Few places smell good after a 12-hour overnight train, and Budapest was no exception. Fresh off breakfast of a plain roll and the European equivalent of Sunny D, we were greeted at the Keleti railway station with the scent of burning trash and strong perfume. We dragged our bags for a mile before arriving at our hostel. Occupying half a floor of a tenement building, the hostel teetered on the sixth floor, with a balcony that cantilevered inward, a ring of identical apartment windows facing down. The courtyard looked like the bottom of a drained pool: cracked green tile, bruised and rutted, with puddles of stagnant water collecting in the center. None of it mattered. Budapest was the highlight of the honeymoon, as underdog as cities come. And in many ways, this was our most perfect day.
Courtney and I spent the morning in Nagycasarnok, a 19th-century market hall, boasting tall skylit windows, Hungarian handicrafts made of lace, and food stalls peddling every style and quantity of paprika imaginable. In the afternoon we headed to Szimpla Kert, the famed “ruin pub,” built on the site of an enormous old stove factory set for demolition. There were dozens of rooms but no interior walls, like staring into a life-size doll house. Each had its own theme thrown together from scavenged artifacts. Some rooms were trashy, full of salvaged bathtubs and gaudy lampshades. Others were like a museum to a bygone era: Minolta TV sets strung together with diodes to control the brightness of the displays. Graffiti covered the walls and disco balls lined the glass ceiling. Up by the bar was an advertisement for bread in the shape of penises. It was part trailer park junkyard and part post-modern masterpiece. We stayed for three hours.
Before we knew it, it was evening. For dinner, we indulged in one of a plethora of gyro and rice platter combos that had been tempting us since Paris. For dessert, we grabbed a one-Euro scoop of gelato (chocolate for Courtney, marzipan for me). We leaned into the expectation-free day. At the backside of an internet café, we did our laundry. Watching the dryers spin, we read our books to a remarkable soundtrack of The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest. We contemplated heading home then—our bags bursting with the smell of fresh detergent—but Courtney rallied us for one final stop.
We took the Metro to the Parliament Building on the eastern bank of the Danube. Home of the National Assembly, the building was inaugurated in 1896, on the 1,000th anniversary of the country, when the cities of Buda, Óbuda, and Pest were united, and remains the largest building in Hungary. It could have been the opposite of Szimpla Kert: stately, symmetrical, exquisitely wrought, the very pinnacle of Hungarian aristocracy. The main façade was so lit up it almost sparkled, illuminating the view of the waterfront.
And yet, what shocked me most was the curious dearth of people. We had the giant plaza sidewalk to ourselves, its emptiness magnified by its staggering footprint. There is something deeply peaceful about being in the presence of great buildings, as if this hulking, historical monument had always been for us alone. It was well before the photos of desolate streets and empty highways, buildings that for nearly a year now have only been scarcely, if ever, visited. Like everyone, we’ve found our own neighborhood corelates now. Walking down the center of an empty street, the scale is undeniably smaller. But the feeling of pausing to marvel at unusual, new ruins, remains.