[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]
Reminder – Sunday lunch in London – 1pm, All Bar One, Leicester Square.
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Grafitto outside UN building in Vienna- “self-deceit is common among those from the tropics”
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Weird – in my mind I have always associated Budapest with Turkish exotica, and Hungary with Russo-slavic ruritania. It is resoundingly neither. It is very much a typical city of Western Europe, and the abundant good historical museums make clear that this has been the case for hundreds of years. Londoners would have always felt quite at home.
It is a big, sprawling city that more than anything else seems to have been architecturally frozen for a hundred years. The buildings are amazing, and they play best against the dark skies and sprinkling rain of my first-night wanderings. It’s a haunting place, filled with a profound indifference to the vicissitudes of history, as a result of being the scene of so much of it. The city (cities, really, born only in the 19th century of neighbours Buda and Pest) has over centuries been the seat of control for numerous conquering powers, most significantly the Austrian Hapsburg line who for a time used Budapest as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire; also Turks and COmmunists, to name two other sources of influence. It is a city of foreigners, and has been since its growth as a trade centre a thousand years ago; for very little of that time has it been a spiritual centre for Hungarians. You can sense it on the streets, a curl of the lip with the locals, a curtness, a sense that they secretly know that all foreigners are fooling themselves if they think they can ever claim to know and own Hungary through Budapest.
It is a city of great beauty, whirling speed, vibrant and happy people, and it wears its history like tidal rocks wear the signs of the ocean washing over them and back again. I have a lot of love for Budapest, but I don’t really feel I’ve visited Hungary, any more than Barcelona showed me Spain. But, like Barcelona, it is a place I will strongly recommend.
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Now I am in Vienna. Everywhere is very cold. It snowed on us in Budapest, and we arrived in Vienna just after a snowfall. The seasons continue to become more chaotic – once, this would have been an omen of looming change.
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I really want to make this ten times as long but I have two minutes left on my internet time. So, obviously, I won’t. Thanks to all those who have emailed me, I love getting news and thoughts from home and elsewhere, and promise to contact all of you over the next month or so as I ratchet some free time at the work computer.
Love and peace,
morgue