Every issue we give you the lowdown on a city that you should travel to with haste. These essential guides are written by people who know said city inside out because they live there, rather than London-based numpties like usβ¦. Bewildering in a good way, like being thrown in at the deep end in your pyjamas and told to rescue a rubber brick. If a dose of culture shock gets your adrenaline pumping, this is the place for you. Even for someone who has lived in the country for years, it never fails to throw up new surprises.
It has architectural eye candy by the bucketload and there are not many major cities in the world with a sheer cliff face bang in the centre of town. Some of Budapest is just as Mother Nature made it β like the wooded Buda Hills to the east β while Pest combines rundown former glory with modern cosmopolitan energy.
And what they say about dogs and their owners also applies to a city and its residents β Budapesters are suitably incomprehensible, impatient and intriguing. Drinking Hungarians love to drink, but rarely just for the hell of it. To make things more interesting, one of the quirks of Budapest is that the action is spread all around the city, so the intrepid traveller can always find somewhere to party nearby, although the best venues may not be immediately obvious from street level.
These are crumbling outdoor or indoor spaces that have been cobbled together from discarded furniture. It may be in all the guidebooks and full of foreigners and expats, but it would be a grave mistake not to recommend Szimpla kert District VII, Kazinczy utca 14 as the one place no visitor to BP should miss.
For live music, it is worth checking out A38 a Shopping Shopping in Budapest, like everything else, is an eclectic experience. Giant shopping centres are springing up all over town, but the real fun is to be had in the small designer boutiques and, in particular, the secondhand shops. As for the latter, for some reason, a lot of good used stuff gets sent over from the UK to Hungary and sold for peanuts if you have the time and patience to scour through it all.
