This is my second time in five years visiting Budapest and I'm floored by how clean, beautiful, artistically dynamic and well run the city appears to be.
Architecture - stunning, varied, rich
High culture - plenty of museums, numerous ground breaking contributions to mathematics
River - clean, not full of shit, superlative bridges
Bags of trash on street - minimal
Begging - minimal, passive in nature
Menacing gangs of thugs - not overtly visible in public spaces
Public transport - underground, trams, buses, regular shuttle buses to airports
Clubs - no random violence, chill atmosphere
Obesity - low, mostly tourists and old grandmas in their 70s
Heroin junkies - not visible
Dog shit - not visible
Locals - shitty Eastern European customer service and suffering depression but educated polyglots with a capacity for hard work
The average wages here are 700 EUR pm at most, so this is a poor city by Western standards.
Compare that to Dublin where wages are around 2500 EUR pm (let's say x 3.5) it's striking that Budapest appears so much wealthier (visually) on all of these measures above but actually is not.
I appreciate Budapest was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a dual capital but also under the yolk of the Ottoman Empire before that and bombed to shit after that during WW2 and then controlled by the Soviets so doesn't appear to have had the easiest of runs.
Any insight?
Is Budapest the richest looking "poor city" you've seen? Who else is a contender?
Architecture - stunning, varied, rich
High culture - plenty of museums, numerous ground breaking contributions to mathematics
River - clean, not full of shit, superlative bridges
Bags of trash on street - minimal
Begging - minimal, passive in nature
Menacing gangs of thugs - not overtly visible in public spaces
Public transport - underground, trams, buses, regular shuttle buses to airports
Clubs - no random violence, chill atmosphere
Obesity - low, mostly tourists and old grandmas in their 70s
Heroin junkies - not visible
Dog shit - not visible
Locals - shitty Eastern European customer service and suffering depression but educated polyglots with a capacity for hard work
The average wages here are 700 EUR pm at most, so this is a poor city by Western standards.
Compare that to Dublin where wages are around 2500 EUR pm (let's say x 3.5) it's striking that Budapest appears so much wealthier (visually) on all of these measures above but actually is not.
I appreciate Budapest was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a dual capital but also under the yolk of the Ottoman Empire before that and bombed to shit after that during WW2 and then controlled by the Soviets so doesn't appear to have had the easiest of runs.
Any insight?
Is Budapest the richest looking "poor city" you've seen? Who else is a contender?