/lit/ - Literature

>>8311163
>>8310018

I lived in BP for almost 2 years, awesome city, not just /lit/ approved but all /arts/ approved. For the size of the city, there's an unbelieveable ammount of things to do.

Music: you have the main Opera house on Andrassy u., then you have the new Muveszetek Palotaja, which is not only awesome and in a great location, but super cheap as well (I saw Phillip Glass for about 5 euros there), tons of places to listen to jazz, and concerts everywhere, all the time. In the summer there's always street performers in the castle, tango sessions (on cobble-stone streets, not the best), etc.

Movies/Theatre: Pushkin theatre, Pesti theatre, the comedy theatre close to the Margit Bridge, so many cool underground cinemas playing all kinds of cinema (there used to be a big cinema-cafe by Oktogon that would do 'random country week' and play tons of films for no money at all).

Literature: It sucks that your language is so hard to learn, otherwise all the expats in the city would be a lot more integrated into the local lit scene. But still, I remember there were a bunch of expat groups doing writing/crit groups here and there, everyone I met was always reading interesting stuff, and there's a couple of really nice bookshops for us non-magyar-speaking. There used to be a great french bookshop maybe a block away from the synagogue, but I think it's gone now. You have AMAZING libraries, specially the one near Kalvin Ter, super comfy.

Your coffehouses are amazing, from Gerbaud to the New York to the one on Andrassy on top of the Alexandria bookshop. Then there's the small indie-hipster cafes, also really nice to explore.

And then the atmosphere in general. Everyone in Budapest was really into art in some way. The city is chock-full of statues of poets, from national to international (there's a really great Shevchenko one across the river from the Parliament), all the concerts and plays get tons of publicity and are always full, you have this national holiday where highschool students go around the city reading poetry to random people on the streets.


And it's so fucking cheap to live there, perfect for the expats. I'm saving some money right now, but hope to move there again by the end of the year.