Budapest: Coming Home to Something You Didn’t Know Existed

Arrival through day two. The rest of the week remains unsupervised.

I went to the shop.

This would not normally justify an article. After Madrid, it requires documentation.

I used Google Maps on the way out to find the address. On the way back, I put the phone away and walked. The route made sense. I recognised where I was. I got back without being referred to another transport authority or descending through several geological periods.

Apparently my penance had been accepted.

At the end of the last instalment, I was asking God to forgive my reverse Camino and permit my departure from Madrid for heaven. Budapest, I corrected myself. I did not want an ambiguous destination interfering with the booking.

Well, I’m here.

I have only just arrived, so it would be premature to announce that every difficulty in my life has been resolved by entering Hungary. I have, however, successfully completed an errand. Following recent events, this puts the city in a strong position.

The place we’re staying has a courtyard arrangement. At first it feels a little alien. You have to stop, look, and understand how the pieces relate to one another. Then something clicks, and the arrangement becomes terribly logical.

I am finding this refreshing to a degree that probably says more about the last forty-eight hours than it does about the courtyard.

The door supplied an early lesson.

I had to pull the handle up before I could turn the key. Somewhere in my memory was a previous encounter with this arrangement. Budapest, perhaps. Or Amsterdam. The information was available, but apparently filed under a different holiday.

Eventually it came back.

Handle up. Turn the key.

Once I understood the gesture, the thing made sense. I could do it again. The door had a requirement, I had learned it, and our relationship could proceed on that basis.

I tried not to become emotional.

There is a particular relief in finding that an unfamiliar thing can be understood. You don’t need everything to work exactly as it does at home. You need the explanation to hold up the next time you use it.

So far, the door and I have an understanding.

I’ve been to Budapest before. I never wanted to leave.

It feels like home. It did then, and that feeling is already returning now. My ancestors came from here, which offers a tempting explanation. Perhaps some part of me recognises the place before the rest of me has finished working out the lock.

Their crest is chiselled into the stone blocks holding back the Danube. That gives the family connection a pleasing solidity. Some families leave a name in a register. Mine appears to have left a forwarding address in the embankment.

There is something grounding about knowing that a piece of your family’s history is physically part of the city. I can stand beside this river and know that the connection predates my enthusiasm for the place. I belong here. I still have to learn how the bloody door works, but those two things can coexist.

Maybe it’s genetic. An inherited preference for a particular arrangement of courtyards would be an oddly specific thing to receive from one’s ancestors, but I would accept it gratefully.

I don’t know. I have a feeling, a family connection, and a successful trip to the shop. We are some distance from a scientific paper.

What interests me is the recognition. Something can be unfamiliar in its details and still feel right once you begin moving through it. There is a logic here that I seem able to follow. I don’t have to know it all in advance. So far, learning one small thing has helped with the next.

“Coming home to something you didn’t know existed” is the closest I can get to it.

I knew Budapest existed, obviously. I had visited. What I am beginning to recognise is how comfortable the ordinary business of being here might feel. Buying something. Finding the way back. Opening the door. The parts of a visit that rarely make the photographs, but eventually determine whether you can imagine staying.

That was arrival day. By the following morning, I was ready to investigate beyond the grocery supply chain.

Day one began with bacon.

I sliced it from a slab of pork belly, choosing the thickness myself. A small freedom, but one I exercised conscientiously. In Canada, I generally encounter bacon already sliced and vacuum-packed, with the important decisions taken somewhere upstream. Here I had a piece of pig and a knife. Management had delegated.

I felt equal to the responsibility.

Carol’s phone, meanwhile, had declined to cooperate with BudapestGO. This was a reversal of the Madrid arrangement, in which her phone had guided us through the wilderness while mine supplied speculative fiction. I already had an account and logged in without trouble.

Her phone required further discussion.

I considered this an Apple tax: a small, unbudgeted payment in time for the privilege of owning something that knew better. I was careful not to enjoy the reversal too visibly. Carol had recently kept us alive through several changes of transport, and the household accounts remained firmly in her favour.

Breakfast accomplished, we took the bus to Keleti pályaudvar.

Keleti is a station with the confidence to look like a station.

The monumental façade, the great arched window, the sense that a journey might be an occasion worth constructing a building around: it belongs to an age when railway architecture was allowed to have ambitions beyond somewhere to put the sandwich franchise.

It opened in 1884. The train hall rises thirty-one metres, and James Watt has a statue on the façade. I approve of giving an engineer a place on a railway station. Someone involved in the production of movement should be represented at the entrance.

Keleti means “eastern”. The name supplies information. I found this almost touching.

