It's in the detail

Sunday morning dawned bright, breezy and sunny, which after an evening spent drinking wine and slivovica with friends did not describe me, so I thought that a walk around the corner to the local CBA corner supermarket would be a good idea.

I decided to take my camera with me, and in the two or 300 yards between our apartment and the supermarket I reflected on the details of Budapest's buildings. A local colleague had once told me that in Budapest you must look down and look up at the same time: down because the pavements are sometimes in a poor state of repair, and up because of the magnificent details in the buildings.

Aulich utca

The first delight is on one of our neighbouring buildings on Aulich utca. This is a classic secessionist building but with a beautiful tiled image of a woman picking apples high up on the building's parapet. Its story, I have no idea.

Frieze on Bathory utca

The next point of interest was on Bathory utca. Here, immediately opposite the supermarket is a building that is fairly undistinguished apart from a painted frieze depicting some classical scene immediately under its eaves. Again, its history I have no idea about.

Bullet holes tell what story?

And then on the next street corner some more sobering detail. Bullet holes around a fourth floor window. When does this date from, 1945 or 1956? What is the story? Who was firing from the window? Who was firing from the street? What happened?

Fine art and human suffering side-by-side. The devil is certainly in the detail.

Summer holiday on Balaton

With the succession of visitors and moving apartments it proved rather difficult to actually take a holiday in the summer, but we finally managed to organise five or six days during August.

Our plan was to escape Budapest after work one evening, stay somewhere on the north side of Lake Balaton, and the next day to drive to Slovenia and return early the next week.

Our plan failed to survive first contact with the enemy, as the Duke of Wellington predicted.

The first morning we woke up in our hotel in the little village of Tihany, on a peninsula sticking out into the lake and could barely move with tiredness. Months of suppressed exhaustion was starting to emerge in both of us. So we stayed in the Allegro Hotel for the next four nights until it was time to return to Budapest, and an excellent decision that was.

What did we do?

Balatonfured from Tihany

We wandered around the village, apparently the most popular tourist destination in Budapest after Szentendre, sitting in a cafe overlooking the lake, commenting on how it felt like we were on the Mediterranean.

We managed to be the last people to breakfast at 1020 every morning.

We rode our bikes down to the exclusive and private Club Tihany, slipped past the guards and swam on the private beach.

Enjoying the view

We walked across the vineyards, up into the hills and down to the other side of the peninsula to find a little beach where we could swim and wash our sweat away.

A quiet beach for a swim

Tihany from the Inner Lake

We went to a wine tasting with a local cellar owner, that turned into an extremely drunken evening discussing all manner of things Hungarian.

In fact, it was a very short but wonderful break.

English bar crawlers in Budapest

I've always enjoyed visiting unusual bars, and so have found Budapest's kert or rom bars particularly interesting (kert = garden and rom = ruin). Essentially in some of the semi-derelict buildings around Districts VI and VII entrepreneurs have moved in and created 'bars'. There are quite a number of these, and they vary from the sophisticated and commercial to the politically earnest and artistic, and some are essentially inside crumbling buildings while others are in gardens.

So having five young folks around gave me the perfect opportunity to suggest a bar crawl around the city one hot July evening.

We started off at the Instant. We drank our beers here in a courtyard towards the back of the building, and above us blue fish mobiles swung in the warm evening air.

Next was the Tuzrakter, which is one of the more artistic and politically driven places. It is particularly bicycle friendly, with bike lock-up facilities in the garden, and an enormous bicycle painting covering the rear wall of the open courtyard.

Beer and palinkas their set us up nicely for the short walk to the Kuplung, a different proposition indeed. This is mostly indoors, in what was originally an old garage, and still retains its greasy and grungy feel. Probably because it was a hot summer night it was pretty well empty, but that meant that we could take over the table football, which allowed Helen and I to see how a university education was benefiting our children.

From there it was on to the Grandio, one of the newer establishments. This is truly a garden bar, with tables set around in an open courtyard and all hidden by huge plants, so that it felt a little like drinking surrounded by Triffids.

