Walking while you travel

Just walk: You'll be tempt ed to hop into a cab or even just take transit to get the most out of a city you don't have much time in, but as a recent 11-hour day in Budapest proved, you'll have a way better time if you just go where your feet will take you.

We only had a day in Budapest. It's one of the world's great cities, but we were on a 10-day, 9-country binge, and my buddy Will and I realised we weren't going to see everything everywhere. We were going to get tastes, nibbles of cities. And Budapest was going to be more of a morsel than most. We were getting in on the train in the morning and taking the overnight train out.

There are a lot of museums in Budapest. The House of Terror is a great one. There's also an old fort, some great churches, a few famous goulash places and a big old market. It wouldn't have been too tough to sketch out a route and see it all in the 11 or so hours we had. And Budapest, like most big European cities, has those double-decker city tours that are often a good way to get a quick overview.

We decided to go another way.

We wandered.

If you don't have a lot of time in a place, walking can be a counterintuitive way to spend it. You've paid a lot of money to be there, you don't know when (or if) you'll ever be back. You want to maximise, find efficiencies, get the most out of your trip.

Another word for that sort of thing is sightseeing. You see the sights, you move on, you have pictures to share and can give friends and family a satisfying shorthand version of the place in question.

But walking around a city, preferably with no particular agenda, gets you past sightseeing into something more like experiencing the place you're in.

That day in Budapest, for instance, we walked around the main core of the old city, then stopped by a tourist booth to ask whether there were any residential neighbourhoods nearby. Turns out there was one, with its own bars and cafes, just behind the parliament, with buildings that made me think the architects behind London's and Ottawa's neighbourhoods were just phoning it in. On the way, we passed by what looked like an underground bar, though the sign was giving up none of its Hungarian secrets.

We went down the steps, opened the door, went down even more steps, and found a fantastic place, with walls of roughly-carved wood, a few old men hanging around drinking small glasses of not-quitewhite-wine-coloured stuff. We asked for a couple of glasses of whatever they were having. It was a sweet Hungarian wine called Tokaji (pronounced `toke-eye'). The stuff is actually mentioned in the Hungarian national anthem. It was good. We ordered a pitcher. It was better.

From there, after passing a statue of Colombo scratching his head looking at a basset hound (also in bronze) -no idea -we walked towards the parliament buildings, and down some side streets, where we came across what looked like it might be a pinball museum -it was called theFlipper Muzeum -but turned out to be an actual, functioning, enormous hall of pinballery. The place was pretty busy, and there were machines from every era, Happy Days to movie tieins of the '80s and '90s.

Then we found what looked like a corner store with a bunch of guys hanging around outside. Working on the principle that a place where a bunch of people are hanging out is probably worth checking out, we went inside. They had some corner store stuff, but mostly they just sold beer.

You bought a bottle from the coolers, or a pint from a couple of taps by the cash register, and then sat on the curb in front and drank and talked. I couldn't think of a more purely neighbourhood bar concept than that. And the beer was pretty good, too. (Mine was a craft brew from the Hungarian town of Fót, just outside Pest.) We sat and talked and watched people go by as we sipped our beer, propped up against the 19thor early 20th-century brick building the corner storebar was built in. It was mostly men in their 20s and 30s on an early weekday evening, day work over or night work not yet begun.

From there, we wandered through the neighbourhood, past hair salons and travel agencies. I always like seeing where people who live in places I'm visiting want to visit. Hungarians seem to like Croatia quite a bit these days, and Spain.

After a couple of hours of that ­ stopping in for the occasional bit of street food, getting lost, realising you never really get lost in cities and popping out somewhere we recognised in time to figure out how to get back to the train station ­ we felt like we got a bit of a handle on Budapest, more than we would have if we'd confined ourselves to the spots Hungarians self-consciously presented to the visiting world.

I've done this sort of thing in Vienna and Paris, Sofia and Santiago, and it never fails to give me a different sense of the place, a feeling of familiarity, of comfort, like I could go back -and I have gone back to all those places -and feel, if not quite at home, then at least like I wasn't totally on the outside looking in. At a time when Wikipedia and Street View can give you any place's greatest hits just fine without you actually having to visit, this slow-mo style may be the best approach to 21stcentury urban travel..........Article by Bert A.