Time out then to marvel at the biggest Tesco store in Europe, the 50 McDonalds, the five Irish pubs (and their amazing prices), and their 12 English counterparts called John Bull. Hark to dogs called Diana and Doris and the paediatrician who is considering founding a Fat Farm for obese Hungarian children. Sit in hotel lounges and cringe at the local business people being harangued by platoons of German and American "consultants" and squads of know-it-all chaps from the West. Yep, capitalism has got its claws into Budapest and they even seem a tad more grateful than their Prague counterparts.
Like Prague, you can have anything you want in Budapest, but like almost everywhere else in the region, only a few can play. To get on the team, it helps: to be in the privatisation loop (being a politician, his relation or a crony is of inestimable value here); to be a razor-sharp entrepreneur; or possess the worker's equivalent of the Holy Grail - a well-paid job that will still be there tomorrow. Any job, however lowly, with a multinational or an embassy means a salary probably three times the national average.
But the real jackpot winner is about 30, with fluent English and maybe a second language, computer skills and financial qualifications. He may get less than his Western counterpart but it will still be unimaginable riches compared with his father, an engineer say, in what used to be the textile industry before it was swallowed up by liberalisation. The older man is probably on unemployment benefit of about £70 a month and sharing a 50-square-metre apartment with his wife, their second son, daughter-in-law and baby. The younger family is probably desperate for a house but the only Hungarian bank that offers real mortgages charges 20 per cent interest, hardly an option on the average salary currently stuck below £3,500 a year. They won't be applying for the two-room flat in the Castle area, advertised at £240 a month. The ad specifies: "Decent, intelligent people only need apply". Whatever that means.
This is the sort of thing that rules you out of the game definitively. All of it compounded by unhelpful details such as a) being 50 or over, and/or b) being a State employee. In Slovakia, neurosurgeons were in the crush of applicants for a cleaning job at the American Embassy. Doctors both there and in Hungary are so badly paid that notoriously, they survive on "gratitude money". Aggi, who entered a Budapest hospital to have her first baby a few years ago, followed procedure. She confirmed the going rate with other mothers in the ward (about £100, half a month's salary at the time) and slipped it directly to the doctor - the doctor, mind, not his secretary, who isn't supposed to know. The absurdity is that the entire country knows, including the revenue authorities, whose tax forms include a box for such payments and who take a dim view of anyone who fails to fill it in.
In Slovakia, where healthcare is also supposed to be free (or paid for out of social insurance), a young economics student remarks that patients have been known to sell everything to pay the doctor, "to be sure of a good outcome".
Meanwhile, nurses and teachers earning a state pittance make ends meet with second jobs. They are not unique. Most people routinely work at two jobs, but the implications for once-respected professions are grave: "What am I to say to my 14-year-old daughter who has two professional parents earning pitiful salaries but who sees the greengrocer next door driving a BMW?" asks a teacher. "What value will she put on education?"
As second jobs require flexible hours, they often involve door-to-door selling - life insurance, timeshares or vacuum cleaners - or working as night watchmen or part-time on construction sites. The young minibus driver turns out to be an air traffic controller. "Life isn't bad for the young, for those who are prepared to work hard," he says, frowning over a city map.
"For those aged 50 up, it can be very hard."
For the old and the uneducated, life can be a nightmare. They are the big-time losers. "There is a complete generation of lost people here," says Peter Davorec, a Slovakian university lecturer and advertising director. They yearn for the old certainties and security. For 40 years they were conditioned to expect them, raised in an era when it was illegal not to work. Those able to rise above the fight for survival, are determined to hack it for the sake of their grandchildren. Those sunk in despair crave a return to the "golden years" and the Communists.
In employment terms, their experience means nothing, minus nothing in fact, when a life working under the Communist system is perceived as a negative. Russian - once a compulsory subject - is their only foreign language; its current value may be gauged by the fact that in the seven years from 1989, Russian-learning at primary level in Hungary fell from 100 per cent to two. The unfairness of it all rankles, even among their more privileged, educated children.
In Slovakia, Martina's mother was fired from her clerical job at the age of 50 and now does manual labour in a factory. Although her father hasn't been paid for months, he still turns up for work at the steel factory. It's what he has done all his life. They cannot foresee a time when they will be able to relax and enjoy retirement. Even if they had savings, inflation would devour them.
"I see the good things about 1989. I appreciate the freedom of expression," says Martina, a 25-year-old student. "But my father - he's tired. Others might have bad memories of the Communists, but he doesn't. He was a small person, from a small village, was never worth being watched. He never wanted to go abroad. People like him like it here, it's home, it's family. They had no ambitions and everything they needed was right here. I think it was lovely for them. They're the simple people and they are the majority."
And what they see under the new regime is not just crippling insecurity but a yawning abyss between the young and the old, the lucky few versus the rest. They see corruption in high places and massive increases in violence and drug abuse. Hungarian sociologist, Andras Szabo, estimates that drug abuse there has gone up by a factor of 10 in seven or eight years.
For Eva, 35, another teacher on a pittance, the most crushing disappointment in the new Slovakia is the eruption of xenophobic nationalism which she believes was behind the split from the Czechs. Its offspring is manifest in the anti-Jewish slogans appearing on the walls; the skinheads wearing racist insignia with impunity; a series of brutal attacks on Asians, in particular, in recent months. Her fear is soundly based.
Her husband's grandfather died in a gas chamber. His many fine properties in what is now the Czech Republic were confiscated by the Nazis, then by the communists. There will be restitution because the law compensates only those whose property was taken after 1948. Russians live there now. "But at least before 1989, you knew who the enemy was. Not any more. Democracy brought chaos and people are still looking for a Meciar (the right-wing, nationalist prime minister up to last year's elections). He is not a democrat."
Yet, Eva has no hankering for the old days. She remembers when her uncle fled to Switzerland in 1969 and couldn't return to see his dying mother. Magdalena Hadacova, president of the healthworkers' union in Slovakia, remembers that decade too. "The situation today emphatically is not the dream come true that we had in 1989. We often ask ourselves was it worth all that standing in the streets, rattling our keys to toll the end of Communism and the birth of freedom, wearing the badges with Dubcek's picture and his slogan `Communism with a human face'. We used to stand there and chant `Our hands are empty' (meaning `we have no guns'). But look - these hands are still empty."