In December of 1996 a friend and I traveled from Vienna to Budapest by train. Pulling into the city, I was shocked at how filthy and derelict everything looked. Buildings covered with graffiti. Windows smashed out. Trash, broken glass, and tons of dog shit in the streets. It was beyond shabby. It was downright spectacular in its awfulness, like some set for a post-apocalypse sci-fi movie. And it was downhill from there. As we were walking from the train station to our hotel, a man approached us and asked if we'd be interested in trading currency with him. We ignored him and kept walking. He quickly dropped behind us and disappeared, and almost immediately two other men came up to us, identified themselves as police, promptly accused us of trading on the black market, and asked to see our passports. What the hell? Were they two con artists pretending to be police? Or were they police who also happened to be con artists? Was there really any difference? At this point I was disinclined to hand over anything, but they grew bullying and aggressive and threatened to take my friend and me to jail. Besides, they were dead certain we were carrying heroin, because we were Americans, and everybody knows all Americans carry heroin. They actually said this. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe any of it, this whole goddamn stupid, scary situation. Without thinking straight, we handed over our passports, and then my friend hit the panic button. He began yelling frantically, which must have frightened our cop friends, because they handed our passports back to us and split. We had been in Budapest less than thirty minutes, and already we'd been scammed, or close to it. Welcome!

The scamming never stopped. We got to the hotel, a quaint and pretty building overlooking the river, and realized after checking in that the hotel itself was a scam: the pretty part was just a facade, literally and figuratively, and the real hotel was this separate thing out back that resembled an abandoned Soviet cement plant from 1956. We had to get to it by crossing a very wet, very dirty alley. Standing in the doorway of this other building and peering up into a completely dark stairwell, my friend and I were incredulous. How could everything be so horribly wrong? So far, this leg of the trip was so wrong it was damn near glorious. We got to our room by groping blindly in the dark (think Clarice Starling in Buffalo Bill's basement), methodically went through our stuff to make sure the cops hadn't picked our pockets clean, and decided we'd had enough; we would leave for Prague first thing in the morning. Now what about dinner?

It was Budapest's final screw-you. We selected a restaurant that looked reasonably nice, but I guess it was too nice, in a corny, Old World kind of way, because there was this strolling violinist there, and he wouldn't leave us the hell alone. We tried tipping him to make him go away, but that only set us up as easy marks; he stuck to our table the rest of the meal, hoping we'd continue doling out money. And he was right. My friend and I didn't know what else to do, so we kept tipping him, song after song. It was like feeding a parking meter all night.

My God, what a depressing city. We couldn't leave fast enough. The next day we sat in the train station and watched as incoming tourists, mere seconds off the trains, were stopped by the police and searched. For their secret stashes of heroin, I'm sure. Unforgivable. Years after the fall of Communism, the Hungarian police were still running around like a bunch of power-mad thugs. I swore then that I'd never go back. I swore I'd devote the rest of my life to killing Hungarian tourism. Now here's the kicker: another friend of mine has gotten a wild hair to visit Budapest next month, and he asked if I'd like to come with. And against my better judgment, against all reason, I said yes. I can't explain this. I really can't. Maybe it's dumb curiosity to see if the Hungarians have gotten their shit together in the intervening thirteen years. Maybe I'm just an idiot. Tonight I came online to look for cheap airfare, and on a whim I typed "I hate Budapest" in my search engine and it brought me here to this website. I've been reading other people's comments (from all the other horror stories I can see nothing's changed), and my Budapest loathing is coming back to me in a rush, to the point where I think I'm going to tell my friend no after all. So thank you, my fellow Budapest haters. Thank you for reminding me how ugly and contemptible the place is, and how brazenly venal and hustling the people are. You've saved me a great deal of time and money and heartache. You don't know how much I appreciate it.