Where the cakes are big and the baths are hot

It's 14 years since I was last in Budapest, halfway through an East European odyssey with my fair, young common-law wife. For five months Birna and I piloted our aged and incontinent Saab in and out of those gaping new holes in the Iron Curtain, and reading through the journal she kept it's clear we were happy to arrive in the Hungarian capital, and sad to leave. As a staging post it came after Bratislava, a bedrizzled, city-sized Arndale Centre peopled by energetically corrupt traffic policemen, and before the desperate, scary shambles of Romania.

With a week of flyblown Stalinist turnip-marts looming, everything about Budapest seemed excitingly cosmopolitan, even the bracing whiff of the Wild East that had its citizenry conspicuously embracing their new-found freedom to vandalise tram shelters and hawk lurid pornography from trestle tables in the metro. 'Really quite smart - saw two Benettons,' gushed Birna of downtown Budapest, revealing both the city's rapid retail evolution in the year up to 1990, and her own since. But back then, I played Barnardo to her Benetton; just months after the Warsaw Pact's meltdown, Budapest was already offering opportunities to highlight the unedifying budgetary apartheid which continues to define our relationship. Birna's account of our first full day in Budapest begins: 'Lovely morning, summer frock on and down to Café Gerbeaud for full-on patisserie breakfast (T to McDonald's).'

This is a city with a long heritage of egging on those foreigners most vulnerable to unsightly indulgence. The Romans built an amphitheatre here larger than the Colosseum, and when in 1944 Adolf Eichmann pitched camp in Budapest, he requisitioned a Danube-side villa with its own stable of white stallions and an amphibious car. So it was, via some train of thought I'm clearly now beginning to wish had never left the station, that by way of atonement for my previous ignobility I returned to Budapest wearing a velvet suit.

Budapest is for those who like their cakes big and rich, and their baths hot and long. There are dozens of spa sources in the city, most of them tapped and tamed by the Ottomans. In 1990, many of the 23 bath-houses had barely been altered since the sultans, and it was in one of these - the gloomily ecclesiastical Rudas, with its vaulted ceilings and sunken octagonal pools - that I endured an experience which ensured that of the two of us, I would be the least sad to leave Budapest.

Most baths back then alternated between male and female use, and with Birna down the road at the Kiraly spa ladies' night, I strode into the Rudas past a sign whose English element announced: 'Now is the Day of the Men.' It was a slogan that only acquired an ominous significance as a winking attendant handed me the handkerchief-sized doll's apron that was the obligatory dress-code. Treble-knotting its tie straps above my buttocks I slipped into the main pool, noting a dozen stout and swarthy forms spaced neatly around its circumference, like digits on a clock face. Half-past six seemed a neutral spot, but before I'd even finished counting the skylights, seven o'clock's toes rubbed against my calf. This was a bad moment, which became a worse one when six o'clock's hand alighted proprietorially on my right haunch. A very small number of seconds later I was back in the changing-rooms frenziedly pulling my clothes back on over damp, untowelled flesh.

Regrettably, those seconds had proved sufficient for three additional bathers to splash across and join their colleagues: in an impressive feat of choreography, tented aprons were whisked aside with a conjuror's flourish, and vaulting out of the water I found myself closely attended by a clamour of urgently proffered phalluses that called to mind the cluster of microphones at an impromptu news conference on the courtroom steps. Five o'clock got me up the nose, eight o'clock in the ear.

This year, of course, they're celebrating enlargement of a different sort: we arrived the day Hungary joined the newly expanded EU. Celebrating at least theoretically, because if their monstrous language is related only to Finnish (words that typically cross international borders almost unscathed are churned to alphabet goulash in the Danube: police is rendörseg; wine is bor), then so is their underwhelmed melancholy. You don't expect to be given presents by customs officials, though if that commemorative pen was a surprise, the manner in which it was slapped into my palm was not.

