungarians did after all get there eventually and such straightforward patriotism accompanied by generally smiling faces and the inclination to be both friendly and helpful to metro or map bemused tourists is extremely attractive.
We stayed in the delightful Brody House in Brody Sandor Ut just behind the flag and flower decked Hungarian National Museum; within walking distance of most of the major Budapest sites even as far as Buda Castle, a stiffish walk, relieved at the last uphill drag by a ride on the splendid funicular railway with its views over the Chain Bridge to the glorious secession facade of the Gresham Palace Four Seasons Hotel. In the other direction, Heroes' Square, with the National Museum of Fine Arts and the assorted pleasures of the Varosliget Park. We did walk to all those place too although we achieved enough understanding of the happily straightforward 3 lines of the metro not to walk through our socks and taxis are readily available in most areas. Brody House is a treasure among boutique hotels; its rooms decorated by individual artists, painted baths in most of them, deliciously comfortable beds, with separate top class sparkling showers and loos. Some rooms it must be said, are designed for the more athletic guest with terrifyingly exposed boxy stairs to bathrooms on different levels.I would definitely have fallen down any similar obstacle given the quantity of alcohol consumed by us all, not even trying I doubt compared with Grandpa's stag, but our weekend was a 50th birthday celebration and middle age has either to be staved off or forgotten in the bottom of any number of glasses. We had the whole Brody house to ourselves which meant a relaxed help yourself atmosphere and everything laid on by friendly and relatively invisible staff to add to that effect.
We dined and partied at a second Brody House establishment complete with live music on Saturday night post a Budapest city bus and boat trip, drinks on the boat in case of momentary dehydration of course. The Brody bar offered an interesting line in killer cocktails which, like all the most dangerous drinks, tasted of the freshest, pure and delicious fruit juice and made your lips go numb halfway through the second glass. I notice, from my range of blurred photographs of the weekend, taken with an unfamiliar point and shoot camera that clearly still requires some level of sober mental capacity, that aside from the odd entirely typical view of the city, the main point of focus in the foreground of every one is a row of glasses, grinning out of focus faces behind. Whether or not 50 is really the new 30......
Well we did walk a lot so we deserved it - lunch in the astonishing baroque/rococo New York Bar and Grill included. It is a bit like eating among the angelic furbelows of der Wies church, that extraordinary rococo confection in Bavaria whose proper name is the the Church of the Scourged Saviour; not a perfect fit somehow with an explosion of gold, pink and pastel blue. The New York Bar has plenty of added red plush, gilt and ormolu to match its painted ceilings and marbled pillars but there is substance as well as style in good straightforward Hungarian food; goulash, cured meats like mangalica ham, the product of a boar with a fluffy sheep-like coat, schnitzels, a New York burger, cured salmon, a variety of fishy soups of the perch and pike mittel European variety and lots of enormous cakes and ice creams. Many of these are rather unnecessarily pictured in the menu and there is plenty of good red wine, white too I am sure, or a spicy bloody mary if needed and it was. The coffee, as always in this part of the world, is excellent - the Turks are not forgotten.
As for sights and sounds to fill more than a weekend, they can nevertheless be more than tasted in a couple of determined days. The National Museum of Fine Arts has the most staggering European collection with odds and ends of Egyptian and other art gleaned from various private collectors over the years. The Italian collection opens with one of the most beautiful and moving Ghirlandaios of all; a St Stephen , once part of a polyptych in Santa Maria Novella in Florence and fitting for the patronal country of St Stephen although that one was a Hungarian king rather than Ghirlandaio's richly robed first Christian martyr with the stoning wounds bloody on his head. There is a vast Dutch collection that includes several glorious Brueghels with all contemporary life on show whether at a village market or Golgotha and a Noah pair of every animal or bird from every bestiary or menagerie available at the time. I never remember which Brueghel is which so don't ask.
