The Things That Don't Make You Go "Umm"

They infest the tourist centers of town like zombies in a low-budget horror flick, their faces leering with vacant eyes and grey, mildewed skin. No, not the geriatric tour groups; not even the plethora of Bhagavad Gita-toting Hare Krishna proselytizers: we mean the omnipresent fiberglass-bodied restaurant marketing pieces - the evil chefs and giant hotdogs with manic eyes and odd proportions who frighten children and attract pigeon excrement.

As the food in most of the places which feature them is dire and cheerless, perhaps these businesses really do require something with which to lure their clientele. Other downtown tourist traps try a slightly more dynamic route: the statuesque rather than the actual statue; tightly clad, nubile bints with perma-smiles, the second cousins of the Konzum-Lány.

This pallid, hunchbacked saucier haunts the edge of Vörösmarty Ter.

A whey-faced fiberglass Pincér glowers on Váci utca.

Another facial-hair gifted mannequin skulking in a doorway.

And finally, and most terrifyingly, a massive anthropomorphic phallus in a bun, lurking outside Buda's Sunny Diner, instead of in its rightful place among the other monuments to man's inhumanity to man, or at least somewhere it won't spoil our appetite. - Victoria Northrop