Arrive at the airport: the ATM has its wires dangling from the ceiling. Wait for the metro: the graffit-covered, dented, chipped-blue cars look like they are straight from the cold war. Get off the metro on Sunday afternoon: city is asleep. Enter apartment building: smells like a combination of stale cigarette smoke and the trash stored on the first floor.
There wasn’t much that was inspiring about arriving in Budpaest after an overnight flight, but things turned around pretty sharply when we actually entered our apartment. 16 foot ceilings with light pouring in actually gave us the motivation to carry on through the day. It’s not often when an apartment is more spacious and has more amenities than its listing shows, but we lucked out here with big airy rooms, reliable cable internet, and even an unexpected washing machine.
As we explored around our neighborhood for the first time, it was still quiet but a little less so at a street fair a few blocks away where some cheesy potatoes roasted in a clay oven and were served with hot mulled wine on a picnic table. Budapest isn’t a shiny city. It has all the makings of a haute European capital along with plenty of baggage of the past. Buildings with exceptional architecture sit decaying. The new metro stops don’t make the rail cars of a bygone era any nicer.
We’ll be living, working, and wandering in Budapest for 2 months, and we expect to find many more hidden gems like our modern apartment up 3 stories of dingy stairs. And we’re used to stairs.
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