This week marks our one month-iversary of being here in Budapest. I’m currently staring out the window at the milky haze of smog draped over the cityscape like a wet blanket, planning my moves for the day, knowing I’m being chased by the ever-encroaching 4pm sunset. They say the grass is always greener on the other side; well, right now that grass is greener than a grow house in Humboldt. What can I say? – We’re homesick. Sure, it’s lame, but can you really blame us!? We just got finished doing the following, so you can imagine we’re a little spoiled…
Fortunately, we’ve managed to find some relief to the wintertime doldrums here in Budapest, including ancient thermal bath houses, neoclassical cafés, the aptly named ruinpubs, and the market halls. All of these places are interesting enough for me to fill an entire post with photos and historical details, which I may foreseeably do in the future, but for now here’s the abbreviated version.
Budapest is probably best known for its many thermal baths. Without regurgitating the text from a guide book, I’ll tell you that there’s about 25 baths open to the public in the city. Some are incredibly ancient, and some are modern spas built in swanky upscale hotels, and personally, not somewhere I’d ever go. People have been taking advantage of the thermal springs for a couple thousand years, starting with the Celts, then the Romans, Ottoman Turks, and now the Hungarians. Most of the larger baths have a multitude of pools both indoors and outdoors, and all different temperatures. In my opinion, the outdoor pools are the best, especially in the winter, as it’s cool to bathe in a cloud of mist, plus they’re less crowded and don’t smell like a sweaty jockstrap.
While there’s cafes on almost every block here, the hundred year old renaissance influenced cafes are the ones worth checking out, as they’re unlike any coffee shop you’d find in the states. A few worth mentioning include the cafe in the Alexandra bookstore on Andrassy, and the New York Cafe. They cost a little bit more, but are still more affordable than a Starbucks.
As fans of dive bars and beer gardens, we’ve definitely taken a liking to the city’s network of romkerts, or ‘ruinpubs’ – essentially, old tenement buildings that have been completely overtaken and turned into a vast multitiered beer garden, artfully decorated floor to ceiling in found objects, sculptures, graffiti, and mosaics. The closest thing I’ve experienced to these places is the squatted out buildings in Berlin that function in much the same way. From what I understand, these aren’t squats – permission is granted to individuals to occupy these buildings through mysterious channels that one local acquaintance of ours likened to organized crime dealings. Either way, several of the ruinpubs we’ve been to are pretty awesome, including Szimplakert (simple garden), which we discovered through a piece in the New York Times before we left, and which is now a block and a half away from the apartment we just moved into (forgive the photos – they don’t do it justice).
Lastly, there’s the market halls. Basically, take your city’s farmers market, throw it inside Grand Central Station, and you have a Budapest market hall. Most of the downtown city districts have their own market hall, the most impressive being Nagyvásárcsarnok, aka Great Market Hall. Basically, all the bases are covered here, including plenty of produce sellers, bakers, butchers, fish mongers, and food vendors. While the chain supermarkets here are pretty awful, the market halls definitely make up for it.
