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Legend says when the Romans wanted to conquer the land over the river they found a monster called Főz-Süt-Fűt living in the marshes of Pest. The monster didn’t fight the legionnaires, but he had them seduced with beauties from the East. The soldiers never returned to their camp and stayed on the left side of the river.

The monster became interested in watching the people, well, kinda mix. With time he was a true voyeur, bringing people together in the most peculiar ways and combinations. The monster is still around, maybe he lives somewhere under the city. They say if his voyeurism is not satisfied he will wake up rampage through the streets like a Godzilla.

makes an appereance in Zagar’s Bossa Astoria video at 1.30 - 1.40

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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.

Budapest is a city that was made up of three cities. Buda is a mostly clean cut old town with conservative traditions and prideful bourgeoisie. It was always closer to the centre of power and the composition of its citizenry still changes with winds, even though the country is governed from the Parliament on the other side.Pest is a pulsing cosmopolitan place, changing much faster and more dramatically than Buda. Pest is the real city where you feel that anything can and will happen. Maybe because it was built on a messy, marshy place in Barbaricum, where the lines of power were not so clearly drawn. Unfortunately, most of Óbuda, the third city-part, became a huge, faceless pre-fab housing estate with only the old town square and a few places by the Danube telling about past glory.

When Ice-T visited here he said aptly that Buda is the Body and Pest is the Pussy. Even the B-s and P-s are matching. He was right, the city is a woman, with the hills as breasts and something messy on the left bank where you can feel the twirl of things. You wonder the grace of Buda and feel the power of Pest, the pussy, sucking everything into itself. Just like you admire the elegant style, shoulders and breasts of a Buda woman and you feel the fatal, invincible attraction to the pussy of the Pest woman.