The Beautiful Blue Danube

Our first eastern European country! We arrived at the Budapest train station a bit after noon from Vienna after our night train debacle in Venice. The poor signage, bustling crowds, street advertisers, and a severe sleep debt made figuring out that the metro station was separate from the train station quite a confusing task. When we finally found the metro station, we got yelled at by a stocky, middle aged Hungarian woman for moving her chair 3 inches so we could see the prices for metro tickets.

Let me go off on a small tangent about this city really quick. Budapest is actually 2 cities governed as one, divided by the beautiful blue Danube river (which is actually quite a murky brown, despite what the song title may lead you to believe). Buda sits on the west of the river and is filled with rolling hills and many residences. It is also home to the castle district, which is the original city of Budapest surrounded still by castle walls. Pest (pronounced "pesht") sits on the east side and is filled with everything you'd expect from a modern, commercialized city including malls, bars, restaurants, clubs, stores, offices, etc.

Anyway, after another 40 minute exploration of the train station in an attempt to find an ATM with cash in it, we were finally able to buy our 10-pack of tickets for 2400 Forints (around $12) and were on our way to the hostel. We finally arrived after a confusing run in with a tram whose driver refused to let anyone board, followed by an obnoxiously crowded bus ride.

Budapest is an awesome city. We finally are experiencing the different type of culture and customs we have been waiting for this entire trip. Hungarian has almost no cognates ad none of us have any familiarity with the language, so communication promised to be interesting. The city also gives a vibe that's hard to put into words: I don't think "enchanting" is the right way to describe it because it certainly does not have the same feel as Amsterdam. Either way, we decided the city was awesome almost as soon as we arrived.

That evening we crossed the river to Buda and climbed a large hill to see a beautiful view of both cities from in front of a huge citadel adorned with some pretty interesting statues. It was a much longer, harder walk than we expected and we most certainly worked off the dinner from the Viking restaurant we ate at earlier.

 

 

The next afternoon, we went over to the largest Jewish synagogue in all of Europe. Seeing it after seeing all of the Catholic stuff in Rome, Vatican City, and pretty much every other city we've visited, certainly left much to be desired. The temple paled in comparison to the other places. It actually looks like a church both on the inside and out except that there are Jewish symbols adorning everything instead of crucifixes. It is also a quarter the size of the main sanctuary of my temple in Cleveland, which I think says something. Either way, it was still pretty cool to see and to feel among my own people again. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

 

After the synagogue, we found a huge fresh food market a few blocks from our hostel and were blown away by the sheer amount of food, clothing, and made-in-China souvenirs. On the top level we scored jackpot: prepared Hungarian food. We hadn't really eaten anything yet, so our delicious experiments of authentic Hungarian food proved to be an excellent, delicious beginning to our day. I had pasta with cream sauce and pineapples, a fried ball of rice and vegetables, and a sort of beef strogenoff looking dish. Afterward, Alex found a bar near all the food shops upstairs that served 6 or 7 different types of Tocaji, a sweet honey wine native to Hungary that anyone who has read The Golden Compass should recognize.

Then we took an all-day figure eight walk around the city and finished off with a ridiculously invasive yet oddly affordable 90-minute Thai aromatherapy massage (with oils I apparently have an allergy to) followed by some delicious pasta and sausage from a nearby grocery store; a wonderful treat given our annoying lack of kitchens in the last few hostels.

On our third and final day, Alex went to Monument Park while Michael and I went to the castle district. Sadly, it turned out to be super touristy and expensive. Despite that, we still managed to eat cheaply by sticking to cauldrons of goulash and potato products at a cute little cafe we found. We even found the hilariously overdone labyrinth that runs beneath the whole district and spent a good our or so on there walking around and laughing at the ridiculous levels of cheesy at every turn.

Following that we headed over to one of the biggest Hungarian baths in the city where we met up with Alex. Yes indeed: the baths. Put all QaF references aside, please. This place was ridiculous! It must have had more than 20 pools and hot tubs and the same number of saunas and steam rooms, each labeled with its temperature and where the water is from. Most of the soaking pools indoors were filled with naturally heated mineral water directly from underground thermal springs. And then there were the steam rooms. You think a hot sauna is hard to handle? Try a 60 degree Celsius room filled with more water vapor than oxygen gas. Now THAT is intense.

After drying off and shamelessly enjoying the eye candy scattered everywhere, we headed to the hostel to collect our bags and then to the train station. Luckily our night train was still running. We got a T6 sleeper compartment, so it was quite cramped. Still a lot of fun, though. We even got a decent few hours of sleep in before arriving in Krakow, Poland at 6am.

One more thing I'd like to say about Budapest: it is not cheap. Sure, it may be cheaper than Switzerland, but what isn't? The Forint may be worth 1/200 of a dollar, but essentially the prices were similar in every respect (with massages as the exception) to prices in the US; there just happens to be a different number representing those prices on the tags. Budapest is definitely not the place to go for cheap food and consumer goods.