Velkom tu HUngari!

Hello, Plone People, my name is Mark Richards. My friend Balazs asked me to be your city guide and resident resource for PloneConference2009 on the topic of Budapest.

For those coming to the conference, I hope to make these posts into external libraries of insight, so you can get in the mood for this great town, to help you get to the heart of things in what time you have outside of the conference, and to make your stay in Hungary more memorable, enjoyable and worthwhile.

My relationship with this town started in the summer of 1989 in a cafe in Washington, DC. I was boasting about my first trip to Europe to a young Hungarian guy who'd been sent to the US from a refugee camp in Austria, instead of Australia like he wanted. Since then the the iron curtain was opened and the Berlin Wall had come down. He now had credit card bills, but he said I could easily travel to Budapest... only he said “Budapesht”. I had no idea it was in Europe at that time, but just the sound of it conjured a vision of minarets and elephants in the streets. When I hitchhiked into town at the end of that summer, I was pleasantly surprised at how fantastically wrong my expectations had been.

I found an english teaching job, some life-long friends and for the next nineteen years, that same feeling hit me regularly as I watched this city change, passing out of the stoic grand greyness of the ex-Soviet bloc and into the shiny new European Union. It's still struggling with its identity. The only stable point of life here is the constant flux. Let transition be your watchword, and the artifacts of history with reveal itself and the beauty of this city will extend its welcoming arms to you. That said, let me give you some geographical context and historical background specifics.

A Tough Broad

Budapest is Vienna's sister city, both raised in the boom years of the Austro-Hungarian empire before the world wars. But unlike her beautiful and sometimes haughty sister, Budapest was bombed during WWII and got some quick, cheap plastic surgery from Stalin's Red Army in the reconstruction. The downtown area on the Pest side is surrounded by towering 'blocks of flats', concrete mesas set in rows around large intersections some of which soon became new city districts and were built to last for nearly a half a century. Well, a half century is nearly up. The short ride from the airport should tell you all you'll want to know and be able to grasp about this side of town in the time you're here.

For all that, Budapest wears her scars proudly, determined to make the best of what she's got. Assimilating 40 odd years of Communist Rule into a present day image isn't easy business. Budapest also got Turkish baths and Hapsburg spas,  the northernmost islamic holysite, the second largest synagogue, and the largest number of shopping malls per capita than anywhere in Europe. For me, Budapest is the down-to-earth and honest sister, no-nonsense and real. People come here to live, not just to look. The city is still a tool of progress not just a showcase or memorial of it.

Boulevard of Broken Pavement

The ringroads are the main life arteries of Budapest, the kiskörút (Little Ringroad) which was once a moat around the medieval town, and the nagykörút (Big Ringroad), track of the the essential 4 and 6 tram lines, which are now under reconstruction. [BTW: I'll give you some shortcuts to pronunciation of this language soon.] For general orientation, just remember these ringroads connect the three cities that officially joined up to become Budapest in 1873: Buda, Pest and Óbuda (or Old Buda).

Pest is on the eastern flat side of the Danube River and the other two are in the hills on the west side. For scale, you should know there is a third ringroad called the Hungaria körút, a kind of beltway around them all and through the suburbs, that you would need a car to enjoy. It suffices to say, that through nineteen years of life here, I've hardly been out to the Hungaria körút, and at the rate this town changes, what I know is most likely outdated. There's enough to see in the heart of town.

This may seem odd coming from "your guide and resident expert" but it is indicative of a couple facts that even Hungarians don't consider enough: One, centripetal force sucks - the city's radial design fosters the misconception that if you're central, you've made it! Everything worth seeing is downtown, so I don't need to go anywhere else. However, the most tourist-oriented area is in the center (on both sides of the river). The conference will be held just at the edge of the big ring road, so you'll have the opportunity to resist its pull, but in moments of indecision catapult yourself outward. I'll be giving you a few anchor points to keep you in a good orbit.

The other underestimated fact: Budapest is not Hungary. That usually puts my friends from the nation's smaller towns on the defensive, but as the only city larger than a million people strong, and as it comprises about 20% of the country's population of 11 million, Budapest is the natural place to search for opportunity. The same brain-drain-to-the-west phenomenon the nation as a whole suffers from, brings many of the brightest lights out of the smaller cities and countryside. If they don't make it their springboard to the nagyvilág (big world), they soon get acclimated to its lively pace and spend a lot of time spreading myths about Budapest to foreign visitors. Especially myths about how hard their language is... ha! I'll give you some insider tips on that in my next post.