Billboards outside the airport exhorted locals to stock up with beer for their EU parties, and one of the many strip clubs passed en route to town was advertising a themed night of 'EU-rotica', yet attendance at the many official gatherings seemed conspicuously poor. Three of the magnificent Danube-spanning bridges were closed to vehicles, but none had attracted a quorum for the anticipated pedestrian knees-ups; in a similarly carless road tunnel bored beneath Castle Hill on the Buda side of the river, a street party was in desultory half swing. Still, we appreciated it all: strolling over to hilly, bohemian Buda from bustling, flat-pack Pest across the Chain Bridge, a triumph of mid-Victorian British engineering, gazing downstream at the splendid waterfall of rainbow spray shooting from out-turned fire-sprinklers on the Elizabeth Bridge in apparent homage to the city's status as Europe's spa capital. Because this was Hungary, the bridge's suspension towers were spanned at one end with a 200ft tall dolly bird in an EU swimsuit, and at the other by a similarly titanic depiction of a young man energetically engaged in the nation's favourite aquatic pastime: indecent assault. (Or possibly water polo.)

But no one - at least no one but the soiled and bellowing British stag parties who we were to find roaming the city in such shaming preponderance - was out painting the town blue with gold stars. Later we'd admire this haughty reluctance to fete one bureaucracy when ordered to by another, though it was certainly at odds with the scenes of unrestrained Slovak and Estonian revelry we'd watch on CNN in bed that night. 'I am not happy because we are always on the wrong side in history,' sighed one of the tourist guides atop Castle Hill, clearly picturing her children indentured to a CAP-sponsored salt mine. 'Today it is cheaper for us to go shopping in Austria,' we were lugubriously informed more than once. I tried to accept this, but it wasn't easy. What about all those dentistry tourists, flocking here from all over western Europe for a knock-down crown and a night on the town? Beer's a pound a pint, and even in the swishest cafe you'll rarely pay more than that for a double espresso.

If every East European nation takes hard-bitten pride in having spent the odd century under a yoke, then Hungary has been bowed beneath these metaphorical implements of tyrannical enslavement so consistently it almost likes it that way. For 450 years they were successively lashed to the Ottoman yoke, the Hapsburg yoke, and until 1989, the mighty Soviet yoke. If our first visit to Budapest came the year after they'd finally thrown that off, our second coincided with the day they willingly shackled themselves to another: the Daily Mail-sponsored yoke of Brussels.

It was under the Hapsburgs that Hungary came closest to smiling. Almost everything that makes Budapest the appealing city it is dates from the 1890s: the endearing and efficient metro, Continental Europe's first; a Danube-dominating, dome-topped mother of all parliaments; those great, tank-tempting boulevards tapering away to hazily distant obelisks. I could go on - and I will. An Eiffel-designed main station, now additionally housing an Eiffel-designed McDonald's; the central market with its cured-meat cornucopia and Harry Potter babushka dolls; any number of epic Art Nouveau cafés, stores and hotels. 'None of this investment was possible until the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867,' read a metro-platform info panel, neglecting the parallel diplomatic pertinence of the Franco-Norwegian Hesitation of 1872, and 1879's pivotal Like, Whatever Accord.

A century on, there's a new boom in full swing: if the first was fin-de-siècle, this one's fin-de-sickle. Prior to its recent and pleasingly lavish overhaul, our hotel, the Corinthia Grand on Erzsebet korut, was familiar to locals as the Comrades cinema on Lenin korut. The boulevard pavements are once more host to the well-heeled window-shoppers they were laid for; with crude symbolism, the red star atop the parliament dome has been replaced by 90lb of gold leaf. The dark satanic mills of a grim transformer factory on the Buda side have given way to a culture park lightly strewn with beech-faced structures of Scandinavian aspect, and in a neighbouring street we found Marxim, a basement theme bar done up like some Checkpoint Charlie-era border post, with razor-wired banquettes, Chernobyl cocktails and murals depicting a beaming, trouserless Lenin. After the 1956 rebellion was brutally crushed, no Eastern Bloc nation despised its Soviet overlords more than Hungary, yet 15 short years after they were sent packing, a generation of hatred and bitterness has already been distilled into gentle, almost nostalgic mockery.

