It was filmed entirely on location in Germany, mainly in Görlitz, the easternmost town next to the Polish border, and in a studio outside Berlin with a scale model of the hotel no taller than three meters. But by its visual style, the 2014 Wes Anderson film reflects how defiantly old-fashioned Budapest is, just like Hotel Gellért on Gellért Hill overlooking the Danube. This old hotel, with thermal baths and glass domes, was among the vintage inspirations behind the film, although it doesn’t always sit well with guests who want no speck of the dust of time.

 

image: www.mb.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/113.jpg

BUDAPEST’S HIGHEST and largest building, the Országház, the Hungarian Parliament Building, a notable Hungarian landmark in Gothic Revival style, with a neo-Renaissance dome

 

(Photos by AA PATAWARAN)

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Maybe this is why I am in love with the city.. Somebody asked me to describe it and I said, “Like Anne Bancroft playing Mrs. Nora Dinsmoor in The Great Expectations,” a 1990s update of the Charles Dickens classic that the fashion audience awaited expectantly, only to find all the movie’s promised glamour not so much in Gwyneth Paltrow’s character Estella, dressed in Donna Karan from start to finish, but in Mrs. Dinsmoor’s faded glamour that proved more glamorous in its fadedness, who wore her broken heart over her caftan like a leopard print or a lipstick the color of blood—“Chicaboom!”

My arrival in Budapest was like entering the broken down mansion of Mrs. Dinsmoor, with her right there in the middle of the ramshackle, arms wide open, penciled brow raised, at once welcoming and intimidating, even frightening. From Vienna, where I boarded an overcrowded train bound for the city, Budapest made it clear I was going to be in no ordinary place.

The train dropped me off at the Budapest-Nyugati Railway Terminal. There was heightened police presence and, underneath the station, where I was instructed to go to purchase my 72-hour Budapest Card and transfer to the Metro platforms, there was a throwback to the concentration camp. I asked an officer what the commotion was all about and, unable to speak in English, he said a word: “Syrians.” Yet, I had no fear of the police or the refugees, as I literally walked over the latter who sat or lay on every square inch of space on the path to the Metro, sometimes carrying my rolling suitcase because there was no floor on which to roll it.

 

image: www.mb.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/49.jpg

The fresco-style soaring ceiling of the Book Café, with the work of painter Karl Lotz

 

GOTHIC ROMANCE

Ah, this is Hungary and, though I am a Diana Vreeland fanatic, I don’t agree that, as she said, “Hungarians don’t impress the world anymore—they’ve never been successful, and success is the only thing the world we live in now understands.” I don’t pretend to know the context in which the visionary Vogue editor said this, but maybe I do agree with her. I am no longer as smitten by New York because it has become so obsessed with success, everything new and newer, better than the last, no more room for romantic failure except in the strains of “Por una Cabeza” wafting from the instrument of a lonely violinist at a subway stop.

But in the bowels of Budapest, as I moved from Metro 1 to Metro 2 at Deak Ferenc Station, after allowing an odd display of miniature satirical clay sculptures by Hungarian artist Petér Salamon Molnár to transport me from a nondescript subway transfer tube to a Tim Burton Gothic universe, I stopped to listen to a xylophonist playing Maria Callas’s “O Mio Babbino Caro.” Right there and then, barely half an hour on Hungarian soil, I was in love.

On Magrit-Sziget or Margaret Island, where I stayed at The Grand Hotel Danubius, I was adrift in a lush garden in the middle of the Danube. I would open my window to a forest of ancient trees around the stone remains of a medieval pool and I would sit on a bench, just outside the hotel, on the riverbank under a moon that would shimmer and waltz on the river. All the elements of romance came together on that bench to move any poet or musician or lover or me.

Once a religious spot, this Isle of Rabbits was renamed after Saint Margaret, who stayed in a convent on the island to fulfill the wishes of her father King Bela IV, who swore to God that, should Hungary survive the Mongol invasion in the 1200s, he would raise his daughter as a nun. A few centuries later, in the mid-1500s, as the Ottoman occupation drove away the nuns and the monks, destroying the churches and the cloisters, Margaret Island was turned into a harem. Today, it is a public garden, perfect for family picnics, open-air concerts, riverside parties, and thermal bath and spa excursions. With a rubber-coated running track 5.35 kilometers long around the riverbank, it is a favorite of runners, joggers, and fitness fanatics.

 

image: www.mb.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/54.jpg

 The tongueless guardian lion at the Széchenyi Chain Bridge

 

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK

But enough of blond children barefoot in the park. I would spend each day one bus ride and three Metro stops away from the island to explore the shabby chic streets of the city, starting from Oktogon, the bustling eight-sided intersection once called Mussolini Square (1936-1945) where the Grand Boulevard met Andrássy Avenue, a World Heritage Site designed to put Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris to shame.

I was a Frenchman in my past life, but in a heartbeat I’d pick this street in Hungary lined by mansions and townhouses replete with Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque touches typical of renaissance revival. Once inhabited by aristocrats, landowners, bankers, and the old Hungarian elite, it is now a street promenade with windows displaying the latest in world luxury, from Moncler to Louis Vuitton to Dolce & Gabbana, to think that in 1950, following the Soviet occupation, it was renamed Sztálin Street, then Avenue of the Hungarian Youth in 1956, then People’s Republic Street one year later.

