To Do With Budapest

It seems like an obscure issue, a surreal consideration, a very odd thing to be asked, “What’re you going to do in Budapest?”

It sounds hardly less strange than asking, “what does it smell like on Mars?” 


I just need to get my head around the fact that I’m going to the capitol of Hungary, the former Roman city of Aquincum, Paris of the East. Continuously settled since 1 AD, even today recognized as 2 distinctive urban centers although unified in 1873 (by a more concentrated political effort than just running their names together) Buda and Pest, like casually saying MinneapolisSt.Paul, or ChicagoUrbana, San FranciscoOakland and expecting a unified entity to emerge from the presumption. It retains a sense of separation with the cold Danube marking the difference, two places in one from what I understand. I dunno, I haven’t been there. Yet. 

It’s the sort of thing school can do though it never did before in my experience

At thirty-two maybe I’m less suspicious of what cultural institutions have to offer than I was when I did the college thing before. Head down, C average, no eye contact. I attended this very same university, under whose auspice I’ll be traveling to Budapest, from 2001-04. I couldn’t tell you the name of a single classmate or significant day I spent on campus in that. Education as loose end: not a productive approach.

Being older and more focused evidently gets you sent out of the country with a vague mandate to write it up: website deliverable, video features, blog entries, an education in educating the interested traveler, destination profile: Budapest.

As such is what follows.