Liszt! Liszt! O Liszt! (7/6/2007)

Ten years ago, a few hours before Lady Diana plunged into the Pont d'Alma tunnel -- I stood on a Passau platform and noticed that our train to Vienna actually terminated in Budapest. Damn , I thought, you can get to Budapest from here? I brought this up to my first (shudder) host family a week later. The responses were decidedly one-sided:

"You don't want to go there."
"Budapest is dangerous to foreigners."
"Hungarians will rip you off."
"Their scents attract bears!"

Not quite. But Hungary is Europe's "thing not like the other" -- a people who conquered, settled, and forgot where they came from. An alien language pasted on a European facade (usually the other way around). A former empire that only half-bitches about lost territory (this is progress: see "Austria" and "Serbia"). Perhaps because of (or accentuated by) its surface similarities, Hungary felt more foreign to me than any country west of the Urals... further compounded by the factor that Budapest has traces of several major cities where I've felt perfectly at home. Schizophrenic? Perhaps.

Hungary is a linguist's nemesis -- the exception to the "I can get around Europe because I majored in modern languages" rule. Hungarian bears slight resemblance to Finnish, Estonian, and a few dialects in Siberia... that's it. The Roman alphabet was clearly not built to carry it, as exemplified by consonant clusters like -gy, -dzs, -zs, -cs and the long overdue umlaut-abuse lawsuit. I felt less linguistically lost in Japan. Not that I didn't have fun, though: to whit, sajt ("cheese") is pronounced "shite".

"Would you like some sajt with that?"
"Oooh, I love that sajt in your display case."
"I need to run to the store to get some gouda sajt."
(Are you having fun, cause I could go all day...)

Another doozy is "youth," "Ifjusag" (pronounced "if you shag"), which comes with a twinge of irony in a country where the age of consent is 14.

Linguistics aside, Budapest is a delight, particularly given its two faces (known -- get this -- as "Buda" and "Pest.") Explore only one, miss the other. Stroll the wide avenues of Pest and forego the subterranean wine fountains in Buda. Spend too much time riding Pest's comically miniscule Metro, miss Buda's grand views of Parliament. That historic Buda and commercial Pest were independent for centuries, though, is puzzling -- the two play off each other consistently, and it's hard to picture them as anything but intertwined. (And, incidentally, when they were first adjoined in 1873, the new city was "Pest-Buda." The Diet changed the name after they actually had to tell people that they lived in Pest-Buda.)

The town, though, is not the Paris of the East as the pundits would tell you -- a boulevard here and there, and Andrassy could be a Champs-Elysees if you were despereately homesick for one. If anything, Budapest needs to be taken in tandem with Vienna -- one the center of the Habsburg empire, the other the name they needed for territory and credibility. Both have the glorious Central European architecture, and both draw life from Mother Danube -- a regal blue in Vienna, a drab green in Budapest. (I blame Bratislava.) World War I, though, pretty much ended that relationship, and with the two on opposite sides of the political fence for much of the last century, the connections are gone. Indeed, the world's last Austro-Hungarian alliance may well be Schilling and Varitek.

Lastly, Budapest taught me about the way my own standards have changed -- it was beautiful, yes, but... something was too familiar. I didn't feel the awe I still get from standing beneath the Palace of Westminster, the serenity from strolling with my friend Kristin in the morning mist through empty Prague, or the glory of getting lost in Dubrovnik.

But ... Budapest had me at Attila Street. I mean -- Kossuth be damned -- if the founder of your nation is a bloodthirsty king known as the "Scourge of God," pops up in the seventh circle of Dante's Hell, AND died while copulating ... how can you lose?