RuinPubs

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Take a tumbled down old building and turn it into a night club and you have one of the most popular attractions in Budapest. And when I say “Turn it into a night club”, I do not mean renovate it, I mean make the ruin the club. Bring in bands, furnish it with whatever old recycled furniture you can find, decorate the walls with whatever is available, and allow tagging anytime.

I think there is room for that old Communist era car in the courtyard; cut the roof off and make it a booth.

Hey that is pretty weird – perfect!

After that, anything goes; find something odd eccentric, weird or cool and use it to decorate.

There you go, Budapest’s RuinPubs.

The original and most popular RuinPub, hosts a Farmers Market on Sunday mornings, so we went exploring and found it to have a look. It is pretty hard to describe, but “Ruin Pub” does it pretty well. The building was originally a ruin, and it has not been fixed up other than to stabilize things. It is open to the sky in the courtyard, and the rooms are open to the courtyard. There are actually two cars parked inside being used as booths. Scattered throughout are rooms with chairs sofas, stools and tables of all styles and colors. There are actually some painting hanging on the walls, but much of the décor is pure graffiti and proud of it. There is a wrecked piano hanging in one stairwell, a table made from VHS tapes, a bathtub converted to a couch. Everywhere you look is something else amazing.

It was nice to go on Sunday for the market because I could wander around snapping pictures. I can only imagine what it must be like at night time. We will definitely go back to see.

The pictures I have chosen only give a glimpse into the Ruin Pub scene in Budapest, and this is only one; there are lots of them, some even bigger than this.