Category: http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post

DUCKS IN THE MIST, A FILM STARRING SIGOURNEY WEAVER


Ever-mysterious, Budapest occasionally borders on the completely incomprehensible. Countering, we roam town concocting muddleheaded, bad-science rationale.

This isn’t smoke, or Budapest’s infamous smog: it’s steam rising from the duck pond at the City Park. Our explanations ranged from the park’s proximity to the Szechenyi Gyogyfurdo (that’s the orangeish neo-classical baths where old men play chess), to the heat emitted by the Millenium Metro (the oldest in mainland Europe) which runs underneath.

BOLDOG ÚJ ÉVET

New Years Eve, Budapest-style:


We went to Kincsem Park for the New Year’s Eve horse races. The park is out in the city hinterlands, in an area dotted with enormodrome stadia and suburban retail developments. When we arrived, the park was empty and freezing, freezing. Through the grand Hapsburg-era entrance, where a ragtime-ish brass band played, there were more signs of life; hot wine, beer tents and sausage stands meant it must be party time.


Thousands of Budapestis arrived in dribs and drabs to watch rag-tag cart racing, show off their ski suits, neck beer picnics and catch of glimpse of Overdose, a 5 million euro thoroughbred and the day’s main attraction.

We supped expensive beakers of hot wine, exclaimed at the cold, caught the drips running off our noses and retired for curry and beer towards teatime.

Tuning into the grammar of the way that other places celebrate is bewildering. In the run up to New Year, we tried to gauge the flavour of New Year, Hungarian-style from the festive paraphenalia being shilled by street corner stalls: cardboard trumpets, streamers festooned with cartoon pigs, hole punch confetti and halloween masks. It all made a pretty incomprehensible sort of sense as we found ourselves in Vörösmarty Square towards midnight where I had to shush my Mother Hen-ish instincts as several different kinds of carnage went off all at once.


I guess we were expecting some kind of PG-rated civic fireworks display, Health and Safety checked and set to some bombastic classical standard, Rendőrség-tolerated street drinking and sausage vendors.

What we got was a fireworks free-for-all; every have-a-go Dad in the city seemed to come with their personal gunpowder stash and deployed their arsenal in the clearing outside Gebeaud.

Kids blew trumpets, the brave waved firecrackers, students conga’d and we – ever utterly susceptible to all kinds of carnivalesque public disorder – joined in, self-administering cherry brandy and 535 HUF (1.94 GBP) fizzy wine until it all got too much, and we beat a retreat first to a bar and then, toting Pom Bears, home.

DID YOU KNOW THEY PULLED THE TOWN HALL DOWN?

A totally gorgeous concession to the festive period. Others might choose Fairytale of New York, but I’ve never heard anything as hopeful, as giddy, as weak-at-the-knees as this.

The specialness of St Etienne has been articulated a thousand times over, and I’ve never felt quite comfortable grappling with the grammars that rightfully belong to a certain kind of student from the early 1990s. Listening to St Etienne provokes a sense of second hand nostalgia usually only available from childhood memories experienced via an overweening older sibling. Even more disorientatingly, they seem to hit the sweet spot of a whole plethora of historical moments simultaneously. There’s some great bits in here: Tim Burgess employing the indie-bloke monkey-walk on the race to the church, planting a kiss on the everso mature and sophisticated Sarah which misses the mark by miles.

Of course, this kind of utterly key sentimentalism about pop music is a site like Freakytrigger’s stock-in-trade; read what they say about I Was Born on Christmas Day here.

And, of course, Merry Christmas!

BUDAPEST: ALSO AVAILABLE IN OTHER FLAVOURS


There is something definitive, I think, about the gusts of pastry glaze and fag smoke that emit, at pavement level, from underpasses and metro stations here. Budapest, however, does also come in other flavours.

Before this week, we had yet to really breach Buda further than atmospheric transport interchange, Moskva Ter, largely due to the gargantuan, though no less atmospheric, Mammut Mall, which draws us in, every time, from square’s northern edge. (You might call us Mall Conneisseurs: we’ve visited three of the largest in the Budapest metropolitan area already, each time, as if on a whim, by accident, ‘oh look where we are!’).


On Monday, however, we scaled – no – scrambled – no – tramped up the Gellért Hill to the Citadella then over, via Deli Station (where in 2006 we missed the airport bus and endured a hair-raising and wrenchingly-expensive early morning taxi drive to Balaton Airport) and the Mom Park Mall (ouch, caught!) to the Roszadomb. In the Buda Hills, the city does a brackish, lemon yellow, stucco’d thing rather well. These suburbs are famously bourgeoise, positively chi chi, an enclave of residential confections strung over the hill that’s named after the flowers that dervish poet Gúl Baba, entombed nearby, is credited with introducing to the city.


