Budapest, The Metro and the Hotel Gellert

“Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna”                                                                                                                                            M. John Harrison  ‘The Course of the Heart’

The Ryanair flight landed around mid-morning at the Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport, named after the nineteenth century Hungarian composer (quiz questions below*) and once through baggage reclaim and passport control we looked for transport into the city a distance of about about fifteen kilometres away.  I am a natural skinflint so turned a blind eye to the taxi line and Mike is an incurable train enthusiast so he steered us in the direction of a bus that would take us to the metro station.

The bus travelled for twenty minutes or so and then dropped us at the southern terminus of metro line three, Kőbánya-Kispest and we waited just a short while for a lumbering but workmanlike Prussian blue train to come into the station. Budapest has the oldest electrified underground railway system on the European continent, and the second-oldest in the world after London.  I think this train may well have been part of the original rolling stock, it was noisy and uncomfortable but it was quick and efficient and in just a few minutes we were at our stop close to our hotel.

We walked the last couple of hundred metres or so to our hotel down a wide boulevard and across the River Danube (grey and uninviting rather than blue and gay) and as we entered through the revolving doors it was everything that we had been expecting.  We had been tempted to stay at the famous spa hotel, The Gellért, after watching Michael Palin’s ‘New Europe’ when he featured the hotel in his TV travel programme.  This is a five star hotel and ordinarily a bit beyond my budget (actually quite a lot beyond my budget) but with bargain price flights we considered the additional cost of a superior room with a view over the Danube to be entirely justified.

The hotel is a reminder of those powerful days of Empire with a towering façade, in need of a bit of restoration, and an entrance lobby of huge dimensions and acres of wasted space.  After check in a bell hop tried to wrestle my bag from me but I held on to it and explained that I thought we would be able to find the room unaccompanied.  I don’t mind someone carrying my bag for me it’s just that I am never sure how much to tip for the service.  They haven’t done a great deal of work so I am not minded to tip generously but a couple of low value coins also seems embarrassingly miserly to me.

The third floor room was excellent, well decorated with substantial furniture, a mini bar with only slightly above prices (a big bonus in case of an emergency) and a balcony with a view of the Liberty Bridge crossing the Danube with Pest sprawling away on the other side of the river.

Trams ran adjacent to the river and every so often one would rattle by and ring a bell to warn pedestrians to move aside out of the way.  I like to see trams as they are one of the distinctive and romantic images of eastern European cities and seem to me to be a symbolic reminder of the pre-war and the soviet eras.  Immediately outside the hotel there was a busy intersection with an intricate spider’s web of overhead electric cables providing power to the yellow carriages that regularly rattled past on the steel tracks in the roads.

Some of these were modern Bombardier flexi-trams that hummed rather than clanked but my favourites were certain future museum pieces from the 1960s that conjured up images of the old days of the Soviet Empire that creaked and complained with rusty metal wheels that squealed along the metal tracks.

I noticed that as passengers got on board they immediately began to look grey and tired and seemed to become a feature of the tram as though locked permanently into a 1960s Budapest time warp.  The trams whirred and screeched and sounded bells to warn of their approach as they drew up and pulled off, setting down and picking up and clattering away again between the rows of elegant buildings and out towards the residential apartments of the city suburbs.

After we had settled in and approved our rooms, the girls declared it coffee and cake time so we found a salon on the ground floor of the hotel and sat and planned our sightseeing tour of the city – we thought that we might start with the Danube and the Bridges of Budapest.

 

* Quiz Time

Which International Airports are named after these famous composers/musicians?

Frederic Chopin

John Lennon

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Louis Armstrong

Guissepe Verdi

Franc Josef Strauss

Sergei Prokoviev

Henryk Wieniawski

Leos Janacek

Bonus Question – What is the connection between Elvis Presley and Prestwick Airport, Glasgow?

Poland (Wroclaw), A Pointless Walk, Shopping and a Final Meal

I now set about a rather pointless walk that soon had Kim getting irritable.  I told you that my friend Dai Woosnam had recommended accommodation at the Strangers Hostel and I thought it might be fun to go and find it and get a picture of it so I made us set off along a long straight road towards the railway station.

With each block that we walked along the street became incrementally more drab and untidy and the buildings more graffiti scarred and depressing with run down shops and fast food outlets selling tostinis, a sort of Polish Pizza with obscene amounts of ketchup or mayonnaise lavished over the topping.

