Just back from a trip to various cities in East Europe..........
Budapest is in fact a name come from two cities, Buda and Pest. These two cities is divided by the Duna River..............
The left side of the photo is the Old Buda city and the right side Pest. The Parliament building is on the coast of the Duna River....
I am reading a book that has a short side story about John von Neumann, that he was born in Budapest in 1903, and that at the time, Budapest was the 6th largest city in Europe, highly educated populace with 90% literacy, 25% Jews (which may imply wealthy merchant class?). Nowadays, I wonder if many people can/would name Budapest in the first 10 of European cities.
Kind of remind me of Kaifeng (開封) - the subject city in 清明上河圖. It had a million population (probably the largest city in the world at the time) and the capital of Song. Now a 2nd or 3rd tier city in the mainland.