The day the lights went out

I got back home from work last night to find that the electricity in my apartment was off. At first I thought it might be a power cut and then I noticed that other apartments had electricity and the meter and main fuses outside my apartment had been switched off and sealed, so it looked like it was just my place.

Confused, I went to the post box in the main hall way and looked for the one for my apartment. I had never used it before and didn't even know where it was, as all my post is delivered to my office address. I certainly didn't have a key to open it but managed to slide my sticky little fingers into it just enough to catch hold of some of the papers inside.

One of them was a blue form from ELMU, the electricity company, that looked rather suspicious, and another was a bill for six months unpaid electricity. Even though I could not understand any of the Hungarian documentation, the meaning was clear.

There followed a slightly fractious text message interchange with my apartment manager where each of us made a few weak attempts to blame the other while not causing offence. We managed that remarkably well, ending up each agreeing to a share of the blame and apologising profusely and agreeing a plan of action.

So first thing this morning I made my way to the ELMU office to sort things out. Of course, as soon as I entered the office it all became very confusing. Dozens of people were standing aimlessly around an empty desk, and as all the signs were, of course, in Hungarian, I understood nothing so adopted my lost foreigner manner, which always seems to work well here. And it did again. A charming young woman came up to me and asked me if she could help, and when I explained my predicament she pointed me towards the empty desk and said I should wait there.

After a few minutes someone appeared. They spoke no English, so disappeared into the next room to find someone who did. He looked cursorily at my pile of paperwork and said, encouragingly, "That looks fine", punched some buttons on the screen and handed me ticket number 364. I waited about 10 minutes for my number to come up and then walked through into the next office to the appropriate desk. Again, the English speaker was summoned, and he explained what should be done. She looked at my pile of paper, typed lots of numbers into her computer, discussed some finer points with her colleague and then told me to go back outside to wait until my number came up again.

Another five minutes went by and 364 came up on the screen for a second time. This time I went to see the cashier who took my large pile of forints, smiled at my probably over-enthusiastically Hungarian "thank yous" and told me to go back to the first desk I had been to.

She now checked her system to make sure that I had paid my bill and produced a sheaf of paper, all covered in densely printed Hungarian, of which I had to sign every sheet. Hoping that I had not just agreed to finance the country's national debt, I again thanked her profusely as she explained that the electricity would be reconnected later in the day.

So I merged from my bureaucratic experience with success, and having enjoyed the smiles and half-understood explanations of four or five people.

And at 7.30 this evening, two men in overalls came round and reconnected me to the modern world.

Reminders of mortality

I went back to the UK for any few days at the end of last week and flew back from Bristol on Sunday evening. The journey had gone well apart from a nasty incident in the departure lounge at Bristol Airport where I watched 11 English football players commit ritual suicide.

It had just got dark when we started the descent into Budapest, and, as I always like to do, I was looking out the window trying to spot familiar landmarks as the ground got closer and closer. We were just a few hundred feet above the rooftops when suddenly the engines started to roar and the nose tipped up again. We were going up again and banking sharply to the left.

I looked out of the window and could see that we were just passing over the runway that we had been aiming for and was horrified to see that there was an aircraft on it. It looked as if our pilot had seen this aircraft, perhaps enter the runway, and had decided to abort the landing.

As our plane continued its steep climb and turn I could see the lights of the city streets out through the opposite window and for a few seconds I really thought that we were going to crash. The plane was vibrating badly with the stresses of the manoeuver and this seemed to go on for an eternity, perhaps 10 seconds, before we stabilised and things grew calm again.

Surprisingly there was very little reaction amongst the passengers, but I think that most people, unable to look out of the windows, had not realised just how close we had been to the ground before having to climb again. The captain came on the PA and calmly announced that they had decided to go round for a second time before landing. Nothing about near misses.

Flying is statistically the safest form of travel, apparently, but I do wonder whether the odds shorten with each flight?

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.