SZENTENDRE (St. Andrews)......Taking a bus to Szentendre, which is quite an adventure in itself, you pass the Roman settlement of Aquincum. It's right along the road with aqueducts and all.

The mostly heavily touristed locations in all of Hungary are Buda's Castle Hill and Pest's Váci utca street. They are crawling with them! But, the little town of Szentendre rivals them both. It's a "postcard perfect" village settled along a bend in the Danube River. Tourists, as well as Budapesters, come to Szentendre to stroll the galleries, museums, shops and cafés. Fortunately, as soon as you leave the souvenir-choked main streets, there are quite little back lanes under the colorful shadow of Baroque steeples to enjoy to yourself.

When I was a child, I loved the movie "If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium". (It's particularly funny to me since I now live in Antwerp.) It was a film about Americans on a speed trip through Europe on a "been there, done that" experience. It was sort of like my Eastern Europe tour behind the Iron Curtain. We visited so many places in so few days that it all blurred together. I know I visited Szentendre, and still have the embroidered vest to prove it, but I swear that none of it looked familiar at all to me.

MARTIN