The neo-classical Museum of Fine Arts stands at one side of the great statue complex of Heroes Square opposite the Palace of Art where temporary exhibitions are held and at the end of the wide boulevard of Andrassy Ut. Any reader of old cold war thrillers will know Andrassy Ut as the address of the torture chambers of the secret police, before that the same house served the Gestapo similarly. Now it is the House of Terror Museum, a remarkable contemporary exhibition space dedicated to the worst that can and did happen under the extreme regimes of left and right in Hungary. It is compellingly horrifying to watch video after video of testament from those who suffered but survived, those who did not are memorialised in numberless black and white photographs. For non-Hungarian speakers, and Magyar is hard to fathom, there are racks of copies of exhaustive notes in English covering the exhibits in every room. Tourists from countries that have not suffered in similar ways may hardly comprehend the awfulness of those terrible times or of the lives destroyed by past contact with this place and everything it stood for. We are left, however, with a sense of deep unease exacerbated by daily updates on Russia's present adventures in Ukraine. Lighter enjoyment is offered by the Art Nouveau whimsy on show in the Museum of Applied Arts, designed in 1896 by Lechner, an important exponent of the Hungarian Secession movement who also designed the Postal Savings Bank building in Budapest. The outside of the Museum is traffic stoppingly surprising with its green and yellow Zsolnay tiled oriental dome and roofs. Inside there is a remarkable sense of space and light. The white painted girders of the great glass glazed and iron atrium are surrounded by cloister like galleries divided by indo-saracenic arches and filled with arts and crafts and art nouveau work including the most covetable Lalique and Tiffany pieces. Only recently rediscovered in a store, the architectural ceramics of Alexandre Bigot, bought by the Museum's director at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, are astonishingly powerful. Art Nouveau and secession architecture is everywhere in Budapest, grabbing the eye and the attention from the standard neo-classicism and neo-gothicism of formal 19th century institutional expectations and later reconstructions even if the Parliament Building and the endlessly rebuilt buildings of Buda Castle dominate the river views on either bank of the Danube as it runs through the city.
Exercise or relaxation means a bath or a swim in one of many spa water pools some of which, like the Gellert are part of huge complexes of hotels, saunas, hot and cold pools, massage and steam rooms. Turkish influence hangs on in several old and beautiful Turkish baths and the yellow and white painted walls of the Szechenyi Baths surround baths from the hottest and deepest thermal springs in the city. On Sunday morning the cafe there was the only place in the city over the weekend where I found pogacsa, the delicious buns flavoured with cheese, bacon, sour cream or paprika and probably a whole host of other possibilities. I couldn't buy one, no one serving on Sundays perhaps but these buns stick deliciously in my mind since another, teenage, Sunday morning decades ago when I drove into Budapest with a friend from Ceasescu's starving Romania. Budapest may have been communist too but it didn't show in cafes and restaurants where gypsy violinists played and there was food, good food even then. Romania was nothing but the smell of cabbage and cheap petrol in the air; illness, deformity and misery to match the sound of carts on cobbles haunting dark power cut nights in Vlad Dracul's Sighisoara; and, as for food, nasty tinned fish and, strangely, chocolate easter bunnies in the food shops. Could that possibly be a real memory? The first cafe we found open in Budapest had a basket of bacon filled pogacsa in the middle of the table and I think we ate the whole lot.
This Sunday, pogacsa- less but lunch in view, we strolled from the baths, past the turquoise tiled dome of the elephant house in the Budapest zoo, a large grey bottom just visible over the wall in the enclosure below. The zoo gate must be the most unusual anywhere in the world, a hindu inspired arched confection, complete with rampant tigers, resting on large stylised stone elephants. On past the Sunday model yacht enthusiasts at the Varosliget park boating pool, past the unfrozen ice rink and the misleadingly mediaeval turrets of the late 19th century Vajdahunyad Castle, back to the metro at Andrassy Ut and, bloody marys hoving into view, to Octogon and a short hungry walk to the sparkling haven of the New York Bar.
After that, floating to the airport on a cloud of wellbeing that survived even British Airways and delays. Memories and souvenirs of Budapest come in worth its weight in gold Herend porcelain, also available worldwide at no extra cost. Less costly is something edible from the wide range of Hungarian salamis on show in the neo-gothic Central Market - worth seeing with or without such purchases. Then there are all those fruity delicious alcohols in seductively elegant bottles in duty free and, for posterity, the indecipherable photographs.
So, a perfect weekend? All this and good company too? It will certainly do.....
