Traipsing Around: Travel and Psychogeography: Budapest

Budapest is a fantastic place! It has the feel of a major Imperial European city, alongside somewhere like London or Paris. It has wide, tree lined boulevards, tall, imposing, delicately patterned 6 storey buildings and, in the Pest side where I am staying, close to the Opera, lots of bars and restaurants. It is cosmopolitan and diverse, but with a strong architectural, confident, sense of itself. I walk the few kilometres to the Buda side, crossing one of the many bridges, climbing the steep hill overlooking the Danube, to admire this vast city of some 2 million people. I spend around 5 hours walking around the Hungarian National Gallery which has a Picasso exhibition that I somehow manage to find my way into without paying extra, but I’m actually taken by the work of a Hungarian painter called Mihaly Murkacsy, who was painting in the last half of the 19^th Century. His works span multiple styles and genres, from early ‘Realist’ scenes of intimate, domestic interiors (‘Woman Churning Butter’, ‘Lads at the Bar’), which have the subtle stillness and composure of Dutch interior paintings of 200 years before, through to large, almost impressionistic landscapes, echoing Turner (‘The Dusty Road’), through to more classical religious paintings. The range and variety of his styles are amazing and so is the sense of honesty, a sort of striving to represent the world as it is, or as it seems to be, which I just don’t get from the more intellectually (and physically) driven works by Picasso. The following day I just wander, bumping into touristy things such as the Houses of Parliament and the fantastic Saint Steven’s Basilica, with its two domes, ornately gilded glory and intricate Corinthian columns. Each evening I visit the same bar, getting to know the bar staff, watching the football and chatting to a local guy and a bloke from Wolverhampton, Dom, who is living in the city with his girlfriend, (although they have just split up and they are both considering their options. None of which involve a return to Wolverhampton).

Fortunately, leaving the city, I take a wrong turn and find myself heading North instead of West, so I work my way around gradually to roughly where I was originally intending, travelling along the River Duna and the Hungarian/Slovak border, through some beautiful, small, riverside villages, stopping now and again to get a coffee and something to eat at Veroce and Nagymaros, with its castle high on a hill, overlooking the river. Old Boys sit and drink coffee and beer at each stop and smile acknowledgement as I sit at plastic tables in the sunshine overlooking the river. The countryside reminds me of Britain in mid-Summer perhaps 30 or 40 years ago, with no traffic on the roads and that languorous, hazy greenness, the smell of summer flowers and the sound of wasps and bees. Brought up during the time of the Cold War, somehow with an image of darkness when picturing in my mind the lands on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, I had no idea that Eastern Europe was as beautiful, verdant and unspoilt as this.