The transcription of my voice memo rendered Keleti pályaudvar as “Caletti, Palliadvar”. The software was doing its best with sounds it had apparently not budgeted for. Nevertheless, I could begin to understand what I was looking at. The transcription might take practice. The place itself was willing to help.

We had a list of transport options. Carol spotted what we needed. We got on, and it took us where we wanted to go.

I realise I am dwelling on the successful performance of basic functions. Please allow for the circumstances of my recovery.

From Keleti, the green M4 carried us beneath the city and under the Danube to Szent Gellért tér. The line opened in 2014, making it a fairly recent contribution to Budapest’s long-running experiment in getting people across a river without making them personally negotiate with it.

We came up on the Buda side, near the green ironwork of Liberty Bridge, with the Gellért complex beside the square and the hill rising above us.

There was the city. We had arrived in the bit of it we intended to visit. The journey had left enough of the day intact to enjoy it.

We went into the Cave Church.

After spending so much of Madrid underground against my better judgment, voluntarily entering another hole in the earth might appear inconsistent. This one was a church. I thought it reasonable to check that the forgiveness cheque had gone through.

The Sziklatemplom began as a cave chapel in 1926, inspired by Lourdes. It was subsequently enlarged, with a monastery established for the Pauline order. Inside, the rock gives the space a different intimacy from a conventional church. You are aware of the hill around you. The building has not entirely persuaded the mountain to stop being a mountain.

In 1951, the Communist authorities took away the monks. The church was closed and later walled up. The order regained it in 1989; the parish history records its reopening in 1992.

That history changes the experience of walking through it. An open doorway seems an ordinary thing until you learn how long people were prevented from using it.

I wandered through. For once, I had very little to add.

Then we went up the hill.

Steps, paths, more height, more city appearing behind us. My legs, which had already participated in a world championship on this holiday, were being invited to contribute to the cultural programme as well.

Apparently recovery has hills in it.

At the top sits the Citadella, a substantial reminder that a magnificent view can also be useful to someone keeping an eye on you.

The Habsburg fortress was built after the defeat of the 1848–49 Hungarian struggle for independence. Its military design allowed for sixty cannons. Relations with the city below were evidently being managed through a fairly emphatic communications strategy.

Now we can go inside as visitors. The new exhibition, The Bastion of Liberty, takes in centuries of Hungarian history and struggles for independence. We walked through the area, following a much longer and harder story than anything my holiday complaints could usefully illuminate.

Outside, the Liberty Statue holds her palm frond above the city. Erected in 1947, the monument subsequently lost Soviet elements as its public meaning changed. The woman remained. Budapest has considerable experience of having to reconsider what is written beneath its statues.

In my notes, the scene initially became “the big flag and figurine”. This is why nobody has commissioned me to catalogue a national collection.

We had coffee and sat with the view.

Below us, the Danube gave the city its shape. Bridges crossed it with a variety of opinions about how a bridge ought to look. Pest spread out beyond the water; Buda rose and folded on our side. There was the Parliament building, the sweep of rooftops, and enough architecture to keep the eye occupied while the rest of me did absolutely nothing useful.

I was enjoying myself.

This should not require its own paragraph, but I had been waiting for the feeling to return.

Looking across at Parliament, in my notes, I called it “Nemzeti Ház”. National House.

The proper name is Országház, the House of the Country. Mine was an improvised description. I had assembled something out of the Hungarian available to me and pointed it in approximately the correct direction.

I don’t offer this as a contribution to Hungarian vocabulary. The language has managed for some time without my assistance.

What mattered was that I wanted to try. I felt comfortable enough to reach for a word and get it slightly wrong. There is a kind of belonging in that, too: the willingness to be imperfectly at home.

The ancestral connection makes all of this more personal. There is a crest in the riverside stone that belongs to my family’s story. Looking over the Danube, I cannot quite separate that knowledge from what I see. Other people have a beautiful view. I have a beautiful view and a small, stubborn sense of recognition.

I don’t need that feeling to explain every door handle or metro connection. It is enough that it is there.

From Gellért Hill we made our way down, then on towards Castle Hill. Budapest had supplied a second hill in case the first one left any doubt about our commitment to looking at things.

We walked through the castle district, taking in the palace and the streets around it, then Matthias Church, with its patterned roof. The Zsolnay ceramics make the roof something you actually stop to examine. A considerable number of decisions have gone into it, and for once I wanted to appreciate every one.

The church has had a busy life. It served as a mosque during Ottoman rule, and later hosted the 1867 coronation of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth. Its history includes extensive restoration and rebuilding. You are looking at centuries of people insisting that the place should continue, with occasional disagreement over precisely what it should continue as.