Budapest is like Manila, everybody wants her and then leaves her to her own devices. The only difference is, despite the many invasions, from the Romans to the Mongols to the Austrian Habsburgs to the Turkish and the Romanians, the Nazis, and the Soviet, Budapest continues to be cited as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, prettier than Paris, some say. To this day, the building code keeps a lid on overreaching architectural ambitions to preserve the historical cityscape, although plans are underway for high-rises to be given the permit to build around the city core.

Back to Andrássy, which only got its original name back in 1990, after the fall of the Communists in 1989. More than neo-Renaissance buildings and luxury boutiques, the boulevard is home to many bookstores, the most popular of which is Alexandra, a two-story booklover’s paradise housed in an Art Nouveau building that used to be the Paris Department Store. Save for a small foreign language section packed with books in Yiddish, French, and German and a smaller English section, the bookstore is in the local tongue, much of the ground floor devoted to international bestsellers and classics translated to Hungarian.

 

image: www.mb.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/101.jpg

Clay sculptures by Péter Salamon Molnár and Kiskirálylány, the Little Princess, by sculptor László Marton

 

HUNGARIAN RHAPSODIES

On the upper floor, the bookstore extends into the Book Café, a gem within a gem, a renaissance-type ballroom-turned-coffeeshop with a soaring fresco-style ceiling adorned with magnificent chandeliers and painted by German-Hungarian artist Karl Lotz, the “Prince of Hungarian Artists,” whose work also decorates the Hungarian Parliament Building that is one of the many reasons the banks of the River Danube on both sides are a World Heritage Site.

Such is the old charm of Budapest. I found some of it in the Hungarian novel I bought at Alexandra upon the recommendation of a sexagenarian clerk, The Charmed Life of Kázmér Rezeda by Gyula Krúdy set in upperclass Budapest just before the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. I read part of it at Callas, the trendy café beside the Hungarian State Opera, where a quartet performed as if to me alone a fine selection of operattas, movie themes, classics, and Broadway favorites. The opera house next door is one of Hungary’s most prized architectural treasures—in beauty and acoustics, though not in size and capacity, among the finest in the world. Gustav Mahler was a prominent guest conductor, so was Franz Liszt, Hungarian pride, whose figure, sculpted in bronze by Alajos Stróbl, stands guard in a niche in one side of the opera house’s main entrance.

I could go on and on with Andrássy Avenue. While it stretches for no more than 2.5 kilometers from the Old City to Heroes’ Square, it spans millennia, thanks to its various landmarks that should take you as far back as, say, the 1500s in a homage to György Szondy, a hero against the Ottoman invasion, whose statue stands proud at Kodály Körönd, once a park square named after Adolf Hitler.

But Budapest is a big city. At 525 square kilometers, it is one of the largest in the European Union. That’s why the Budapest Card is a must, 24 hours or 72 hours, so you can hop in and out of trams, buses, the Metro, and the weekend Danube ferry, especially if you have a specific itinerary. I had the 72-hour pass, but I didn’t make enough use of it because, well, I have this hopelessly romantic notion that one has to get lost—on foot—in order to find one’s way in a strange city. My only regret is that I had to pay precious florints for a cruise on the Danube, when my travel card could have gotten me a sort of “Budapest by Locals” ferry trip at no extra charge, if I remembered to do it on a weekend.

On the cruise, I did make some friends on the upper deck over ice cold beer under the scorching late-afternoon sun while opening myself up to Instagram-worthy views of the Citadel on Gellért Hill, the very steep rail of the Budapest Castle Hill funicular, and the towers of Matthias Church on the Buda side and the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace, the Inner City Parish Church, and the neo-Gothic turrets of the Parliament on the Pest side.

 

 

A WHISPER TO ST. ANNE

The sun was still up when the cruise ended and I capped it off with an early dinner of paprika chicken and a glass of wine al fresco on the riverbank with The Little Princess for company, the most photographed statuette in Budapest sitting on the railings of the Danube promenade. It was created by award-winning sculptor László Marton after the image of his five-year-old daughter.

Apart from a cruise, what’s the Danube best for but a stroll? So I walked off the dinner by crossing the suspension bridge Széchenyi Chain Bridge, the first permanent bridge to connect Pest to Buda designed by British engineer William Tierney Clark with cast iron decorations and a pair of guardian lions on both ends.

In Buda, I walked all the way to the Batthyány Square to catch the underground train back to Pest, but not before I caught an elderly woman entering a two-towered old church. I chanced upon a mass being said in Hungarian with no more than 15 of us, the priest included, in a place teeming with religious artworks such as the Pieta that you would pay to see in a museum. I didn’t know until after the mass, after I circled the building to find out what church it was, that it was the Church of St. Anne, a fine example of Italian Baroque, first founded in 1390, destroyed by the Turks in 1540, refounded in 1686, and rebuilt beginning 1740 under the care of the Jesuits.

I find it providential that my wanderings led me to Saint Anne, mother of Mary, grandmother of Christ, patroness of horseback riders and sailors, protector from storms. Her name in Hebrew means “favor” and, in the Baroque glory of her church, while I heard a mass in a language so strange to me, I asked of her in fervent whispers, “Take me back here soon and from here on to Belgrade, Warsaw, Tirane, Bucharest… all these storied places of the Europe of old.”

Ámen.