A short business has led me to Budapest: A multinational EU funded project working on CO2 reduction by better energy usage has its kickoff meeting here. The first free hours I used for a walk through the center, which shows amazing contrasts between Gucci shops and decaying building blocks just within eyesight.
Budapest is one of these “have to visit in my life” cities to me. Never managed so far. (And now I can’t get Jethro Tull out of my brain …. ). I am looking forward to seeing more of your not-so-touristy photos of the city – this could be a street in many of the Eastern Europe cities today – the places without any Gucci and Prada …
Budapest for sure is a wonderful place, and one can probably spend weeks there. And at the moment the mixture of the international mundanity and the old buildings still in a kind of “Dornröschenschlaf” is really attractive. But it’s changing at a fast pace, the divide between the young urban professionals and the pensionists of communist times becomes sharper from year to year, at the same speed as the expensive labels take over downtown.