Buda & Pest

Last Friday night my flatmates and I flew out of Luton and 2 hours later (after a few serious bumps on the Easyjet flight - not fun!) we landed in Budapest. I had no real expectations of the place and wasn't really sure what it would be like, but as we took the taxi into the city it reminded me a bit of Munich and also Amsterdam (minus the canals).

We stayed in a hostel that we nicknamed the 'Psych ward' because it was old, dark and creepy and seriously reminded us of an old mental institute! The place was pitch black and almost deserted. The room itself was decent although when you lay on the beds you could literally feel each spring in the mattress. But hey, it was cheap and we were barely there the entire time...cost us something stupid like 12 Euro a night?

It was so late when we got in that most restaurants were closed so we resorted to having a Subway, taking a few night photos by the river and calling it a night. Saturday morning we woke up and wandered down the local supermarket, had a browse around and settled on some breakfast. At 11am we headed down the road to do a biking tour around Budapest which would take about 4 hours.

On the tour we saw places such as Heroes Square, Opera House, Parliament (where the was protests about the Prime Minister still going on), City Park, House of Terror (where the communists used to torture people), the Chain Bridge where we rode across the Danube River to the other side of the city (which is split in 2 - Buda & Pest). Rode up to Buda Castle where you could see the entire city.

After the tour we asked our guide for some recommendations on places to eat. As we hadn't had lunch we popped into a place she recommended and had some traditional cuisine - bean soup with pork and pasta pieces (which was really good). Chekced out some markets and went to get ready for our night out. For dinner that night we went to a place called the Blue Rose and had more Hungarian food (including a to-die-for dessert). We basically were forced to leave the restaurant though as it closed at 10pm (on a Saturday night?!) and headed to a bar/club we had seen on our tour, which had a glass roof (on top was a fountain/water feature people could look down at you from). Got ripped off on our drinks (they kept changing prices on us) so headed back to the psych ward...err hostel ;-)

Sunday morning the girls decided to go to a Hungarian mass at a gorgeous church called St. Stephen's Basilica (they're Catholics). It was a beautiful day so I went and sat down at a cafe with a hot chocolate and read some more of my book and generally waltzed around the area checking local things out. When mass was over we stayed at the cafe for breakfast (so good - French toast, omelettes etc). The best thing about Budapest is that its so cheap. 1 pound gets you about 400 Forint (their currency, they are converting to the Euro in 2012) so we had these huge breakfasts for less than 5 quid!

The afternoon saw us heading to the Széchenyi Bath, the largest thermal bath in the city. It was built in 1913 and is both outdoors and indoors. Outdoors there is a whirlpool where thet jets literally push you around the bath! Indoors there were baths of all kinds of temperatures. Went into one of the saunas which was like 90 degrees inside, then we had to walk out and plunge into a cold bath which was 16 degrees - apparently good for your circulation! Floated around and relaxed for a few hours (turned into walking prunes) and then had to head back to pick up our luggage before catching a taxi back to the airport.

Ate dinner at the airport then boarded our flight home. Missed the Green Line bus at Luton and had to wait for another 30 minutes, the bus was totally full when we finally left! Then we had to catch the night bus from Victoria home, so we got back at about 1am. Had to get up at 6am the next day for work....ergh! It was a nice relaxing (and cheap!) weekend away though.

PS: Funniest thing we saw all weekend was potatoes! They were everywhere! They have markets on the weekend and all you would see is people with carts full of potato sacks dragging them down the streets.