After that came our final destination, one of the oldest of all, the Szimpla. On a weekday evening this was pleasantly quiet, and we found our way into one of the dingy corners stuffed with decrepit old furniture and graffiti, features that characterise this particular establishment. And there we sat and drank our final beers of the evening before wandering home through empty streets, talking about the weird and wonderful places we had visited.

The visitor season begins

Having to furnish an unfurnished flat meant that we thought about how to transfer some of our belongings from the over-furnished Southgrove Road. One solution was for Helen to bring a load of stuff in the car, and she indeed did that, driving all the way from Yorkshire with her friend Bev.

We had planned to use a removals company to transport large items, but when Rachel announced that her boyfriend had a Luton van we offered to pay them to bring all our stuff out and have a free holiday with us. Which they duly did.

Rachel, moi and Joss on the Citadella

It was great fun having Rachel and Joss staying. They brought a tandem in the back of the van, and we had some big laughs riding around Budapest. Bikes in general are cool, but tandems are frozen solid, and we had so many astonished looks and warm smiles riding up and down the banks of the Danube and that it made me think that "I've got to have one of these".

Fishermen's Bastion

Rachel and Joss were joined a few days later by Matt, escaping from a festival in Croatia, and then also by Felix and Penny who had decided to have a short holiday in Hungary.

Matt arrives at Keleti palyaudvar

So for nearly a week we had a maximum of seven people at one time staying and had a real laugh. More on one night out in another blog.

Matt and Helen on the Citadel

Rachel, Matt, Joss, Helen, Felix and Penny

We had other visitors as well.

David and Karen, some previous neighbours of Helen's visited us one evening for dinner and we had an interesting evening talking about the current political situation back in Britain. Although I try to keep in touch through Radio 4 it's difficult to get much of a feeling for the vibe of the country, and I have to say that I felt somewhat relieved to be out of the country and in salaried employment at this precise moment.

Then we had Jill and Shayleigh. They stayed for four or five nights at the end of train journeys from Britain, and having them around offered yet more dimensions on the place. They particularly enjoyed the baths, and were pretty well the first people to stay with us who did not have to put up with a lot of rain.

So all in all, we had an interesting July and August with visitors.

Moving home

Good grief! It has been about two months since my last blog entry. I think this is the way with such things, as life gets in the way of all plans.

The life in particular has been moving apartments and Helen finally permanently moving to Budapest. We left our sweet little apartment in Falk Miksa at the beginning of July, with some regrets, as it had been my home since January and I had come to feel very comfortable there. However, we did want an extra bedroom and I was finding its review into the courtyard getting rather boring.

So we had been looking around with the help of an estate agent at properties in the approximate area, District V, which has many advantages: close to work, quiet at most times of the day but close to interesting nightlife. We had got a bit desperate, not being able to find anywhere that felt just right and started to look up at the buildings as we walked around for 'Kiado' (For rent) signs. Eventually we saw one on a magnificent building overlooking Szabadsag ter, and decided to ring the number even though we thought that it would be far too expensive.

Our new place (Lechner's Post Office Savings Bank just visible to the right)

Anyway, the owners showed us around and said that it was indeed going to be far too expensive but we loved the place, wonderful views over the square, lovely rooms, lots of light, location, location, location. So we cheekily sent them an e-mail suggesting a rent that was far less than they had asked for and were astonished when they replied saying that if we went up €100, the place was ours.

There then followed a month of negotiations and discussions about contracts. The landlords are Russian and we suddenly got rather paranoid about whether or not they were legitimate and if we were going to be scammed. But after getting advice from colleagues about the various legal documentation to look for we negotiated our way through the contract negotiations successfully and finally moved in on Saturday, 10 July.

Crowds watching a World Cup game in the square

We arrived during the middle of the World Cup, and shared the square for several weeks with one of Budapest's large outdoor TV screens.

The place was unfurnished, so we spent the first few weeks backwards and forwards to IKEA and various other furniture and household equipment shops, trying to establish yet another home. Truth be told it is only now, after nearly 2 months, that we are just about settled in.

And it's wonderful. The collapsed Budapest property market is bad news for many people but we have to count our blessings that we can be living in such a wonderful place.

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?