My friend B asked me to meet her in Budapest, so I said yes. This is what happened whilst we were there.

Son of Zoltan
Zoltan is ill, so his son picks me up at the airport and drives me to our flat. This is the first time I have ever had someone waiting for me at arrivals with my name on a card. The pick up deal is too good to miss, everything is so cheap in Budapest, so I go with the flow.

Son of Zoltan is really sexy. He’s been learning English for a couple of years and wants to practise on me, so we have a strange stilted conversation as we drive into town at 100 miles per hour. It’s text book learning language. He asks me if I have any pets, he asks me this as we whiz past a dead cat on the motorway, and he tells me about has two dogs, he says that he likes to go fishing and that he would like to open a fishing tackles shop. We discover that we’ve both been to Disneyland Paris and seen The Da Vinci Code (“Book good is,” says SoZ). He wants to know what people in England are like, and I struggle to explain the word eccentric. We tell each other jokes that neither of us understands.

Me: What’s brown and sticky? A brown stick.
Son of Zoltan: Stick? What is stick?
Me: Like a branch, a twig, on a tree (waving my arms)
Him: (puzzled look) I do not understand, why funny?

I am totally charmed and happy as anything when he drives past us the next day, bibbing his horn and waving like a friend.

Flat
We stay in a little flat in the middle of Buda. It’s cheap and noisy but clean and a welcome home. Everything is oddly shaped, the rooms, the furniture, the building, and B and I fantasise about how we’d rearrange it if we lived there. Our flat is on Floor 1/2. There are Russian channels on the television. There is a courtyard where noises echo and where we never see anyone.

Two Tourists
B takes me up the hill to see the castle and Fisherman’s Bastion. The streets have been relatively quiet up until now but all of a sudden it’s tourist central Fisherman’s Bastion is possibly the model for the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland, this ornate folly is delightful. We eat our first cake of the trip and take the funicular down the hill.

The Baths
I couldn't come to Hungary without having a dip. All the details are in my Pool section.

Dancing
In the city square there is a display of Hungarian folk dancing. Those dancers must be near fainting in their heavy layered outfits, dancing in the afternoon heat. It’s relentless, the dancing and the sun. Hungarian folk music is the music of madness. Later, in the underpass we see a group of kids breakdancing. They stand in a row, and when the music takes them they come forward to execute a handstand, or a spin, or another complicated manoeuvre. They concentrate fiercely on their moves and it is utterly compelling to see ruddy-faced white Hungarian youngsters – girls as well as boys - dance the dance of the ghetto.

The House of Terror
Terror Hàza is now a museum, but it was once the headquarters of the Hungarian secret police, and before that the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s very own Nazi party, made it their home for a while. The building occupies a big chunk of one of the swankiest streets in the city and it’s open for visitors.


I didn’t immediately warm to the overly slick museum presentation experience. The surfeit of plasma screens and highly designed displays, coupled with overwhelming English language information sheets gave me Millennium Dome flashbacks for a while. But I soon got over it, in fact the sense of dread and anxiety that grew as we headed closer to the cells in the basement was eerie and real.

So the House of Terror documents the culture that enabled the secret police to dominate Hungarian society in the 20th century. You get an understanding of how oppressive this rule was, how nobody could be trusted, how threats were a part of everyday life and how torture was used. It also presents propaganda in a chilling light, it made me question my relationship to it as a kitsch part of history. One of the most powerful exhibits is a quiet wall covered with photographs and names of the victimisers of that period: party members, police chiefs, informers and corrupt judges. It presented these people as humans, as flawed people who could have done better but really fucked up. It was extraordinary.

Something else happened whilst we were at the museum. B called me over to look at a wall that had been plastered with facsimile pages of deportation papers. These were the orders that were given to deport undesirable individuals to remote work camps. After they were deported, the people’s possessions were seized by the state and when they returned, they had nothing. B had told me that her father was a Hungarian refugee who fled to Norway after the uprising in 1956. He was an undesirable because his own father had been an officer in the Hungarian army, on the wrong side after the Soviets took control. He had also been deported to do forced work. So B called me into this room and she pointed to her grandfather’s name on a sheet of paper plastered to the wall, and her aunt’s name, and her uncle’s name, and her dad’s name. I saw B’s family name up there, my B, my friend. Her uncle had donated his papers to the museum a while back. We stood and were shocked and I felt astonished to be so close to this awful history.

Opera
£15 buys you one of the best seats in the opera house, it enables you to watch a production with a cast of over 100 in period costumes, and to stand on the terrace of the beautifully ornate state opera house during the interval.

Statue Park
When communism ended in other former Soviet republics, statues were torn down and destroyed. In Budapest they were torn down and put in a park so that people in the future would know about them and know what they represented. Statue Park is a mixture of tourist kitsch and the earnest desire to reach out and explain to foreigners what the art of a totalitarian regime really means. It’s not entirely successful, but it is really bloody amazing. The park is half built and will probably remain that way until someone comes up with the money to build the proposed interpretation and study centres. But for the time being it offers a stroll on the edge of the city through a period in public art that has now disappeared. So we see Lenin and Stalin, proud anonymous workers, monumental peasants and labourers. The statues are creepy and funny, completely alien, actually.

And the park makes me long for something similar in the UK. I would love to tear down all the statues of religious and royal leaders, military people, “heroes,” and put them together in a park somewhere, instead of getting in my way on the streets of my country. I think it would be useful to examine the mechanics of state power that are represented by these statues, just as the curators of Statue Park do with theirs. And maybe we could replace them with statues of artists and poets, writers, thinkers, animals, statues that celebrate the culture of a place rather than its powermongers.

Still popular
Naomi Campbell is still popular enough in Hungary to be launching a new perfume. Billy Idol sells out shows here. And Matt Bianco are still big in Budapest.