March Visit

I take the Thursday afternoon flight to Budapest. P meets me at the airport and drives me to the apartment overlooking the Opera. I try to get my ipod fixed at the Apple store just down Andrássy, but the store seems to be more for show than fixing things. I take a mate out to dinner at the Pava restaurant in the Gresham Palace - over-priced and pretty ghastly customers. As we cross the top of Váci Utca, a couple of nice friendly local girls stop us and ask the way to Bécsi Ut. I know where Bécsi Utca is - it is the road to Vienna going northwest out of town going past Dr H's surgery. One of the girls blows it a bit by giving me a small lecture on the difference between an Ut and an Utca. We offer them our map and they ask us if we would like to go for a drink in a bar they know nearby. We say maybe later and head for dinner. I explain to my out-of-town friend that this sounds like a standard Budapest scam. The drinks will be 200 euros per round and heavies will appear to take us to the nearest cashpoint to pay up. And the police will take no interest if you complain. My friend thinks the girls were too nice to be involved in something like that, but when we cross Vorosmarty Tér after dinner they are still there looking for Bécsi Ut. It is actually just a block away, so I think I was right.

In my experience, Budapest feels like a fairly safe city full of friendly, capable, interesting people and their reputation is the real victim of this sort of crime. The police and authorities could end this scam pretty much overnight if they chose to.

It has been nearly three and a half months since my last visit and I suppose I have become a little complacent in the number of hours that I have been wearing the alingers. Dr H is disappointed with my teeth on Monday morning. The lower premolars have not moved as much as they should and there is now a gap between the teeth and the aligner. I promise to wear the aligners more hours a day and he asks me to come back in ten weeks.

I spend the rest of the morning looking around the Roman amphitheatre opposite his office and getting lost finding the tomb of Gul Baba, a Turkish mystic credited by the locals for introducing the rose to Buda. On the flight home, I sit next to a couple of Romanians who turn their mobile phones on mid-flight just to prove there is no signal.