Goodbye Russia and Hello Belgrade (by way of Budapest)

The first post on this blog was meant to have been written about six months ago, when I first stepped fresh faced off the plane into the maelstrom of life in Russia. However, as I did not have a reliable source of internet access the whole period I was living in St Petes, it has had to begin now, as James and I are on our way to spend (at least a few) months living in Serbia. I am hoping to reflect on things we did and saw in Russia while reporting on what we find in former-Yugo states, so hopefully I can still say a few mildly interesting things about our time living in St Petersburg in 2007.

In the meantime, we have been on holiday for three weeks in Western Europe, and only arrived back in the East - namely, Hungary - today. It feels strangely comforting to be back in a city bedecked in the legacy of forty five years of Soviet rule, even if there are markedly fewer hammer-and-sickle monuments left here than in Russia (and rather more EU flags). I will miss the lovely safe feeling you get from being in country, like England or Germany, where it takes you less than three hours to buy a train ticket and you don't have to duck around the corner every time you see a policeman for fear of being scammed or conned out of your migration papers. That said, when I saw the dour expressions on Budapest's marvellously morose residents today I breathed it in as the ex-Soviet charm I'd been missing, and it almost felt like home.

Budapest is actually an amazingly picturesque city, which looks like a cross between the set of a Dracula movie and a James Bond film. We are staying on the Pest side (where the action is, James, says, although it seems very gentrified today) just around the corner from Franz Liszt square, which I can imagine would be very pretty in summer with lot of terrace cafes and the like, but today looked very static and frosty, albeit in an attractice snow-tipped way. We walked around looking at the monuments to the failed attempts of 1848 and 1956 to gain independence from the Austrians and the Soviets respectively (the Hungarians haven't had an overly lucky history...) and although it was freezing the breathtaking splendour of the neo-gothic buildings and towering memorials to Kossuth or Kun made it worth the frostbite. Tomorrow I plan to spend half the day in a cafe named after Lukacs and the other half in a thermal bath, which sounds like the perfect way to ease into the end of my holiday. Once we get to Serbia I should have something more substantial to say; in the mean time here are some pics of Budapest on a wintry day for everyone back in Australia to contrast with our sunburnt backyards...