I left my apartment in London (paid for by the university) in an Uber (paid for by the university) and flew on British Airways from Heathrow to Liszt Ferenc Airport (paid for by you know the drill). And then I took a bus (paid for by me) to my apartment in Budapest (passed down from my grandparents to my mother and then to me). And now I sit in the living room where I played as a child, looking out the window at the trees in the park around the Nemzeti Múzeum, where my grandmother used to take me.

The apartment in London had looked out at trees as well. From the living room you could see the treetops along a small road of elegant white houses, the kind that populates Kensington. (I’ve been told you’re not allowed to paint the houses any other color there.) From the bedroom you could see the treetops of Kensington Gardens. It was not a large flat — just two rooms, plus the kitchen and bathroom, and even the kitchen was sort of a half-kitchen, with a half-sized refrigerator and just two burners on the stovetop. But of course it was expensive, much more than I could ever have afforded myself. Once you emerged from the small street on which it was situated, you were in the bustle of High Street Kensington. I enjoyed that bustle — while I was in London, that is.

Budapest was a bit of a shock, after London. In previous years, I’ve come here from Boston, which even on its most bustling day is a sleepier town than London. But where I live in Boston is quiet and leafy and not at all crowded. Boston to Budapest is less of a shock to the system than London to Budapest, and for about a week I could not slow down. I was rushing here and there. Of course, it did not help that I had to finish final grading for the summer semester — I would read travel journals, then go grocery shopping at Spar, then watch video essays, then run to DM or Rossman before it closed. In London I had shopped at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, or Boots for things like toothpaste and shampoo, and when I had rushed, it had generally been to class or one of our excursions.

But here in Budapest, sometime after I finished grading, I started to slow down. I realized that no one else was rushing around. People were strolling, sitting in cafés, talking to one another. I wasn’t in London anymore.

It’s hard to describe the difference between London and Budapest, because it’s almost as though they exist on different planets. The current population of London is almost nine million people. The current population of Hungary is about 9.5 million people. In other words, the entire country of Hungary has slightly more people in it than the city of London. About 1.7 million of those people live in Budapest. Boston, if you count all of it (including areas like Cambridge that are Boston by another name), contains around 4.3 million people. So it’s more than twice as populous as Budapest. It also exists on another planet — the planet of countries that were not bombed in either world wars. I’ve written about that distinction elsewhere, so I won’t talk about it here, except to say that when my students fly from Boston to London, they feel as though they’ve arrived somewhere ancient and consequential, in part because it bears the scars of those war years. And they’re right — there is a significant shift even between Boston and London. But the honest truth is that the two cities don’t feel that different to me.

I mean, not as different as traveling from either of those places to Budapest.

The first week, I was too rushed, and also too sick from a virus I had brought with me from London, most likely caught from the students and exacerbated by the cool, damp weather of a London summer. Slowly, the dry heat of Budapest began to vanquish the virus. Once my final grades had been uploaded, I began to slow down. I walked more slowly down the street. I moved more slowly around the apartment. Even my thoughts began to slow down.

I suppose the process had begun, even if I wasn’t conscious of it, when I landed at Liszt Ferenc Airport, which has only two terminals. It continued on the bus ride to the city center, which sped through areas of old factories, now rusted, and small suburban houses, their yellow or orange or pink paint peeling. Or sometimes the houses are mint green, or a kind of brownish red, each house situated in its small garden. And then we were in the city, where the buildings are just as colorful, some fully renovated, some still with cracked paint exposing the underling plaster or covered by layers of soot from the era of Trabants. And then we arrived at Kálvin tér, which is a busy intersection but nothing at all like Piccadilly Circus. And I climbed the stairs to what I still think of as my grandparents’ apartment.

Now I am here until almost the end of August. I’ve finished all of my work for the semester and I’m back to working on writing. I suppose it’s good to be in Budapest to write, because writing takes going slowly — it takes immersing yourself in a way that you can’t when you’re skimming over the surface of life. I did write a few poems in London — I could do that. But now I need to work on stories and a novel, and for those things, I need to concentrate, to dig down deep into things. Into myself of course, but also into the world. It’s as though the imagination is a shovel, and I need to dig into the soil of reality — of what happened in the past, of what people are like in the present. That is, into history and psychology. And I need to dig deep into the language as well, into words and their etymologies and the ways in which they do or don’t go together. I wonder if that makes me a gardener or an archaeologist? I suppose a writer needs to be both, to dig in order to find things but also in order to grow things.

Can I find things and grow things here in Budapest? I hope so . . .

(The image is View of Budapest by Albert Gleizes.)