Mad dogs and Englishmen time

During last autumn I spent some time poring over maps of Hungary looking at where there might be potential for interesting bike rides. What caught my eye was the 'Danube Bend', where the river north of the city twists its way through a line of hills.

This is said to be one of the most beautiful parts of the whole river and for the cyclist it offers the chance of a 45 mile flat ride north along the edge of the river followed by a 25 mile ride back in a straight line across country to Budapest. The catch is that the straight line return goes over the hills and not through them.

Now, while a week ago we were shivering in unseasonably cold wet weather, now we are sweltering in unseasonably hot weather, with the temperature in the low 30s. That is not the best time to be contemplating long bicycle rides, but remembering that I am either a mad dog or an Englishman, I set off anyway.

With the flooding having started to recede I was able to see some of the problems that it has caused, fields still partially underwater with crops withered from being submerged for a week or so and sandbags still in place to protect the lower-lying roads.

I cycled on through the heat until finding a likely spot for sandwiches beside the river just near Esztergom.

After lunch I decided to pay a visit to Slovakia and cycled across the bridge from Esztergom into Sturovo and did a quick tour of the town. As one of my colleagues told me some months ago, the only advantage in her opinion to living in Sturovo was being able to enjoy the wonderful view of Esztergom's basilica.

When I passed this way before in February I knew little about the relationship between Slovakia and Hungary, but since have discovered that many people living in the southern part of Slovakia are Hungarian-speaking because prior to 1920 Hungary's borders were much greater than they are today.

And therein lies one of today's European nationalist issues. Much as Hungarians resented being governed by Austrians in the 19th century, Slovakians resented being governed by Hungarians in the same period. During the Cold War nationalist issues were not discussed, but now they are surfacing again. A few years ago the Slovakian government banned officials from speaking Hungarian (even if they were Hungarian speakers) in the course of their work. And now the new Hungarian government has passed a law which offers Hungarian speakers in Slovakia the possibility of having dual Hungarian-Slovakian nationality.

The Slovakian government is apparently not impressed by this.

Anyway, I left this tricky issue behind me and cycled up into the hills, a 4 mile 6% climb, which in the 30° heat was pretty exhausting, and as my partner opined later that evening, probably not sensible.

But the descent on the other side was wonderful, and cycling back along the riverbank as the early evening sunlight gave the city its magical glow was quite uplifting.

World Cup fever hits Budapest

At any time of the year most of Budapest's bars and cafes have televisions showing football, so it's no surprise that finding somewhere to watch the World Cup is not a problem.

The authorities here have set up a number of large screens in popular open spaces in the city, and the most convenient for me is in Szabadsag ter (Freedom Square), probably the most beautiful open space in the whole of the city. At one end of a large grassy area is the screen, and around this is a ring of refreshment stalls, all serving cold draught beer, which seems almost incomprehensible to a Brit, who would see it as a recipe for social disaster.

However, in a country where social drunkenness is very much frowned upon hundreds of people watching football surrounded by cheap beer is perfectly okay, and it created a wonderfully laid-back atmosphere last Saturday night, where people gathered to watch England's opening game of the tournament.

A sizeable number of people in the crowd cheered excitedly when England raced into a one goal lead but there was a stunned silence and an almost embarrassed cheering from the small American contingent when the United States got their rather strange equaliser. Enough said about that.

Hopefully things will improve, and that the relaxed atmosphere of Freedom Square will not continue to affect the England team's performance.

People claim a new part of the city (temporarily)

Extreme weather brings a lot of bad things - people die, crops are destroyed, infrastructure disappears - but it can also let people claim something new from their environment for a while. Snow keeps cars off the roads so we can run and play in the frozen streets and a flooded river turns embankments into beaches.

So this evening, as the Danube reaches hopefully its peak, Budapestis strolled along the rakparts, enjoying the warm evening sun, watching the huge river surge through the city. People sat on the walls looking, swam from the steps that normally lead down to the busy roads that line the river and sat and chatted about the new dimension to the city.

They even sat on the parapet of the Varhegy tunnel, gazing out across the river and just possibly commenting on the hundreds with their cameras, recording the scene.

On beautiful cities

I’ve just finished reading Orhan Pamuk’s “Istanbul”, in which the author talks about Istanbul’s ambivalent struggle to ‘westernise’ during the 20th Century.

At one point he talks about the ‘picturesque’ qualities the city had in his childhood time, and referring to John Ruskin says, “… picturesque beauty rises out of the details that emerge only after the buildings have been standing for hundreds of years, from the ivy, the herbs and grassy meadows that surrounded it…”.



I’ve been coming to think that that also describes Budapest. It’s not had the massive plastic surgery that some cities have to make them look ‘like new’. As with cosmetic plastic surgery on people, where all the nips, tucks and lifts cannot hide certain features of the ageing process, and the ensuing disconnect between aged and tightened features just draws attention to the artificiality of what has been done, restoration of a city carries the risk of creating a sterile or artificial environment.

Not so in Budapest, a city that still shows its age, in the occasional buildings whose plasterwork is crumbling to the extent that wooden tunnels are needed on the pavement to protect pedestrians, and the facades marked by bulletholes, reminders of the 1944 siege and the 1956 uprising.


Of course some renovation is needed to stop total decay, but I for one find the mix of old and new, crumbling and precise, help to make Budapest a wonderfully beautiful city in which to live, work and play.

When the levee breaks

“If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break,
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break,
When the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay.”

After three weeks of rain almost every day, the wettest May ‘since records began’, the Danube levee did break today. It’s the city’s turn to flood, as massive floods affect much of the regions’s rural areas. All central Europe has suffered in recent weeks from the unseasonal rain, with people killed and agricultural land damaged across Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.




Apparently it’s not uncommon in the spring for this to happen, as the Alpine snows melt and make their way to the sea, but it looks pretty awesome to me.

Fortunately it looks as if the terrible weather has ended, and this weekend has been warm and sunny. Just well for the organisers of “The National Gallop”, a new event that brings horses and riders from all over the country to Budapest for a weekend of racing around the (turfed and sanded) Heroes’ Square.



Around the horses is a big spread of stalls and other festivities, turning the top end of Andrassy ut into something reminiscent of a pop festival.


Each of the country’s counties has its own stall, showing off things that they are proud of, which might be honey, palinka or traditional music. And what better way to recover from stall surveying than to lie down in the Town Park and enjoy the feeling of sun on your face and grass on your back.


A very jolly way to spend a Saturday.