com
),
in a regal, baroque-style building on the
park’s northern edge. I paid the entrance fee
under its vast domed ceiling, inlayed with gold
and blue paintings, and was quickly ushered
downstairs into a maze-like changing area.
Wearing only a pair of shorts, I set off to find
the actual baths. There weren’t any signs in
English and the dice, stashed in a locker, were
no good to me now. I pushed open a door.
“
Do you have permission to be in here?”
asked the blind man on the other side.
“
Oh… I don’t know,” I replied, sounding
stupid. I’d wandered into some kind of private
massage room.
“
I can have you arrested!” he said, pointing
his white stick in my direction.
Not sure if he was joking or genuinely angry,
I left quickly and tried another door. It opened
into a huge hall full of mineral-rich pools, each
with little clusters of people bobbing around at
the edges. Only their heads and shoulders broke
the waterline, their eyes scanning the room like
hippos on the prowl. For an hour I wallowed
with them in the warmest pool, a kind of hot,
eggy soup that was extremely relaxing, before
finding my way outside.
The city’s main boulevard, called Andrássy
út, is the best return route to the centre.
Crowned by a statue of the Archangel Gabriel,
this broad, tree-lined avenue leads back down
towards the Danube and it is, in many ways,
a reflection of the city’s identity. Its elegant
buildings are filled with high-end boutiques
and plush coffee shops, and throughout recent
history, its corniced townhouses have attracted
the best of society. They’ve also housed the
worst, including the Hungarian Nazis and
the Soviets, who both used the corner plot at
number 60 as their headquarters. Now the
building is open to the public as the House of
Terror museum, a permanent memorial to the
victims of both regimes, that’s one of many such
memorials and museums on this stretch.
“
It’s hard for tourists to understand our
history,” says Dóri, a young Hungarian
journalist who, thanks to the dice, I had met
that night at the hostel’s bar.
