I've always approached my travel as a kind of love story. Even this article is shaping up like a Dear John letter I'd be writing in an airport with no intention of mailing it. I came to Budapest after a brief relationship with Prague which probably needs some exposition and more overarching romantic metaphor. Prague was something like a first girlfriend. It was my first time away from my motherland of California, and I showed up after a lot of contrivance, stumbled through those initial cultural differences, spent too much money on cheap trinkets to display my affection for her to the world, and took hundreds of photos of us, me and Prague, together. Then it was time for it to come to an end and I went back home sulking about it being over too soon, how it really was true love, conjuring a way to find a replacement for the experience I had. I saw I could continue my studies in Budapest, and that the city was available, and it seemed appealing. After all, both cities had been raised near enough to each other, I figured I'd know the territory well enough. So I did what people are prone to do when they get an eye-full of a new crush: I fantasized about every intricate detail, looked up more pictures than I should have, imagined this new life as something harmonious, manifest, decked out in the fin-de-siecle style of men with top hats sitting around cafe fireplaces and discussing Chekhov over glasses of Palinka and smoking hand rolled cigarettes.
I arrived in late August with two duffel bags of the bare essentials of my belongings and too many books. It was hotter than I had expected, hot to a point of stifling, which made it difficult to explore. I found myself wasting a lot of time in the air-conditioned hostel lobby where I could chain smoke and mull over the looks from sour faced older women on the metro eyeing the tattered hem hanging from my cutoff jeans. I was frustrated in the way the city didn't seem to need me as much as I needed it. I was getting news from friends all across Europe talking about the quaintness of Italian cafes and the crumbling architecture in Paris. I thought they were deluding themselves. Their lives were obviously full of gregarious produce vendors and friendly municipal workers, perfect replicas of every cinematic depiction they had prepared themselves with. Meanwhile I was getting yelled at by several check out ladies at the market near my house for not having a barcode sticker on my bag of peppers, and trying to accept the fact that the metro security didn’t contain the kind of characters I had seen in repeat viewings of Kontroll.
So the honeymoon was over, which is a good thing, the pragmatism started to set in and eventually I could start feeling my way back home after a long night. I knew where to go to accomplish what I needed to, and there were a few perks I got accustomed to (the smoking inside, falafel permeation, and the nightlife scene which extended until breakfast, most specifically), but I could feel a restlessness writhing inside of me. I decided a weekend away was the best cure for my feelings of displacement, and I went back to Prague, something I thought I'd never be able to do. I had a lovely time, of course, her looks hadn't changed at all and I still knew all the right spots to go, but on the train ride out of town, I was happy to be headed back to Budapest. "Back home" was the phrase the slipped out of my mouth. Something had changed with the distance. Budapest seemed inviting, accessible, she opened the doors of her bars and ruin pubs to me. There had been a heavy weekend of rain and some of the stagnant soot and general grit had been sloughed off the buildings, and something about Budapest in grey looked very appropriate. The days were getting shorter and the yellow lights from the chain bridge were inviting in the fog and sometimes I would wander home discussing my love for the city with myself.
It took a while, but I've really adopted a great love for the city. It would have been easy enough to settle somewhere else, come to Budapest on a weekend trip, end up at Szimpla or Corvintető and leave with another check mark on my world map and maybe a passport stamp or two. But this is a city to dig in to, one that takes some nurturing and careful exploration and an understanding of its background to fully comprehend. This is a city that doesn't shy away from emotion, and it's nice to come from somewhere like California and not be confronted with the plastic happiness I grew up around. By now I've found my favorite bars, met some wonderful people, and conducted my life as happily as I imagined I would. It's defied my expectations in every way, and the differences are still exciting. More so, it has been completely different from the stock education abroad experience that most come back from their studies with. This is not a vacation and not the prefabricated European experience I've encountered through my conversations with aforementioned students in other capitals. Except for a few times of being hauled around on field trips or study tours, I've never felt like I wasn't first and foremost simply living in the city. The fact that I can conduct my life in the way I would back home has convinced me that this is a city that doesn't cater to the amusement park expectations of most Americans abroad.
In the end this has been entirely my subjective experience. And it's really hard to sum up in 1000 words the complex relationship I've had with Budapest and the understanding of the mechanism inside it. The homesickness is there, of course, but every good native son knows that nothing can replace their motherland. Some might say Budapest and I had some miscommunication at first. Some people never got in a fight with the city, others knew her type immediately. She's a temperamental lover, and sometimes it might not seem like she wants you around, but once you open yourself to her emotional being, she'll start reciprocating. She's a resilient city, a little calloused, and rough around the edges in some areas, but she's strong. And hey, we've only been seeing each other for a couple months, and only now do I feel like I'm really getting to know her.
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