Hay Budapest Festival 2013: Day Two Well, my grandfather was the last king of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I see. Being a Habsburg might no longer come with a large part of Europe to rule, but it still gets you a table at the newest restaurant in town, a superior steak place called Prime (the name was a hit with the mathematician in our group Marcus du Sautoy). Conversation veered from the sociological implications of Ryanair ("It flattens the class system. You are all equally miserable, and equally powerless to do something about it.") to pony racing and the beauty of In Our Time. After dinner there was a party at Brody Studios, a new artists" studio-cum-members" club in a stylishly dilapidated old townhouse. In London you'd have to pay a designer millions to achieve the effect. Here, the architecture (not to mention a certain amount of wear and tear) comes as standard. Saturday morning came with blue skies and a trip to the flea market, a 20-minute taxi ride out of town. If the night before had shown hip contemporary Budapest, the market evoked older British stereotypes about the region. Tall piles of discarded watches gleamed in the sun. Naff porcelain, eerie taxidermy and Nazi knives lay jumbled on trestle tables underneath rows of bad leather jackets. Glimpses of Hungary past and present provided good context for the first talk of the day: the French architect Odile Decq. Charismatic and dressed wholly in black (including lipstick: "the colour is an addiction," she explained), she gave a history of her own career before digressing onto architecture more generally. She spoke eloquently about the dilemma of wanting to see more women in architecture. When I started in France it was seven per cent, and now it's thirty. So there has been progress. But it's difficult, because while I want to encourage women I equally don't want to be respected because I'm a woman. I don't want quotas. Perhaps Decq's best-known work is the MACRO museum of contemporary art, in Rome. From the outside, the new glass and steel walls fit elegantly around the existing facade. Inside it is daringly bold, with different levels and walkways jutting out around the interior, in reds and blacks as well as the usual museum white. "It's important not to have just one way to pass through," she explained. There must be many routes, and many points of view. Certainly there is no shortage of those around here.