From: Nat Hager III
Date: Tuesday, 1998 August 25 0.04
Subject: Postcard from Budapest
Greetings from Budapest Hungary.
I'm over here with Xuan Phan, a friend from Armstrong and SBIR endeavors, and
we're taking a trip through Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
I'm here with my laptop doing my usual thing, and using a Budapest CompuServe
number to get back to my mail server in the States. I've attached some
digital camera images, sorry they're low-resolution, but at least that makes
the mail transfer easier.
We came over Saturday from JFK on an
Austrian Air flight and landed in Vienna Sunday around noon. We rented a
car and, since we plan to see Vienna on the way back, headed straight for
Hungarian border. The highway on the Austrian side was modern and
western-looking, and having been in the east in the 80's I didn't quite know
what to expect at the border. At first the checkpoint looked pretty much
like the old East, dilapidated, colorless, pavement buckling, etc. But
now there was absolutely no fence in sight and customs procedures were
trivial, I held up the passports and the girl waved us on like she had better
things to do.
Once past the checkpoint I was
surprised to find things pretty much like Austria. The highway was
modern and in good repair, farms and businesses seemed to be thriving along
the highway, villages looked pleasant and inviting, and there were even
billboards for hotels and restaurants (though some advertised prices in German
Marks, which is more stable than the Hungarian Forint). If you looked
closely things looked a little poorer, but not that much. There were a
few police cars doing normal police activities, but not the hoards of police
cars you saw on the Berlin corridors in the 80's.
Arriving in Budapest it seemed pretty
much what I expected, a little grimy around the edges but with a beautiful
downtown waterfront along the Danube, with the city of Buda on one side of the
river and Pest on the other, linked by several suspension bridges. There
was the old royal palace on the hill overlooking the Buda side, and the
Hungarian parliament along the river on the Pest side. Riverboats took
people slowly up and down the river, and numerous street trolleys clanked up
and down the streets grabbing their power from overhead wires. There was
a large shop and restaurant district on the Pest side of the Danube with
numerous sidewalk cafes and street vendors selling folk art, all anchored by
several large convention-class hotels (Marriott, Hilton, Intercontinental)
along the river. And of course McDonald's restaurants were everywhere.
The mixture of communism and capitalism
is fascinating. Communism is clearly dead, the people just don't have
that sullen fearful demeanor anymore. Their dress and appearance is
pretty much like any western European capital, neither impoverished nor over-compensatingly
flashy. Their main concern seems to be making money, and we even had to
fight off a couple NYC-style squeegee-meisters, trying to do an unsolicited
windshield cleaning on the car. Though about 2/3 of the buildings still
have that drab colorless communist appearance, the other 1/3 has obviously
undergone a major repainting or remodeling to turn them into some type of
modern business center
We've had wonderful accommodations
here. We stayed at the Hotel Villa Korda, which is an Italian-style
hotel on the hills above Buda. It's very middle-class
Mediterranean-style neighborhood, and since it couldn't have all been built
overnight we speculate it's where the privileged party officials lived in the
old days. The room is downright elegant, even with a remote-control air
conditioner, and the only problem has been getting the hotel phone to connect
to the local CompuServe number, but once I do it's a solid 33.6 connection.
We ate at a very upscale restaurant last night around the corner, complete
with patio table and live Hungarian music, and waiters who obviously knew what
they were doing.
Well that's about it. It's
getting close to midnight Monday here and I'm hitting the hay. Tomorrow
we're heading for a large resort lake about 100km southwest of Budapest, and
then back north to the Slovak and Czech Republic. Hopefully I'll get
another Net connection midweek and can send an update.
Nat
Monday 24 Aug 98 / 23.30 CET
Material Sensing & Instrumentation, Inc.
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