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Budapest
Diablo Nightclub, Budapest, Vl.Ker. Terez ert 62:
Just got back from Budapest with a bit of useful advice for any potential strip club visitors. Check the drinks menu for a 'first drink' price, as my friend and I ended up paying HUF15,000 (over £40) for the first drink. When we queried this two bouncers resembling Grossburger from Stir Crazy appeared asking "Is there a problem?" to which we replied "No..." We walked away from the place happy that we hadn't ended up face down in the Danube as we fell a little short at paying the bill. One good note was, the birds were stunning!
[Robbie, 16th August 2004]
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Hallo Club. I visited this club in July. No admission fee, beers only a couple of pounds. Some very attractive girls. Dances twenty pounds and upwards, though girls don't pester you if you say no. The girl with the snake was quite sexy, but the "wedding night" couple - regular free show at midnight for very erotic. I met an English guy there who told me that many of the girls offer lots of extras as I was leaving early the next morning I didn't have time to check out, but club is definitely worth a visit
[Ian M, 7th October 2001]
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Apologies for corresponding under a pseudonym, but I'm too embarrassed to use my real name and e-mail address.
I just wanted to feedback an experience I had at the Dolce Vita in Budapest. I and a colleague went there expecting a pub with strippers, instead of which we were charged a total of HUF 58,000 (about £140) for four bottles of beer and the company of two ‘ladies’, which we did not request. When we protested the size of the bill, we were threatened with violence, and could only pay by handing over all our local currency and also a large amount of UK currency.
This place advertises in official publications, but I guess this no longer means anything. It might be worth warning other people of what can happen, especially if you don't go mob-handed!
[Anon, 18th July 2001]
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Hungarian (Table-)Dances
The strip scene in Hungary came with two radically diverging sets of pre-conceptions. For this was the country which has become known as the porn capital of Europe -- the home of Cicciolina has seen a huge explosion in...well, let's draw a veil over precisely what, but let's just say industries had sprung up which would have Marx spinning in his grave. On the other hand, reports from the front-line were not exactly encouraging: "abrasively bent on ripping people off...Watch out for $200 drinks!...Unless you are a linebacker in the NFL you will get ripped off". As usual with such things, the truth lay somewhere in the middle: there is undeniably a huge potential to get taken for a great deal of money. But with care and caution, you can get by, and have a decent enough time, though frankly, you'd be better off going to Prague or even staying in London.
Every tourist guide has dire warnings about accepting invites from attractive women in the street. We were sadly disappointed in this aspect: going by our experience, you're far more likely to be accosted by Armani-clad hoodlum lookalikes than any babes. Not that it made any real difference the first evening; we were so paranoid, we would not even have visited a venue offering us free beer all evening, an all-you-can-eat buffet and Britney Spears as cabaret. Visions of Mafia thugs dancing on our kidneys easily overpowered any and all other inclinations. This was despite passing one club, Galaxia, on the other side of the street, where the window rapidly filled with women teasingly waving their breasts at us. It says something about our state of mind that we ran away!
In the end, we asked for local advice, and spoke to Tomas, the landlord of the apartment, who seemed like a reliable and trustworthy man of the world. He did give us a couple of pointers, and some useful general advice: don't go any place where you are the only customers. He also specifically namechecked the Tropical as a dangerous venue, and when we walked past it quite by accident later on, we gave it a wide berth. And that was at 11 in the morning.
Though, in the end, we only visited two clubs, Dolce Vita and Pigalle, the format in both was similar, and it seems reasonable to extrapolate this to being the basic modus operandi for most venues. The details may differ (there may be an entrance fee of HF1000 or so, or there may not), and the drink prices vary too (a beer ranged from HF1000-3000), but these are relatively trivial differences. We'll get onto the specifics of each venue in due course, but let's start with a description of the general rules of engagement.
