Expecting to arrive in the former Eastern bloc, I was armed with a cadre of expectations about how many of my possessions would be 'redistributed' upon my arrival in Hungary. Communism!
But there are still leftovers of this Formerly Illustrious and Glorious Political Regime That Sucked And Yet People Are Still Nostalgic For/Hate and Never Want to Come Back.
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION:
When you buy your subway ticket with your Forints, nice uniformed guards of the State are ready to check if you actually bought it (because they know you're so sly that you replaced your real ticket with a fake one in the ten-foot walk from the ticket machine to the gate). They usually only speak the Mother Language (Hungarian this time).
ATHEISM:
On Sunday mornings the streets are deserted, save for the remnants of the ticket stubs that you so carefully bought in the previous paragraph. While there are churches everywhere and most of them have more gold than a Zales store, people just don't seem to be worshipping their God/Gods/anyone except for the porcelain one anymore.
SHOES:
You can buy yo'self a pair of Communist shoes at Tisza Cipo, a small shoe store on the M2 line (Astoria). You'll pay so much more than any communist would have dreamed. But hey! You're not going to be wearing Nikes, you hipster, you.
LIBERTY SQUARE:
The only lasting monument of communism from the guten alten Zeit is surrounded by the American embassy in the East, the Hungarian equivalent of Wall Street, and a statue of Ronald Reagan. I guess you can say that the symbol of communism has been contained.