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Plazas (the term used by Hungarians for shopping malls) in Budapest mean more than just very Western or American style shopping centres. They are the new city life. You find everything that makes a city different from a village: promenades, high streets, cinemas and cafés.

West End City Center, a shopping mall / plaza behind Nyugati became what it advertised: a new centre for the city. Sociologists talk about a new breed of people for whom plazas are the only third place. The Plaza became a plaza in the piazza (public place) sense; there are even people who visit a plaza to get fresh air.

The whole plaza is an as if thing. People act as if they had a lot of money, as if they were shopping addicts. The truth is: not many can afford buying new things constantly, but acting as if they could (and just did) is nevertheless an option. A lot of women save those fancy paper bags you get in the shops. The paper bag becomes a multifunctional tool: it is a handbag and a tool for as if - a status symbol, an item to make others envious during the plaza cruising.

Typical scene on the promenade between the hotels and the Erzsébet bridge, on a sunny late afternoon. A well-dressed, bit older man lights up a cigarette. A young guy comes to him, asks for a cigarette and starts a conversation. The game is clear and not about smoking. Who is the young guy? A runaway kid? Somebody from the penitentiary, or an orphan who never knew his parents and was not tough enough to become a badass? Someone just making a fast ten-thousand to sup- port his coke or whatever habit? Someone from a distant village, who came to work in the city and somehow ended up as a male prostitute?

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Your last exit in the VIIth district before the bourgeois, green belt district streets of XIVth Zugló is Szinva utca. The street is designed in perfect, scary symmetry. On the sides you see windows with rolled-down palettes. You can’t help the feeling of being watched. But the street is dead, the only living thing between the walls is dog shit.

A few toothless zombies appear from nowhere and check if the cars have valid parking permits. You notice that each house has a workshop underneath, in some you can watch the last women working in the capital’s textile industry. You are happy to see people again, even though they are half machines.

You get scared, hurry towards the light, the busy road at the end of the street. You have a feeling that each step takes you further and further from your goal. You scream. A window opens and someone tells you to go to hell. “I am already in the hallway” you shout back.

The „climbies”, the monkey bars were all manufactured by the Central Monkey Bar Manufacturing Cooperative (CMBMC). Some of them had political meaning: the sphere symbolised the globe and the rocket trained the future generation of kosmonauts. There was also the house, the cat, the wave and the pipeline and that was the selection. Thick oil paint covered them in either peace blue, soviet red, sick piss yellow or green.

They were made of metal so your hands would freeze to them in the winter and they would burn your ass in the summer. The blocks of concrete surrounding them made climbing an extreme sport. Most of the kids suffered severe injuries and boasted about them like veterans boast about their scars. Today the good old mászokas are replaced by safe-to-use, euro-conform wooden or plastic things.

Some of the old ones are still to be seen around, sunken, paint peeled off.

Visiting one of the baths (spas) is surely a must to do.

For detailed info, descriptions, news visit: budapest-bath.com

• Gellért Spa and hotel
• Address: Budapest XI., Szent Gellért tér 1.
• Tel: (+36 1) 466 61 66
• Open:
  Mon-Fri: 6.00-19.00
  Sat-Sun: 6.00-17.00
• Price:
  with locker 2800 HUF
  with cabin 3100 HUF
  Free if you stay in the Gellert Hotel

• Széchenyi Spa (Bath)
• Address: Budapest XIV., Állatkerti út 11.

• Rudas Spa (Bath)
• Address: Budapest I., Döbrentei tér 9.

• Rácfürdő (Rác Spa/Bath)
• Address: Budapest I., Hadnagy u. 8-10.
• under renovatio, opens in 2009 (allegedly…)

• Király Spa (Bath)
• Address: Budapest II., Fő u. 82-86.

• Lukács Spa (Bath)
• Address: Budapest II., Frankel Leó u. 25-29.

You can observe the contrasts of this square from the upstairs terrace of the bar on Moszkva Tér. The square lies at the intersection of many of the roads that descend from the surrounding hills - home to the country’s richest. And this is where the city’s last slave market (”official” term: illegal work force market) is held every morning. People from the Eastern part of the country and Transylvania are hired by foremen who shout loudly into mobile phones, selling these guys to building sites.

One week’s earnings of the workers could buy one pair of trainers that the übertrendy youngsters in the bar wear. Fate is a bitch sometimes. The trendiest kids have to pass the poorest workers everyday. There is little interaction, both groups dislike the other and are absolutely aware that they have little in common.

City planning in Budapest has always been a bit of a comedy act. Few decades ago the council started building the second (red) metro line. The National Theatre, that time, the jewel of Blaha, was found to be in its way, so they blew it up. Few months later they realised the metro would not have even touched the buildings foundation. Some say that the commies wanted to destroy that national symbol on purpose.
In the 70’s, they were building a motorway bridge near Nyugati. They started from both sides, and as the two branches were nearing each other they realised there was a 0,675 meter difference between the two. One side was measured to the Adriatic Sea level, the other is to the Baltic, hence the divergence. Well, there has always been a big matter which standard the country is measured or compared to.
People on night buses saluted this masterpiece of planning for decades. Coming from the South on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, the bus turned left on Alkotmány just before the bridge, drove around a huge block to turn right again onto the Körút and then made a left again under the bridge. The 5-minute detour was needed because the bus stop is placed twenty metres before the end of the bridge. Some genius solved this problem by allowing the night buses to make a left-turn before the bridge onto the Körút.

The real estate market seems to care little about important or simply magnificent buildings. Many of the city’s famous properties are decaying and no-one seems to be able to find a solution. The most famous case is Gozsdu udvar between Király and Dob utca. It was a Paris-style passage full of small businesses, offices and flats before the war. The bitching has been going for decades between the district, a cunning investor, the last inhabitants and the Rumanian state. In the end, the building was so run down that it could be used as a stand-in for post-war Berlin setting in the movie Spy Game, (imdb: tt0266987). They started the renovation recently but you are still able to visit if you can sneak past the guards. You might get an indescribably weird feeling of being in a scenery for a post nuclear strike role playing game.

Úttörő Áruház, V., Kossuth Lajos utca 7-9 . (Used to be the first shopping mall in Budapest. Last name was “Pioneer’s department store”)

Gozsdu udvar between Király and Dob utca

Divatcsarnok, Andrássy 39. “Fashion Hall”, (used to be a very chic shopping mall)

If you keep your head high and watch the rooftops you can se e weird installations on many buildings. Many of these turret-like edifices have other purpos es than being just mere ornaments. They were designed to be shooting stands and wer e heavily in use during the war and in 1956. The one on the corner of Dob utca is still the one of the most dominant landmarks of the street. Nazis sniped on the Kiskörút from this turret that is now turned into a flat. It was on sale for HUF 15,000,000 in 2004.

Like many women, this city had some rather not too pleasant experiences. Not long ago Germans on one side and Russians on the other abused her. Scars from that rape on her precious body can still be seen all over.

Up in the middle of the Castle on Dísz tér, one building full of bullet holes still stands out as a contrast to the tourist attractions. It is not preserved as it is on purpose, there is the usual bitching going on about the renovation: who will get the fat contract and so on. Still, it serves as perfect memento for the troublesome days.

The scarred buildings in Pest are not so in the focus of public attention, out of sight in a side street. Many of them will never be renovated, their last function is being a twisted tourist attraction until property speculation forces them to be torn down.