You sit down, and order your drinks: there is a menu on the table, and I think this is a legal requirement, as it is to have the bar prices posted outside (it would thus seem a good idea to run, not walk, out of any place that doesn't do this). Soon thereafter, a number of attractive ladies will approach your party and ask to sit down. Shortly after that, the waiter will ask you if you want to buy the "beautiful ladies" a drink. [That ringing sound you hear is, indeed, alarm bells going off] If you accept, you will be hit with the most expensive drinks on the menu, costing anywhere up to HF8000. Prising this info out takes a little bit of interrogation, but to their credit, they did admit it...eventually. If you demur, the company evaporates like "sna' offa dyke", to use a good old Scottish expression. This is the basic catch, and if you are not aware of it, it would indeed be very easy to rack up a huge bill in no time at all.
We were worried what would happen when we opted not to buy the drinks (Mafia...kidneys...), but there was never any sign of physical intimidation, perhaps because there were five of us (they weren't to know we were all total wimps!). Certainly, when our numbers thinned out, due to private dances or toilet reasons, the repeated fending off of demands to "buy the pretty ladies a drink" became extremely tiresome, but it was never any more than that. I suspect that the way it works is that, while in Britain, the clubs take a percentage of private dance fees, in Budapest they rely solely on drinks income: at least twice we were told that private dances were entirely the girls' responsibilities, and one club didn't even know how much they charged.
Speaking of which, dances seemed to be a standard HF10000, though reports suggest the quality varied wildly, from a perfunctory song's worth of moderate topless contact (Dolce Vita) up to something that lasted twelve minutes (yes, we were timing them!), and which left the "victim" looking as if...well, we're back to Mafiosi and kidneys again. This was in Pigalle, where it was also made clear that you could purchase company by the hour for HF30000. You would, I personally think, have to be quite mad to go for that, especially given the threatening circumstances.
You couldn't knock the quality of girl in either venue, but of the two clubs, those in Pigalle were far more enthusiastic and lively. In Dolce Vita, beta-blockers appeared to be the order of the day, with little more than gentle swaying, while at least one girl at Pigalle was doing pole work of such vigorous contortionism, she would have been signed instantly at any venue in London. There was a great sense of energy here, though against this, the hassles of "drinks for the beautiful ladies" were far more frequent and I repelled wave after wave of them in my role as Guardian of the Coats.
Pigalle was also weird, in that there seemed to be three interlinked venues in one street, though one had no customers at all (ALERT! ALERT!), and the third's claimed "variety programme" was one guy not playing the drums, while the clientele was a bloke slumped over the table. In comparison, the bit we settled in was grooving wildly, though we only had one drink there before the interminable pressure got to us and we baled. These were certainly not the only places offering entertainment, but we couldn't generate enough enthusiasm to try others, strongly suspecting there'd just be more of the same. However, one of our party did liberate a much-needed roll of bog-roll, which is part repayment for the eye-popping prices.
I confess a slight twinge of regret at not getting to 'Hallo Club' with their interesting-sounding special presenations, including "Erotic show with a snake" and "Soldiers Girls" This was despite the startlingly-ugly woman on their flier, particularly by Budapest standards -- they must have looked long and hard to find someone so homely. Mind you, any venue offering free entry to army guys would not be the place to find the chilled-out atmosphere we craved.
It's a great shame that the places rely so heavily on practices which are sharp, to say the least. This is a desperately short term solution, reflected in the fact that we all spent far less in Budapest than Prague, largely because it was near-impossible to relax. There's no doubt that the raw talent is available, in spades, and a well-run, legitimate establishment would rake in cash by the bucketload without needing to resort to flogging overpriced pseudo-cocktails. How long such a venue would last without getting a visit from its rivals, however, is perhaps open to question...
Dolce Vita -- address to follow...
Pigalle -- Kiss Jozsef utca 1, 10pm-5am
Hallo Club -- Kirally utca 65, 9pm-5am
[£1 = HF400 at 10th April, 2000. TaB flew to Budapest with British Airways (half-price, thanks to the Daily Mail!), and stayed in one of the Amadeus Apartments, which for the five of us worked out at under ten quid each per night. While not luxurious (at that price, what do you expect?), they were perfect for our needs and come recommended: email amadeus@elender.hu for more info.]
[TaB Report, April 2000]
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