I grew up in Debrecen, Hungary’s second city, in the east of the country, close to the Romanian border, in a family where Sunday lunch meant slow-cooked gulyás from scratch and the August holiday meant a week at Lake Balaton. I moved to Budapest in 2011 at the age of 18 to study journalism at ELTE, Eötvös Loránd University, and I never really left.
Debrecen is a city of about 200,000 people with a university, a great Christmas market, and almost no international tourists. Growing up there means understanding Hungary outside the capital: the Great Plain puszta, the Hortobágy National Park and its shepherd traditions, the Tokaj wine region a few hours north, and the specific character of Hungarian provincial life that Budapest residents can forget exists. It also means that when I write about Budapest for visitors, I write as someone who arrived here and chose to stay, not as someone who has only ever known the capital.
What I Write About
Thermal baths, specifically. Budapest has more thermal springs than any capital city in the world, and the baths fed by those springs are the single experience that most distinctly belongs to Hungary rather than to any other country. I have been to all of the major Budapest baths multiple times in different seasons and at different times of day. I know which pool at Széchenyi stays the warmest longest in winter, which entrance at Gellért has the shorter queue, and which bath is the most genuinely local experience for a visitor who wants to see how Hungarians actually use this institution rather than how tourists are instructed to use it. The thermal baths section of this site is the most developed content here because it is the most genuinely unique Hungarian experience available to a visitor.
Hungarian food honestly. I cook gulyás, halászlé, and túrós tészta. I know what lángos is supposed to taste like when it is made well. I can tell you which stalls at the Central Market Hall have held their quality and which ones have tilted toward tourist pricing at tourist quality. Hungarian food culture is richer and more specific than its international reputation suggests: the paprika-growing traditions of Kalocsa, the summer fruit season in the orchards of Pest county, the duck-fat-roasted potatoes that appear on winter menus throughout the country.
The rest of Hungary that visitors miss. Eger with its castle, Bull’s Blood wine, and the Valley of the Beautiful Women wine cellars. Pécs with its Ottoman minarets and 2,000-year history. The Danube Bend with Szentendre’s Serbian Orthodox churches and Esztergom’s cathedral on its hill. The Balaton wine region that most visitors overlook in favour of a beach hotel. Tokaj and its botrytised Aszú dessert wines.
Living here as a foreigner. I arrived as a Hungarian from outside Budapest, which is different from arriving as a foreigner but shares some structural similarities: unfamiliar administrative systems, a city that operates primarily in a language that most of the world does not speak, and the specific process of building a life in a new place. I have been through the Hungarian administrative processes, the rental market, the healthcare system, and the bureaucracy that foreign residents encounter. The expat and nomad section draws on this experience directly.
A Note on Hungarian
Hungarian is hard. This is objectively true. It has 35 grammatical cases, vowel harmony, no cognates with any Western European language, and a phonology that gives most English speakers real difficulty. I speak it as my first language, which means I can navigate things that guides written from outside cannot: the informal tip from a server who switches to Hungarian when the tourist table departs, the landlord’s lease clause that matters, the train platform announcement that changes the departure time.
The language sections on this site include pronunciation guidance for the words that matter most — the few words of Hungarian that earn disproportionate goodwill from locals when used by visitors: jó napot (good day), köszönöm (thank you), kérem (please). They work even said imperfectly.
Contact
For corrections, questions about specific content, and requests for topics not currently covered: anna AT allabouthungary.com.
allabouthungary.com is work in progress, please bear with me until I transfer all my content here.