Thursday, June 28, Budapest

I joined up with a free Walk around Buda and Pest this morning. Three pretty young women divided us up for a two and a half hour stride beginning on the Pest side and crossing the Danube to Buda near midday. Our group had members from four continents (no Africans), Muslims with their scarfs, Aussies in shorts, South Americans struggling to follow the accented English of the guides, a few Americans, lots of EU folk.
The tour was uneventful. Much was made of recent efforts to purge the collective memories of Soviet time. The city looks prosperous with little evidence of the decay that you see in Old Havana (the only socialist paradise I have visited--Georgia and Armenia had similarly cleansed themselves of USSR automobiles, bad service and falling-down buildings.) I learned that most of Budapest was bombed into the Stone Age in 1945 ("Longest siege of WWII except for Leningrad and Stalingrad"). The buildings were reconstructed post war with some effort to recreate the look of old Budapest.
The intense area of tourist-trappism is over the bridge in Buda. They rebuilt a bunch of old castles and the kitsch stores followed the tourists. The view of the river was nice.

I spent the afternoon looking for Hungarian art but found that the local flea market is not open Mon-Fri so I had to postpone my craving to buy tapestries. But that search led me, serendipitously, to one of the national museums. Inside I found a wonderful photography exhibit. What made it special was that I had just visited a similar exhibit in New York. The Budapest version dovetailed beautifully with what I had seen stateside but was larger and more complete. I fell in love with the work of Man Ray (especially a photo called "Kiki"), Paul Strand, someone named Rossler and a Hungarian named Aladar Skjelke (sp?).

Tomorrow I hope to explore some caves.