Budapest has re-awakened, and while it is still stirring after a long sleep under communist rule, the city has kept the Old World charm that make it such an attractive place to visit. There are two moods of Budapest, representing the old and the new: the pleasantly lazy lifestyle of cafes, thermal baths, simple living and low-cost opera, and the frenetic, ambitious lifestyles of the would-be rich and famous, the young Hungarians and Western business people who came here to capitalize on a fast-changing economy. Budapest offers both, and the visitor or resident doesn’t have to choose between them. The magnetism has led more than 10,000 Americans to make Budapest home, sometimes years longer than they planned. Budapest has a character not unlike that of New York City: people will complain about it, but they find it difficult to leave. Many Hungarians, meanwhile, have come back. During the 1956 revolution, which was quashed by the Soviets, many Hungarians fled to Vienna, then to the United States or Canada. Now they are back, reclaiming their past and building a new future. They are people like Gaston Vadasz, who was a young boy when he and his mother carried their suitcases —- heavy, he remembers, to his small arms —- in terror across the Hungarian-Austrian border in December of 1956, paying a farmer to guide them. The border was marked by several feet of carefully raked dirt, fashioned to show footprints. Vadasz and his mother were two of the lucky ones who made it. Now, with his wife Linda, he is back in Budapest as marketing director for Juventus radio.