A Love Affair with Budapest

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.” 

― M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart

A love affair with an eastern European city.
Not your ordinary 7 o'clock soap opera kind of romance.
It is the best kind.

The kind that transcends physical intimacy and surpasses emotional attachments.
The kind that you read in 18-century poems by John Keats.
The kind of love that cannot be interpreted by men.
The kind of love that breaks hearts yet fulfill one's soul with starlights and moondust.
Otherworldly and transcendental.
That is how the old city of Budapest had with me.
The kind of love to across oceans and continents for.

A breath of nostalgia bygone fills the air,
Living in a hundred-year-old building in Astoria, Pest.
Taking the second oldest metro in the world.
Crossing Széchenyi Chain Bridge to the old capital of Buda,
where everything looks medieval and ancient.
Every encounter is by no means fortuitous, I am destined to be here.
A fascination starts to ferment...

Time machines seem gratuitous when you've got cities like Budapest.
It is a place transcends the concept of time.
A city that belongs to everyone that belongs to no one.
A city for the ever wanderlusting souls.

I was Dreaming of legends and fables at Fisherman's Bastion.
Down by the banks of blue Danube, lamenting the cost of wars.
Beguiled by the gravitas of St. Stephen's Basilica.
Enamored by great art and literature linger around the Jewish Quarters.
Searching for inspirations at New York Palace Cafe.

What more could you ask for in life,
but an extraordinary love affair with a city that transcends time and has everything to offer you.