START BUDAPEST BLOG

You must have heard that taxi drivers preying on toursists is one of the annonying things in Budapest. With a little caution you can easily manage not to fall victim to these suckers. The main rules:

• Use a taxi from a big company
• Order a taxi on the phone if possible
• Make sure the taxi you ordered picks you up
• Don’t take an offer form a taxi driver to visit strip bars etc.
• Try no to look like a fool and use common sense

Click to find out how and why.
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The passengers of a night bus are a cross section of the night: young people going to or from a club, workers travelling through the city to an early shift, homeless sleeping on the bus.

Night buses in Budapest operate between 23.00 and 4 o’clock the following day. Around midnight the night buses can turn into clubs because many so people use the time of the journey to get hammered. On the weekends at around three or four is the after party time when you can see at least one person who is more fucked up than you are. The night bus on the way home is your last chance to pick someone up. It sounds strange but actually you can often succeed.
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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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WestEnd City Center (or West End City Center) is a huge shopping mall / plaza behind Nyugati Railway Station in Budapest. It opened on November 17, 1999. It became fast what it advertised: “a new centre for the city”. WestEnd City Center was the role model for all of the huge shopping malls in the region. It also used to be the biggest shopping mall (one a 50,000 m² piece of land) in Hungary, but now Arena Plaza is bigger.
The mall houses 400 over shops and businesses and also the Hilton WestEnd Hotel. It also has a 22,300 m² rooftop park with and ice rink.

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Budapest map for real.
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Budapest in big Hollywood films appearing as another town
Berlin - Spy Game
Buenos Aires - Evita
Paris, London - Munich

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.