A similar emotional evolution may explain my determination to revisit a Budapest bath-house. All have been upgraded in the last decade, and none more so than the Széchenyi, a vast, neo-Baroque complex set in parkland at the foot of Andrassy boulevard. This is effectively the city's municipal bath-house: £6 buys a whole day's unisex wallowing (with cash-back if you only fancy a couple of hours). I ventured through dim chambers housing a cook-chill sequence of pools, their distant vaulted ceilings black with sulphured encrustations, and out into a fabulous warm-water lido bordered by copper-domed, Hapsburg-ochred stateliness.

Here I played aquatic chess with a splendidly bearded gentleman whose favourite - perhaps only - words of English were 'check' and 'catastrophe!', both of which enjoyed regular and enthusiastic airings during our brief encounter.

But the fun was both good and clean - no need this time for the hurtful ribaldry with which Birna had interrupted the faltering, whispered account of my Budapest debut. No need, perhaps, but she still couldn't resist it. 'Bash your bishop, did he? Penetrate your queen's defence?' Justice was done when we essayed the whirlpool simulator in the next pool down and she was swept away, in a vortex of froth and gut hair, by spud-faced, bor-breathed British stags.

Stumbling torpidly outside, we found ourselves in a city imbued with the burnished, ethereal quality of a looming thunderstorm. And with good reason, though our towels-over-head dash from baths to metro in the son-et-lumière of an astounding storm proved just brief enough to qualify as recklessly romantic. Less so the rather longer sprint from metro to riverside restaurant, an ordeal whose convalescence demanded a comprehensive appreciation of high-end Magyar viniculture.

It was while animatedly debating whether to trump this with an extravagant sample of the well-paid work done by the nation's goose force-feeders that Birna withdrew our old journal, carefully parted its dog-eared and now soggy pages, and began to read tactical extracts aloud. 'T rude to gypsy violinist... T hid in bookshop to avoid friendly South Africans... went to Museum of Fine Arts - T wimped out in first room.' I shrugged at the sightseers cowering under the canopy of a passing tourist barge as she delivered the coup de grace. 'Got completely lost leaving Budapest - two-hour shouting match as T wouldn't take blame.'

History is written by the victors, I reflected as the waiter approached our table with a salvered brick of foie gras. Though sometimes, as indicated by the 'I' that's now been inserted at the start of that last entry, the losers get to scribble in the margin.

The best baths in Budapest
Rudas
Arguably the finest of Budapest's bath-houses, the Rudas (I Döbrentei tér 9; 00 36 1 356 1322) has a beautiful dome through which shafts of light cut down through the steam. There have been baths on the Rudas site since the 14th century and the current building was constructed by the Pasha of Buda in the 16th century. The Turkish baths are men only, but there is a mixed swimming pool. They are currently being renovated, but are due to reopen in September.

Gellért
An expensive, but impressive bath-house connected to the Art Nouveau Gellért Hotel near the city park. The Gellért (XI Kelenhegyi út 2-4; 00 36 1 466 6166; www.gellertfurdo.hu) offers a stunning Art Nouveau swimming pool that has made it famous, a maze of steam rooms and saunas that have a very different feel to the city's other Turkish baths. The water here is recommended for those with blood pressure problems because of its carbonic gases content.

Rác
Currently closed for an ambitious refurbishment and the building of a new 60-room luxury spa hotel opposite, the Rác (I Hadnagy utca 8-10; 00 36 1 356 1322) is due to reopen in August. When it does, it will certainly be worth a visit as the octagonal pool and Ottoman dome inside date back to the Turkish era.

Király
Construction began on the Turkish part of the Király baths (II Fö utca 84; 00 36 1 202 3688; www.kiralyfurdo.hu) in 1566 and it opened in 1570. It is now one of the city's most important Ottoman monuments. It was added to in the 18th century, but the pattern of small baths of varying temperatures surrounding a large main pool - the traditional Turkish bath layout - remains unchanged.

Széchenyi
The 19th-century Széchenyi (XIV Âllatkerti út 11; 00 36 1 321 0310; www.szechenyifurdo.hu) in the city park is Europe's largest health spa and attracts over two million visitors each year. The waters are used to treat gout, arthritis and gall bladder disease. There are indoor steam rooms and thermal baths and outdoor pools where bathers play chess.