BUDAPEST, Hungary – It is Tuesday night at the shadowy rathskeller called The Irish Cat Pub. The laughter of canoodling couples echoes like secrets from dimly lighted dining nooks while after-five mates roost over rounds of Guinness. At the bar a smartly dressed woman tries to talk into her cell phone over the blare of music. Maybe she is one of the American expats the guidebook said frequent this Irish-themed hangout du jour in “the Paris of the East.”

One thing is certain: the bland menu of salads and pastas is a godsend after a couple of days of high-fat Hungarian fare eaten on the run – mostly goulash, pork, and little pinched dumplings called galuska, all typically laced with rich red paprika, the national spice.

As for the expats? Zip. More disappointing, not a single Hibernian within earshot.

“It’s not like I was expecting to find a reunion of all my Irish cousins,” Robert, an Irish-American and fellow journalist, says wistfully. "But, still ..."

A two-mile walk for after-dinner drinks and a film screening at the hipster “ruin bar” Kuplung, formerly a car-repair shop (hence kuplung, which means “clutch”), further dims the night’s prospects – the joint is braced by scaffolding and closed for renovations. Unique to Budapest, ruin bars have been the rage for the past 10 years and are named so because they’re found in the ruins of abandoned buildings and stores in the city’s old Jewish Quarter.

My guidebook’s pages flutter once more in the March wind, chilled by the nearby waters of the Danube River whose seven bridges of architectural splendor link hilly, fast-paced Buda on the west bank and historic Pest on the east. Soon there is another bridge – this one mental: It dawns on this third-time visitor that keeping up with this city of 2 million people might not be easy. Locals say it’s been that way since 1989, when the bloodless Velvet Revolution swept out communism and flung open the windows for a breath of fresh democracy.

SIGNS OF THE TIME

Few Hungarians argue that for the past quarter century they have been feasting on newfound capitalist-fueled freedoms. Today locals with forints, the national currency, to burn happily do so in the city’s fashionable high-rent shopping districts like Stefania Road, with its art nouveau facades, and Boulevard Andrassy. A quick glance at this city's Westernized milieu reveals the contemporary Hungarian's unabashed appetite for bekasmeg (breakfast) at McDonalds, BMWs and Mercedes-Benz, Pizza Hut and posh strip clubs like the popular Dolce Vita. Eager to lay it on thick for your upcoming nuptials? Nowadays the cat’s meow for hifalutin wedding receptions is the former summer palace of the Hungarian army.

Models in lingerie billboards wink at international travelers cozied up at nearby al-fresco café tables, as well as tourists browsing outdoor vegetable stands with names like Ha-Ha (no joke). Lady Luck keeps slot machines at Budapest casinos clanging till the wee hours inside sparkling new Eurodollar-built hotels. Tourists, understandably, look exhausted. After all, it’s yeoman’s work for American and European trophy wives to shoulder behemoth tote bags bulging with bubble-wrapped Herend china.

Granted your college-aged backpacker from the states might find it hard to fathom how virtually none of this world existed only a quarter century ago. Back then border guards were paid an extra day of vacation for killing anyone who tried to leave or enter the country illegally. It was Stalin statues and two-story red stars representing iron-fisted Soviet rule -- not billboards plastered with hot chicks in racy bras -- that glared down upon your workaday proletariat. Yet these symbols of oppression, long since toppled, imbued generations of Hungarians with a fear and perennial paranoia few millennial Westerners can comprehend, according to Budapest resident and retired university professor Dr. Juliana Ramotsa.

All that remains from this era, she says, are Budapest's dreary and monochromatic, high-rise housing complexes built in the last half of the 20^th century, plus the occasional pockmarked building facade, the result of Soviet artillery during the 1956 revolt.  

Ramotsa remembers as a young girl that October morning in 1956 when the Soviet and Eastern bloc military invaded, brutally crushing Hungary’s anticommunist uprising. Budapest’s lovely cobbled squares were turned into killing fields. Within days the secret police headquarters became known as “the torturing building.” She recalls the tank that pulled up in front of her family home and the soldiers banging on the front door. They had come to arrest her parents, college professors who were on the Soviet’s long list of academic intellectuals to detain. She watched through the window as her mother and father were handcuffed and shoved down the walkway to an awaiting car, where they were whisked away to be interrogated. They did not return home until a month later.

