Bad Budapest Tourist.

The visit to Budapest was to celebrate the wedding of one of my oldest friends and to catch up with a few more who had also made the journey. All this didn’t leave a lot of time for exploring Budapest. We did walk along the Danube, across the Chain Bridge up to Buda Castle and Matthias Church and the sandcastle-like terrace of the Fisherman’s Bastion. We walked Andrássy Avenue and the Square of Heroes and took in the huge Christmas markets in front of St. Stephen’s and I did also manage a coffee and sacher cake in the poet’s Central Cafe. But we did not have time for the Gellert Spa and, with fascism on the march again around the world and in America, it would have been useful to visit the House of Terror Museum that documents the 1956 uprising across Hungary and its violnt repression by Stalinist Russia – but I didn’t have the energy and stomach to withstand this.

So, I went to see the Miniversum model train. Escapism at its best. This a huge model behind an unassuming single door that documents a few cities in Hungary and Austria. With a couple of kilometers of track and a hundred moving pieces, it is by no means the largest display of this kind but it is still worth an hour or more of your time to see the real and fantasy world created by the designers. In any train layout it is possible to combine different periods and this is no different. There are even little HO scale vignettes of, yes you guessed it, Life Under Communism. There are a collective farm, and drab block of flats and even sections of the Iron Curtain with guard towers and a scene that captures the fall of the wall.

So next time, the Museum of Terror.