Budapest

I'm in Budapest this week, having come up from Croatia a few days before Olga and Mila to get a Russian transit visa. This is an extension of the visa hassles I wrote about a few months ago, proving that the consequences of taking your eye off the ball when dealing with Russian bureaucracy are long and annoying. But while the Russians play with my passport, I have had some time to explore what is really shaping up to be one of my favorite cities. I'm staying at our friends' apartment in the Ujilipotvaros neighborhood of the city, a quiet district along the Danube north of the center. It is almost entirely residential, and full of modernist apartment blocks built between the wars. Although it is rather densely built-up, the buildings seem designed for humans, with an abundance of balconies and courtyards. It feels like a healthy, middle class sort of place, full of shops and cafes, and with an interesting mix of people from young families with children to seniors. It is what I imagine the Upper West Side must have been like before Manhattan lost the plot and became a gentrified shopping arcade. Before I arrived, I imagined that the city was like a sort of smaller, more provincial Vienna. And indeed, a great deal of the city dates from the second half of the 19th century, during the Dual Monarchy when the country enjoyed a long golden moment in the Hapsburg fold. But its most pompous buildings -- St. Stephen's Basilica, the Opera, Parliament -- are so ridiculous that they almost become self-effacing. By some strange and pleasant force of aesthetics, it achieves a king of harmony. And if parts of Budapest feel a bit too much like it jumped out of a travel brochure, Hungary is remarkable in just how dramatically it sticks out from its neighbors. It starts at a very basic level, with the faces you see on the street, most of whom have rather striking, dark features. But it really goes to a whole new level when it comes to the language. I've never actually traveled to a place where the language is not related to something I've learned before. So the words of the language, which is closer to Finnish and Siberian native languages than to anything Romantic or Slavic, often seem like just a pile of haphazard syllables. This partly explains why despite closely studying and comparing bottles at the shop, I still keep bringing home carbonated bottled water. So much of how I see the world comes through the prism of America and Russia, and I am always pleased to come to a third country that seems comfortable and happy with itself, which I think is the direct result of not having pretensions to superpower status, either in reality or in their imagination. This is what shapes my personal adjustment process when I arrive in a new place. There are usually a few days that I spend sputtering in frustration about why Russia, a country I have so much invested in, has to be so comprehensively inadequate in how it treats guests. And there is also the inevitable reflecting on being an American, the kind of self-awareness that is so important but which way too many of my fellow citizens lack (I mean, in what civilized country do people insist on bringing firearms to a debate about health care?). You realize how we are seen, for good and for ill. When I arrived on Sunday, I took a walk around the center of the city and came upon Szabadsag Square. There is a statue there of Harry Hill Bandholz, someone I'd never heard of. He was in charge of a peacekeeping detachment sent here in the chaos of 1919, and organized the defense of the National Museum from pillage-minded Romanian troops. It is a touching thing, and in a substantial way made me proud to be American. I kept walking to the north part of the park, and noticed that a whole quadrant was blocked off by ugly grey metal pylons. I saw a ring of jersey barriers and metal gates blocking traffic, and signs in Hungarian and English wanring that photography was strictly prohibited. Yep, I'd stumbled upon the U.S. Embassy. It is a perfect embarassment, and as a taxpayer and citizen I hope that Obama is successful enough at restoring our standing in their world -- and our sense of basic self-confidence and decency -- that our embassies will someday soon stop looking like colonial outposts perched among the natives waiting to be attacked. When our embassy in a friendly, peaceful ally like Hungary looks like it belongs in Islamabad, something is deeply amiss.