Szechenyi Chain Bridge Night Countdown Timer

The lions at the ends are the joke nobody gets until they arrive. There are four of them, carved in 1852, and they have no tongues. Legend says the sculptor was mocked so hard for it that he threw himself in the river. It is almost certainly not true, but the city tells it anyway, and I like that about the city. This was the first permanent crossing between Buda and Pest. Before it, you waited for the ice to freeze or you paid a boatman. Now it is just a road with an unreasonable view, and at night the chains light up in strings of white dots that run away from you like a landing strip. I stood at the middle and looked back at the lit facades on the Pest side. The water was doing that slow churn big rivers do, gold light breaking apart and rejoining. A tour boat slid under the span with its commentary going in four languages at once. It has been blown up once already, in 1945, and rebuilt from the wreckage. That feels worth mentioning when you are standing on it in the dark, holding a railing.