Oh what a stunning city! Every single building on every single street is so soul-satisfyingly ornamented. Wrought iron or marble balconies. Statues on every corner or building. Sculpted pillars galore. What looks at first like an alley opens up into a colossal courtyard with floor after floor of iron wrought by hundreds of hands painstakingly over what must have taken years. And these are accentuated by potted plants hanging thousands of flowers dangling over the edges. Every random alley I explored was like this, and almost every one had a fountain or statue at the centre. I felt my soul feeling more at home, felt it rising to the surface, slowly freeing itself from the oppression of ugly surroundings created with only practicality, efficiency, and frugality in mind.
A moment of silence in the majestic Hero square, for a bygone era, when beauty was a priority. I'm pondering the labour that went into all of this. A time before television. I know that passivity is bred by the forces of society, but here there are forces that are swelling up a passion in me to create, explore, achieve, learn, and aspire to certain victory. And oddly, I'm not sad to leave. Three hours of power walking through this grandly decorated city has recharged me, and I'm eager for new adventures as I board a train to cross this flat land on my way to Debrecen, Hungary's second largest city, at it's eastern end near Transylvania.
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