There's a place in Budapest that should be visited exclusively in the coldest days of winter, that's the enclosed area where the imported soviet regimes's statues were relegated, not in faraway Magadan but just where they kind of belonged, on Balatoni út in a non descript suburb on the outskirts of Buda. I've been there in the warmer months but somehow it's so more inspiring in the coldest days of winter, first because it's so cold that there are barely other visitors, you have the whole stalag for yourself, and also because the frost give these statues another dimension and echo. We're speaking of the cold, isn't it ? figuratively and physically down to the bones you feel you really touch the reality behind these statues. Here are a few of those statues frozen in time, there are many more there, just to give you the feel...
Inside this stalag-looking barracks there's a very interesting museum including videos made from period analog film material used exclkusively in the 1960s and 1970s for the training of internal intelligence officers assigned to following, checking their fellow citizens for subversion or spying for the West. Unique and must-see, you can see how these officers should lay hidden microphones in private appartments when needed.
