There, you can plan your day, which may begin with several more hours at breakfast. In Hungary’s emerging, newly entrepreneurial city, one right is inalienable: spending an entire afternoon in one of the city’s inspiring cafes. Here one can read, watch the passing crowd, write a novel that never gets published, and eat as many gargantuan pastries as the stomach desires, all without any reproachful or impatient looks from the serving staff.

Budapest likes to consider itself the Paris of the East, a moniker that is at least partly enduring. For Budapestians, moving unstoppingly toward a market economy (despite 1994’s re-election of the Socialists), this is no longer Eastern Europe; it’s Central Europe. Different address, never moved. That change in many ways defines the contradiction of Budapest in 1995: there is still a maddening bureaucracy that frustrates family and business life, yet the city’s downtown carries the high paced, professional air of a Western city. There are new coins, but most street phones take only old coins. Stocky gypsy women in black-and-red skirts sell flowers and trinkets next to the Clinique cosmetics shop on tony Vaci utca; traditional old Hungarian restaurants serving up chicken paprika are situated across the street from New York Bagel.