Along the route we passed Partisan Hill a once elegant recreational area with a grandiose crescent-shaped structure like something that might be found in Baden-Baden or Bath but now sadly neglected, forlorn and forgotten with crumbling masonry and cracked pavements, a once gleaming construction littered with smashed bottles and spray can squiggles and the only hope is that it stays standing long enough until someone restores it.

By now we had left the comfort of the tourist centre and were in a much less attractive area. At a busy intersection an intricate spider’s web of overhead electric cables was providing power to the blue and cream trams that regularly rattled past on the steel tracks in the roads.  Some of these were modern Bombardier flexi-trams that hummed rather than clanked but my favourites were certain future museum pieces from the 1950s and 60s that conjured up images of the old days of the Soviet Empire that creaked and complained with rusty metal wheels that squealed along the metal tracks.

I noticed that as passengers got on board they immediately began to look grey and tired and seemed to become a feature of the tram as though locked permanently into a 1960s Wroclaw time warp.  The trams whirred and screeched and sounded bells to warn of their approach as they drew up and pulled off, setting down and picking up and clattering away again between the rows of neglected buildings and out towards the residential apartments of the city suburbs.

Ten minutes into the pointless walk I knew that I was in trouble!  After a while Kim gave an ultimatum – ‘one more block and if we don’t find it we are turning back’.  We didn’t find it and at the next cross roads I thought it best to submit and comply and so we turned and walked back to the centre.

It was really rather cold now so I wasn’t minded to complain when Kim spotted the bright lights of a modern chrome and steel shopping arcade and I followed her in for what I thought would be a short stroll from one side to the other to warm up but I was in for a nasty shock!

Kim likes to go shopping most weekends and one of her favourite stores is Tk-maxx (big names, little prices) and she was delighted and I was stunned when in the middle of the arcade was the very thing – Tk-maxx Polish style and this inevitably meant half an hour of pointless meandering through the rails and racks full of things that we had no intention of buying anyway.

““Do you like that?” I’ll say in surprise since it doesn’t seem like her type of thing, and she’ll look at me as if I’m mad.  That!?” She’ll say, “No, it’s hideous” “Then why on earth,” I always want to say, “did you walk all the way over there to touch it?””                                                                                                              Bill Bryson – ‘Notes From a Small Island’

Kim was happy now and the pointless walk to find the Strangers Hostel was conveniently forgotten and I was equally delighted when the shop browsing ended and we returned to the main square and the coffee shop where we had stopped the day before which was busier today, full of people from the open air concert outside the front door, taking a break from the show and taking the opportunity to warm up a little.

It was getting dark, we were tired of walking and, if I am honest, the day was beginning to drag a little now in the way that it does when there is no hotel room to go back to for a break but we still had over two hours to wait before returning to the airport so we needed something to do.  We watched a little bit of the Concert, it was a Polish rock band now which meant little to us so I tried to steer Kim towards the ‘Drink Bar’ but she had an alternative plan and suggested a last meal at the Georgian restaurant ‘Gruzinskie Chaczapuri’. I liked that idea better than mine so we walked past the Hansel and Gretal houses (so called by the way because they are connected by an archway as though they are holding hands) and on to the bistro.

This time I tried a speciality Georgian Pie but I don’t think I will ever have another one, it was quite tasty but it was simply a massive bread base covered in chicken and melted cheese, even bigger than a Pizza Hut special that immediately had me counting the calories and so sticky that I was obliged to order a second beer to unclog my tonsils and wash it down.

And so our time in Wroclaw came to an end and after the meal we collected our belongings and took a taxi back to Wroclaw Copernicus Airport where we had plenty of time to reflect on our three days in the city.  We had enjoyed it but were in agreement that although we had missed a few things out three days was just about the right amount of time required to enjoy this splendid city.

Krakow, The Crocodile Bar in Kazimierz

It was nice inside and I for one could have stayed longer but we didn’t want the girls getting drunk so after a second beer we left and walked out into the street where it was cold but not unpleasant.  The area around the hotel was quite run down and the buildings looked tired with peeling facades revealing crumbling brickwork and rotting timbers beneath.   After the war, under the Polish Communist regime, Kazimierz deteriorated into a seedy and disagreeable area and it is only since the mid 1990s that the district has begun to rediscover its Jewish heritage and undergo reconstruction and regeneration to become one of the main tourist centres in Krakow.

Read the full story…