This is UN heritage site and shit -- meaning it is officially a beautiful road.

Budapest is really Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube and connected by lots of bridges (11, I think). I love the bridges. They're all different and pretty and you can walk across them. One is green and pointy and one is white and rectangle-y and another looks like the Manhattan bridge plus the Arc de Triomphe with lions at the ends. Paul Theroux hates people who start their description of a place with what they saw out the window as the plane landed but, just for the record, the river and bridges looked really nice from above. Something I didn't notice from the plane is that Buda is hilly and Pest is flat. Weird.

It's really a beautiful city, and I don't even mean that in a pejorative way. Not beautiful-but-sterile, not beautiful-but-boring, just beautiful. I haven't explored too many neighborhoods, but at least in the center you can pretty much look in any direction from anywhere and see something pretty or interesting or that makes you go wow. The Four Seasons Hotel reminded me so much of (toned down) Gaudi that I had to take about 20 photos of it. And there are castles. Not that Budapest is the only place that has them, but I'm sort of a sucker for that particular kind of fairy tale shit. The street with all the embassies is pretty fabulous, too. Embassies always make me feel like I'm somewhere important.

I have a favorite Hungarian artist now. His name was Jenő Gyárfás. (Not only do Hungarian vowels sometimes have accents, sometimes they have two accents. Joder.) His work reminded me of Goya, and the people in his paintings mostly look crazy or shifty or possessed. Sometimes that happens because the painter wasn't very good (I've seen a lot of deranged-looking baby Jesuses), but I'm pretty sure Jenő knew exactly what he was doing.

Also, the bread here is often sausage-shaped, which makes me giggle.