Budapest

For no particular reason, I’m thinking about Budapest today, a city that was, for no reason I could think of even at the time, one of the best places I’ve ever been. Because, let’s face it, Budapest looks like any other industrial city anywhere in the world. It’s been bombed into submission so many times that it’s little more than a jumble of concrete and dull, cheap architecture.

But I loved the place. It had a vibe.

My cousin and I had taken the train—she wasn’t happy about that, but I love long train rides—from Prague, a city that has to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Prague is your high school girlfriend, or—no—it’s the woman you wish you could be in love with. Endless beauty and excitement.

But I also thought Prague had this “get it while you can,” vibe. Just like Budapest, Prague has been destroyed too many times to count. Things are good now, and everybody is running around like it’s the last night at the fair, and you have to get all the pleasure you can before the lights go out for good.

Budapest, though, was more resigned. There seemed to be a Zen take on it. Kind of, Okay, it’s all good now, but you know the sky is going to fall again sooner or later, so we might as well all sit down and have a drink.

Budapest has all these cool tiny museums: we went to the Bible museum, the subway museum, the Lutheran Museum, which is across the square from the first McDonalds to go in behind the Iron Curtain.

And Budapest’s main museum—which both guidebooks we carried simply noted “had some nice art”—is the secondary repository of the riches of the Hapsburgs. We are talking Art here, so much of it, such good stuff, the Rembrandts are hidden off in a side room.

I have an extreme fondness for 12th-15th century religious art, and the museum had room after room of it, suffering saints, beatific martyrs. Golds and reds and blues that have never again been seen.

Maybe that’s why I’m thinking about Budapest today: because a day spent thinking about beauty is a good day.