A Day or Two Off in Budapest

When we were in Chiang Mai, Thailand earlier this year a group of us were discussing where we had been, where we were going and long term travel in general. A german guy by the name of Tim probably put it best when he said: "You have to think of it like a job. You're not working five days a week any more, now you're traveling seven days a week. Sometimes you just have to take a day off."

A day off.

After an outstanding eight day tour of Italy with my parents, as well as a two day whirlwind side trip to Napoli it was time for a break. As luck would have it the hostel scene in Budapest is quite competitive and we were getting there just at the beginning of the off-season. We booked a private room at a really nice hostel with a lot of character for less than at many of the dorm beds we had stayed in western europe. We spent the first day or so just lazying about the hostel, catching up on the internet and resting.

Not a picture of us lazing around

Hero's square

The second day consisted of organizing our train tickets to Slovenia and some general wandering around the city on foot (as we tend to do). We checked out the old Hapsburg palace (see above picture) and Hero's square where there happened to be some sort of small time military presentation going on (involving a South Korean flag). On the way back from our walk we stopped at Eco cafe and shared a brownie and smoothie.

The staff at the hostel was extremely helpful and the woman that was working the first two days of our stay recommended some hungarian dishes to try and a general idea of where we could get them. Around seven we set off for the restaurant street and had a really nice hungarian meal which was lesco for Katie (tomato, onion and green pepper dish) and goulash soup and paprika chicken for me. All of our food was really tasty and relatively cheap.

Katie's lesco

Andy's paprika chicken over noodles with obligatory sour cream

Finally on the last day we were real tourists and spent most of the day exploring the city. We took tram 2 along the river (basically a tourist tram) and walked over the bridge onto the island in the middle of the river. The island is a big park with cycling and walking paths as well as a huge fountain that dances (sort of) to various classical pieces. There was a sign that listed the songs in the order and groups that they were played but neither of us were astute enough to be able to figure out where in the list we were.

On the walk back to the hostel we stopped at Budapest's big marketplace with the intention of getting sandwich ingredients but were side tracked by langos - a traditional hungarian sweet that the hostel staff had recommended to us. The best way I can describe it is fried dough with anything and everything put on top of it. There is also a heavy focus on sour cream in hungarian food, which is a big change from no sour cream at all in western europe. We got one langos with sour cream and cheese and a second with fired bananas and nutella.

Langos

After almost finishing both langos we grabbed our bread, meat and veggies from the market and headed back to the hostel. Later in the day we took the metro across town (to the Buda side) and walked up a hill to check out the castle/tourist area. This may have been the start of some minor oh-look-another-amazing-building-and-or-castle fatigue, but there were nice views of the city nonetheless. We hoofed it back to the hostel (extremely long walk) and had some couscous and leftover lesco for dinner.

If you read all of that, congratulations! That was extremely long - on to Slovenia!