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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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As a Westerner talking to Hungarians, you can often notice an element of arrogance. Hungarians sometimes tend to feel a bit superior because “life (or survival…) in this country is harder than in the West” where people are “spoiled by the social system and lack of challenge and hardship”. Other common topics are: our school system gives more comprehensive knowledge than a Western one; basically everything was invented by Hungarians; we have the most Olympic gold medals and Nobel Prizes per capita and so on.
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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.