Yesterday I went tramping solo on Margitsziget. This long, straggly island on the Danube has an altogether different feel. In season, it’s a pastoral pleasure palace, with baths, spas, lidos, tennis courts, bike tracks and incongruous contiki-style kiosks doling out canned drinks and (utterly gross) oversized pretzels to the sweaty. In winter, most of its attractions are closed and hemmed in by wire fences or functioning undercover, to protect tennis courts and outdoor pools from rain and autumn leaves.


What’s left is astonishing in its own right; modernist leisureworld architecture outcropped against skeletal trees, with the Buda Hills rising beyond on one hand and the concrete towerblocks of the Újlipótváros that line the Danube on the other.

CAKE REVIEW #2


So, the second of this grand (some might say seminal) series has been delayed by a very unfortunate discovery. See, the common-or-garden cake is not the only baked good the cukraszda has to offer. On worse for wear mornings – of which, due to the thoroughly clement pricing of boozables around these parts there are a few – one naturally prefers the soothing combo starch n’ carbohydrate to confectioner’s cream, egg custard and the like. Thus, one would choose the scone-ish pogácsa, a cannon ball of salty pastry topped with cheese or similar. Some days ago, Joe discovered that these leadweight carb-bombs featured pork fat shortening pretty high up on their list of ingredients. Therefore, in the attempt to retain what is left of my hard-won vegetarianism (for I have no doubt that I am inadvertantly absorbing pork fat by osmosis most days), myself and the pogi-for-short can no longer be friends.

As far as cake goes, however, things are still grand (and if they’re not, and, in fact there are morsels of duck tail studded through every one, please don’t tell me). Today is Mikulás, which I shall post about at length later. Suffice to say, excitement levels at Kazinczy utca 7 were pretty high – this not only being something a bit like an extra Christmas but also the kind of aimed-at-children tradition-fest with a PG-rated folktale backstory that I’m a total sucker for. Occasion enough, then, for a trip to Muvesz, the fin-de-siecle, confectioner’s cream paradise that I may (ahem) have mentioned previously.

I had francia kremes, a tower of pastry, egg custard, confectioner’s cream and caramel glaze which is now, I’m almost certain, my very favourite cake.

ALL KILLER, NO FILLER

…except not really. I am knee-deep in writing obligations just now, no rest for wicked, etc. However, I do have a couple o’ observations and some point n’ shooting for yer.

1. Confidential to the clothes horses: H&M here is, like, as good as it was in Britain 5 years ago.
(Backstory: Way back in, erm, 2001, “London of the North” Leeds was the shopping Mecca for Hull’s rag tag youth. At that point, without simulacra’d High Street (read: be-roofed wind tunnel) St Stephens, we were a little lacking. Favourite favourite for me was always H&M, which Hull sadly lacked, and whose multicoloured eurofashions always seemed pretty exotic. And, importantly, cheapex)

2. Subway, I think, has the same yeasty-and-tomato odour the world over. Except you’d ask for the pleasingly-transliterative szendvics here, natch.

Anyway. Photos! Then, back to it.


More on my Flickr here. Budapest is a total embarassment of picturesque, and I have become quite the shutter-bore.

DON’T GO IN THE BEST ROOM/The Hungarian Museum of Ethnography



The Hungarian Museum of Ethnography does exactly what municipal museums do best: take a mack-off, extraordinary building in the centre of town and fill it with a wagon-load of assorted artefacts, objets, bequests and ephemera ordered chaotically but sensitively by a curator with a sense of humour.

We last visited here in 2006, and were rather taken with the Old House exhibition, specifically the Best Room, the area of a nineteenth-century Hungarian peasant’s abode reserved for best – chock full o’ their posh china, embroidered sheets, ceremonial jugs &c. Thereafter, we followed their example: the mould and damp-ridden cupboard that held the collective detritus of our Norwich flat became our very own Best Room.

CARDBOARD DINNER GETS MORE SAUCE

Photo credit: Chew.hu

So I had drafted an entry here bemoaning the rice cake n’ sandwich n’ crisp-based cardboard dinners I’ve suffered since arriving here. Not necessarily, I should add, because – as popularly held – the Magyars are raving carnivores (although in all honesty ahuh, they really dig meat and yup, they’re a landlocked country), but mostly due to supermarket anxiety, language problems and timidity. I’m a vegetarian of 11 months standing (yup, I’m one of those squeamish, sentimental latecomers) and with a culinary blindspot and a total lack of cookery imagination and nous, hunter-gathering is a challenge even back in the UK.

However, all that’s by the wayside now since, thanks to some detective work by Joe, we found a curry house just around the corner from our place. In fact, I’m pretty sure it must be phantasmic: it’s a hole-in-the-wall Indian, with a wood panelled interior, neon sign, canteen tables, friendly owner. The menu is brief and no-nonsense (which, in a pretty shallow way, pings my authenticity meter) and food is cooked to order – we spent our fifteen minute wait eyeballing two girls lolling on the next table who split a pappadum and a mango lassi with two straws. The food was straightforward and big and good and, well, I think – at the very least – we can safely say that if Joe ever throws down his pans n’ pinny and refuses to cook, at least I won’t perish from dry mouth.