The best thing about going on a city walk with a historian is that they will enthusiastically convey anecdotes about the places you’re visiting, throwing in a couple of juicy details for good measure, and then, with a much more matter of fact tone, they will also inform you that your exciting trivia is just…
Category: urban exploration
Safe as Houses- The 2018 Edition of Budapest 100
The main disclaimer to our Budapest 100 experience this year is that, no surprise here, we were lazy. Not to go, of course, but to register for the events which had a fixed schedule, and this obviously included some of the fancier houses, such as as the Magda courtyard in Mátyás square and the Gutenberg…
Fading Beauty: In Search of Secession in Újlipótváros
It takes special talent to go on a city walk on one of the coldest mornings of the winter, or, to highlight my gifts even more, on the only truly freezing weekend morning of the entire season. Nevertheless, I managed to embark on the adventure with little to no regrets: perhaps I could have taken…
Fickle Snow- A Morning in Városliget
Not only does snow have a smell, but it also has a very particular way of filtering light as it sneaks into the apartment on winter mornings. In all honestly, calling it light might be an overstatement, it is more a state of darkness that is incomplete, an undecided darkness, a confused darkness, a darkness…
January Fog along the Danube
Yesterday, while strolling by the Danube, and seeing, in a first phase frankly nothing, and then an odd shape here and there, it dawned on me that I haven’t written a weather complaint based piece for a long time, and since I consider myself pretty good at this exercise, such failings must be promptly corrected,…
Best of 2017 Budapest
The third year must surely signal a tradition, so here are some new additions to the ever growing list of particularly nice Budapest things. (For the previous editions see here: Best of 2015 and Best of 2016.) -I am prone to moaning that it never snows in the city, although in all honesty I dislike both snow and…
Dada Would’t Buy Me a Bauhaus- In Search of Hidden Modernism in Újlipótváros
I’ve already mentioned my ancient collection of English puns, and how it provided unexpected guidance for my adolescent discoveries: another one I recall very vividly is the one giving this piece its title: ‘Dada wouldn’t buy me a Bauhaus’. Due to its Romanian connections, I was by then familiar with the concept of dada, but…
People Sitting on Terraces in Paris
The other day, as I was walking through the blunt early evening fog of late autumn in Budapest I had a grand revelation. Before diving straight into it, let me just specify that these days we are having four types of weather around here: milky morning fog, opaque noon fog, blunt early evening fog and…
A Tourist at Home- Autumn in Arad
I recently read a piece about how our experience of time changes as we age– namely, we feel that time passes faster than when we were younger. Which, since I just started getting irked by the prospect of Christmas shopping when I know for a fact that yesterday was a balmy day in May,…
Rust, Gold and an Angry Poet: Autumn on Gellért Hill
Let’s say you woke up one day and suddenly had no idea what season it was, perhaps a strange sort of weather amnesia, but figured you’re in Budapest, and in such cases your go to solution should definitely be Gellért hill: firstly, it’s rather easy to spot from many central areas, particularly the Danube promenade, and secondly,…
Pocket Diary Budapest 