Nearby, St Stephen sits on his bronze horse with the composure available to a man whose position in Hungarian history is secure and who does not have to find lunch.

We did have to find lunch.

We found it. It was good. I have no grievance to attach to the meal, which leaves a regrettable gap in my usual method of reporting.

There is a pleasure in letting that be the whole account. We walked, looked at beautiful things, ate, and carried on. The city did not require us to devote the afternoon to overcoming the morning.

Then I got on the metro going the wrong way.

The M2. Red line. Entirely my mistake.

I noticed after one stop, and for a moment the Madrid part of my brain returned to its desk. There would be stairs. There would be corridors. There would be a sign indicating that the train in the opposite direction could be reached through a neighbouring geological formation.

Then I remembered where I was.

We got off, crossed to the other side of the platform, and waited.

Three minutes.

That was the penalty.

No elaborate act of repentance. No requirement to re-enter the city from another angle. I had made an ordinary mistake, and the station allowed me to correct it in an ordinary way.

I could almost have kissed the platform. Hygiene and Carol’s presence encouraged restraint.

That little reversal told me more about how I was experiencing Budapest than a flawless journey would have. When everything goes right, you can credit your planning. When you get something wrong and it remains manageable, you begin to relax.

I had spent Madrid feeling that the next mistake might consume the rest of the day. Here, this one cost three minutes. I didn’t even have time to develop a satisfactory grudge.

I am aware that one platform does not establish the universal competence of a metropolitan transport network. A Budapest resident could probably supply a corrective account over several drinks. I would listen. On this particular afternoon, though, the city had met my mistake with a perfectly reasonable answer.

I was free to keep liking it.

Back to Keleti. Back to the bus stop, where the first bus on our list pulled up. Then back to the apartment.

The door still worked the way I had learned it.

We had spent the day going places, and most of what I remembered was the places. A church inside a hill. A fortress overlooking the river. Coffee with the whole city laid out below us. The roof of Matthias Church. Lunch. The familiar pull of a place I have never quite wanted to leave.

Transport had done its job and stepped out of the story long enough for us to have a day.

My ancestors have their crest in the stone beside the Danube. My contribution so far has been to exercise personal control over bacon thickness, misname Parliament, and board a train in the wrong direction. I hope the family is prepared to accept a modest start.

There is still most of a week ahead of us. Plenty of time to discover complications, find more places to sit, and improve my pronunciation without making any promises about it.

For tonight, I’m back at the flat with Carol. I know the way to the shop. I know how to get home.

That last word is coming very easily.

Day two began with assembly.

The S-Works/McLaren Venge came out of its travel case and became a bicycle again on the apartment floor. Torque wrench. Allen keys. Seatpost. Bars. The small, familiar ritual of bringing expensive pieces of carbon back into an arrangement I am prepared to sit on.

If bicycles have a hypercar category, this belongs in it. The McLaren name represents actual engineering collaboration with Specialized: carbon-fibre expertise applied to making the Venge lighter and stiffer. Considerable intelligence went into the machine. The engine remains whatever I had for breakfast.

I couldn’t spend a week here without riding.

The first outing was modest: turn the pedals, feel the bike beneath me, make a few loops around Hősök tere. Heroes’ Square. The Millennium Monument presided over proceedings while I contributed some recreational circling.

The bike felt right. Budapest moved past at cycling speed, which is a very agreeable rate at which to become familiar with a place. Fast enough to cover ground, slow enough to notice it. I kept pace with traffic from the bike lane and caught a few cyclists looking at the Venge.

They knew what it was. A small international conversation conducted entirely by looking at someone else’s bicycle.

I felt understood.

We also had a more difficult navigation problem: finding darkness.

Carol spotted a possible place in the park for that night. Sheltered enough, perhaps, from Budapest’s apparent ambition to provide its own daylight. I was dubious, but she had found us a patch worth trying.

Most visitors want a good view of an illuminated city. I had brought a telescope and was looking for somewhere the city might shut up for a moment.

Back to the apartment for lunch, with a steampunk market on the afternoon’s agenda. Brass, gears, leather: the imagined future of people who expected tomorrow to require more rivets. I was curious what Budapest would make of it. A city with this much confidence in ornamental metalwork ought to have something to contribute.

There was a pleasing progression to the day. Begin with a carbon bicycle benefiting from Formula One engineering. Consider a future powered by decorative clockwork. Finish by pointing a small electronic telescope at another galaxy.

We had packed for several centuries.

