"Shock and delight at seeing the "New"... " a Budapest Travel Page by Upstate1NY

My Grandmother was the person in our family who decided it was time to have a Television in 1956., My first images of the "tools" of war had been watching tank bodies being trucked past my house from the boiler works in Oswego New York, headed to "some place" to be made into tanks for the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. Now my first actual images of war were flashing across the screen of our TV as updates where shown on the evening news of the Hungarian Revolution. Images were burned into my memory, tanks in action shooting, people, adults and kids throwing Molotov Cocktails, people on fire, people being shot. I believed that nothing could ever overcome those memories. I had been to Russia in 1992, Moscow and St. Petersburg, I had seen lines at the bakery for bread, lines at the meat market for sausages, lines and lines and more lines for what even than I knew not. I was NOT prepared to see a Hungary that defied the images I recalled, let alone ones that did a "one up" on Russia itself. There were NO lines that I saw, there were stores filled with lawn mowers, electric power tools, gardening equipment, model airplanes, all the accouterments of a life with leisure time and the means to make it pleasant.
To say the least I was amazed, but even more delighted and thrilled. These images and the "truth" behind them started my "re-education".