reesesWeb

I can't fault the Magyars their fixation on bacon.

I made it back into the states today. Fortunately, I was not the person who died on the plane.

I have a few trite observations to make about Budapest. I'm tired and cranky (so, in other words, feeling normal), so this will be short, in the form of bullet items.

• "Budapest has the most beautiful women in the world."
  
  Perhaps at one time, they did. But the Madison Avenue model machine morlocks have apparently sucked them all away, like so many Eloi appetisers. There are a lot of "pretty" girls with fantastic bodies -- the sort who think they can make it in Hollywood and become movie stars, and do, but in porn. There are also a lot of "cute" girls working in places far beneath what would be their stations here in the states -- mall kiosk girls that could easily be regional catalog models, etc.
  
• Very dirty, run-down buildings
  
  Budapest is about ten years behind Prague in cleaning up their city after throwing off the industrial yoke of the Soviet collectivisation regime. This stands to reason -- half of Budapest was destroyed in the second World War, and replaced with godawful Sovbloc concrete cubes of residential misery. Who'd want to clean that up? It'd just be polishing a turd.
  
• Porn capital of Europe
  
  It may be the porn capital of Europe, but it's almost all for export. Even in the tourist areas (where lots of porn is typically sold), the best you could do is a handful of truly scary looking magazines with emaciated, drugged out girls on the covers. After I worked my way through those, there wasn't anything else.
  
• Food & Hotel are absurdly inexpensive for European city standards. The five star hotel we stayed in (Kempinski) was about half the cost of similar lodging in Prague, and about a third to a fourth the cost in Nice, Paris, or the states. And food -- eating at McDonald's is about 1/2 the cost of a gourmet meal at one of Budapest's new "elite" scenester restaurants (Tom-George). However, the bill of fare at these restaurants lead me to believe the menu was composed by a guy who came to the west coast once, and made up a list of dishes that sounded to him as if they'd be served in SF or LA. Lots of bacon, though. Bacon chips, bacon noodles, bacon nigiri. You think I'm making that last one up. Anyway, we had a very satisfying meal for about 10kft, or about USD40. The huge numbers would throw me off after eating, too. I'd think,"Oh, jesus, 5000ft to take a cab from the airport!" and have to calm myself by telling myself it was about USD20. That backfired, though, when I checked out of the hotel and settled the minibar tab. I signed away 36kft without thinking or questioning how perhaps ten bottles of Coke, Fanta, and water could come to $144.
  
• Lots of fat americans in BP
  
  It's american vacation season, true. It's Hungarian travel season, too, lowering their numbers. But everywhere I went, I heard loud american-accented english. Everywhere. However, on the bright side, I didn't hear any of the "ugly american"-isms that embarrass us overseas. Perhaps Budapest, being slightly inaccessible (good god, you'll never learn the language), is on the other side of that Rubicon, impregnible to the people who roll through the Netherlands and call everything 'quaint'.
  
• Grocery stores close absurdly early
  
  OK, this last one sucks, but so do grocery stores that close at 4pm on Saturday, and 2pm on Sunday, if they're open at all.
  

Kat asked if I'd go back, because she's keen on living there. Not because it's her favorite place, as I think we're both partial to Prague in that region, but because there's actually work for her there. Lots of work in the human rights/international law field, and she could get a job that would pay for law school in only 250 years.

Let's just say,"no." I might consider it if I were single, just to debauch for a year or two, but not old and married. It's too dirty, it's too backward in terms of technological facilities available, and the language is just too damned hard. I can't emphasise the language barrier enough. Sure, everyone speaks english, but I don't want to be one of those gits who lives in a foreign country for a year, and still can't hold a conversation about the weather.