Ramotsa takes in stride the dizzying changes she has witnessed in her country over the decades.

“I survived World War Two, I survived the revolution of 1956, I survived communist rule,” she says quietly on a sunny afternoon at Heroes Square, surrounded by the Romanesque statues of Archangel Gabriel, Magyar chieftains and Hungary’s kings and leaders from the past 1,000 years. “Now I can say I don’t like the prime minister without fear.”

Downtown’s sprawling Central Market Hall underscores another sign of the times: English is replacing French and German as the second language of choice on everything from menus to marquees. Hunglish, a mix of Hungarian and English words, is widely spoken. This is extraordinarily helpful considering Magyar (the Hungarian name for their unusual language and themselves) is tricky at best. U.S. currency is welcomed everywhere.

“Dollars,” says Budapest resident Andrea Szeifert, “are like gold to us.”

Yet some things never change. Here amid the Central Market’s century-old ironwork, elder Hungarians still dress in traditional dark-wool topcoats, gray caps and drab scarves, as they chat over Kobanyai beers and spicy sausage or while browsing with traditional stoic dignity for freshly made strudel and Zsolnay porcelain.

CSIKOS KID

If the Central Market Hall is the heart of Budapest, the city’s Old World soul definitely belongs to Castle Hill, or Verhegy, rising from the Buda hills since the 13^th century when the sky-tapping structure was built by Dominican friars. The castle complex encompasses a large village of winding cobblestone streets crammed with preserved Gothic, baroque and Renaissance homes and mansions, churches and bric-a-brac shops. All of which is topped by Kiralyi Palota, the royal palace. Best of all this castle-top perch offers a near-breathtaking panorama of sprawling, spired Pest in the distance just across the Danube, which from this vantage point at night looks like a 19^th-century engraved Christmas card. As luck would have it, the palace’s strolling Roma violinists are all too happy to play “Jiggle Bells” on request.

Fourteenth-century Turkish rule left behind something a wee bit more practical than strolling musicians: namely, a quartet of hot-spring baths. At the Gellert baths the owners literally throw in the towel (basically a Native American-style lap flap with waist cord) with the $5 admission. Modestly behind, one hour spent neck-deep in the steamy, sexually-segregated, Roman thermal pool proved an elixir worthy of Saint Stephen, this country’s first king.

Saint Stephen would likely also nod his approval at how his countryside still has powers to sooth the savage photojournalist eager to escape Budapest’s big-city cosmopolitan crush. Bright sunflower fields and thatched-roof cottages, all clustered around carefully tended vineyards, punctuate my 25-mile drive from Budapest into the Danube Bend region. Cradled between the rolling Borzsony and Visegrad hills are bare volcanic mountains, as well as ancient battlefields dating to the early Middle Ages – all that remain of the Roman Empire’s frontier in modern-day Hungary.

In Tok is the far more modern – and, yes, touristy -- Patko Csardo horse ranch. No sooner do our shoe heels hit the ground when the ranch house doors fly open and, as if on cue, a small group of Hungarian musicians emerge and launch into a cheerful serenade. Later the Hungarian-style rodeo fares well, particularly among a group of middle-aged American women hypnotized by the young quartet of whip-cracking, galloping csikos. Making matters worse is the goulash and stewed chicken lunch.

Up the road, Szentendre turns out to be a near-storybook Hungarian village thanks to its amalgam of sun-dappled Serbian church steeples, fresh-scrubbed shopfronts, winding cobblestone streets, and well-tended baroque homes painted in bright blues and reds. Equally artful are master confectioner Karoly Szabo's colorful, handmade marzipan creations. On the shelves of his Marcipan Museum and Sweet Shop are everything from tiny frogs to an intricate model of Budapest’s neo-Gothic Parliament Building, all made from -- yep -- marzipan. Szabo, not unlike Budapest and the rest of Hungary, is indulging his sweet tooth for change a quarter century after the collapse of communism.

My last night in Hungary finds me wandering the city’s cobbled riverfronts and crisscrossing its ancient bridges. But no matter how much time I spend peering like a vagabond through the frosted glass of its oldest taverns, or mesmerized by the exotic allure of its bewitching Romani women, this mysterious, Central European country's thousand-year-old soul always seems just beyond my grasp. Perhaps that's par for the course in a place where change continues to occur faster than the speed of now.