H is for Hungary

Hungary is a breathtaking country.

The picture above is of the ‘Chain Bridge’ which spans the Danube between Buda and Pest, which together make up Hungary’s capital city.

The bridge was designed by an Englishman called Clark, then built by a Scotsman, bizarrely also called Clark. How spooky is that?

The potential for metaphors on the roles of the home nations within the United Kingdom throughout history is just too obvious.

As a city, Budapest is up there with Europe’s great capitals. Some of the architecture is stunning, the people generous and fun and the language is so incomprehensible as to be charming.

Helen Baggott has an amazing blog going on Rome. Worth a look here.

Much though I love Rome, Budapest shades it for me. On and off, I lived in Budapest for the duration of the 1990s.

Outside of the capital, landlocked Hungary has some great beaches on the shores of the Balaton lake and the magnificent Danube river. There are fabulous wine regions, plains, towns and cities. We shall visit some of them in another post.

My ‘Work in Progress’ is largely set in Hungary.

While the hero Sean visits many places that I know well, his adventures are mostly fictional, as if I wrote of things that really happened, then the reader would not believe me.

Hungary was a wild place in the early nineties. The Berlin wall had crumbled, the USSR was in turmoil and a new era was beginning.

It is in this milieu that Sean is trying to do his job and have fun. Sean works in currency – and so is a person of great interest to many parties, not all of them benevolent.

Some of these people play very rough and young Sean will have to tread very carefully.

Find some more blogs in the A to Z Challenge here.