Somewhere in the day’s observations, an escalator on the M3 caught my attention. I could see part of the mechanism between the stairs. Enough of the workings was visible to hold my interest.

I like being able to see how something works. It settles a part of my brain that otherwise remains on duty, trying to infer the machinery from the outcome. Here was the movement, and here was something of the means by which it happened.

The torque wrench that morning had offered the same small reassurance. There is a specification. You meet it. The bolt is tight enough. You may now think about something else.

This is the sort of detail I keep noticing in Budapest. It is becoming difficult to tell how much belongs to the city and how much belongs to the relief of being somewhere I enjoy. I am content to let both participate.

My notes wandered from machinery to Margaret, the king’s daughter whose name the island carries.

Béla IV and his wife pledged her to religious life during the Mongol invasion. That beginning was chosen for her. The remarkable part of her story is how firmly she later made the life her own. The accounts of Margaret’s vocation describe her refusal of marriage and her willingness to take on the convent’s most menial work. A king’s daughter doing the jobs that royal households generally find someone else to do.

There is something formidable about refusing to become the person your usefulness to other people requires. A royal marriage could serve a great many interests. Margaret had her own answer.

Then there was Tesla, who came to Budapest with a problem in his head and found a way to see its solution.

I kept circling the same thought: people finding a way to live or think that made sense to them, even when the expected route went elsewhere. In my notes, it came out as: “Maybe this is the one place where neurodivergence is normal.”

That is a feeling about being here. I am hardly equipped to diagnose a city, and neither a saint nor an inventor needs me completing their paperwork from a metro escalator.

But I recognise the relief of finding room for the way your mind works. The wish to see the mechanism. The pleasure when an unfamiliar arrangement suddenly becomes intelligible. The willingness to spend an evening looking for something almost invisible because you know it is there.

Which brought us back to the park.

In February 1882, Nikola Tesla conceived the rotating magnetic field in Budapest. In his account of the moment, he was walking in City Park with his friend Antal Szigety, reciting Goethe’s Faust as the sun set. The solution appeared in his mind’s eye with extraordinary clarity. He sketched the diagrams in the sand with a stick. The principle behind his induction motor, part of the electrical future that would light the world.

One hundred and forty-four years later, I stood on a hill in that same park with a Dwarf 3, looking for M31.

Vega was barely visible. Cassiopeia a ghost. The Dwarf struggled to lock onto the sky through the light. And still, Andromeda came through. A smear of ancient light against a sky drowning in LEDs.

Then a police officer came up the hill to find out what idiot was sitting up there with a red light, expecting drunk teenagers likely.

I was available to assist with that enquiry.

I explained the telescope setup and showed him M31. He was impressed. There is something rather wonderful about an encounter with the police in which the object under examination is another galaxy.
I shared with him, the number of stars in that galaxy.. three trillions suns.. One star for ever dollar the founder of the Tesla Car company, Elon Musk has horded like some technological dragon sitting on his horde, and let the stunning inequality with the rest of humanity sit between us, in the dark.

Then he told me about Tesla, the man. This was the place, he said, where Tesla had conceived the rotating magnetic field.

That detail came from him: a local rendőr who had walked up to investigate a light and stayed long enough to look at something much further away. I had shown him Andromeda. He had shown me something about where I was standing.

I haven’t independently pinned Tesla’s walk to that exact patch of ground. But this is how the place was introduced to me, by someone who knew it, and I had no reason to think he was doing anything other than sharing what he understood to be its history.

The same hill, according to the man standing beside me. The same park. The same stars overhead, when the city would let me see them. Suddenly the century and a half between us felt a little less substantial.

At roughly two and a half million light-years away, that light had begun its journey long before Tesla, before Saint Margaret, before the first Hungarian king. Before my ancestors’ worked beside the Danube. It had crossed the distance between galaxies, and I was trying to catch what remained visible through the last few miles of our own atmosphere.

Tesla saw what wasn’t there yet: the motor taking shape in his mind, the invisible field made useful. I was trying to see what had always been there but was hidden by the world his work helped us build. The same man who helped give us the grid helped give us the lights that erase the stars.

That’s not just irony. That’s the operating system: every solution creates its own shadow.

And yet I had brought an electronic telescope to find my way through it. His electrical future was on both sides of the lens.

I stood there, beneath what we could still see of the stars, and let the connection be enough. Family connection to the river. An inventor’s thought in the history of this park. Light arriving from far beyond either of them. For a little while, the distance between belonging somewhere and simply standing there seemed very small.

The hill doesn’t care which century you’re from. It holds whoever shows up looking for something they can’t quite see.

Read Day 3: What Happens When You Can’t Import a GPX File →