Buda and Pest

The weekend of the 24th was our first “free” weekend in over a month so I decided to take advantage of Wizz Air’s low cost flight service to Budapest, Hungary. The flight left at 5:45am on Friday morning and returned at 2am Monday morning so I got a full weekend in Budapest. I stayed in a nice hostel close to the Danube in Pest.

Background: Budapest is actually 3 cities that over time merged together. In the late 19th century the government officially joined them together as one city. Buda and Old Buda are on the west side of the Danube. Pest is on the east side. About 2/3rds of the population live in Pest.

I came to the conclusion that Hungarians are big drinkers. I arrived at the hostel at 7:30am (the flight from Sofia to Budapest is only 1 hour) and checked in, but wouldn’t be able to get into the room until 10am so I wandered off to get some breakfast at a café recommended by the hostel. On the way to the café I passed by a couple establishments where the clients we all drinking beer. Odd for 7:30am. I figured maybe they just hadn’t stopped from the night before, but the trend continued. Even in the café, half the clients were drinking a beer. They were also smoking like chimneys so I continued on to find a cafe with less smoking. I checked in and squeezed in a quick nap (we had been up for nearly 7 hours already due to the early flight time). That afternoon I walked over to Buda and walked around the Buda Royal Palace – and old palace on a hill overlooking the city and the Danube.

Since my only eastern European experience thus far had been Sofia, I sort of figured most eastern European cities (with the exception of Prague) would look like Sofia. Not true. Budapest was beautiful. The buildings were well maintained, the parks manicured, no dog poop on the sidewalks, no cars parked on the sidewalks. Basically Budapest made Sofia look like a dump. All that comes at a price though, most everything I paid for in Budapest cost the same as it would have in the US. That was a bit depressing (given my volunteer salary). The saving grace was that their currency is Forints which requires some calculation to equate it to dollar – meaning you could just pretend everything cost cents on the dollar. I think was really made a difference was the Danube. Having a large river flowing through a city makes a huge difference. Sofia doesn’t have a river (well, the locals say they do, but it’s more of a floodwater drainage trench with trash in it).

From the castle you can see the Hungarian Parliament which looks as though it was modeled after the British Parliament – very grand.

My next exploration of Budapest was a tour of Monument Park. This is where a large number of old communist statues from around Hungary have been collected and put on display. It is outside of the city so I splurged for the full tour/bus/English-speaking guide (remember, cents on the dollar). There were only 6 of us on the tour – 3 Brits, a Canadian and us. Our guide was around 6’4”, 250 lbs. and talked louder than anyone I have ever heard in my life – and he liked to talk, a lot. I started the tour asking lots of questions, but the answers always went on far beyond the actual information I was looking for and tended to repeat. Interspersed about every other sentence was the line “you know”. Some people say “ummm” when they pause. This guy preferred, “you know”. The combination of this with megaphone level volumes kept questions down to only the burning ones. We paid for the guided tour, but I’m sure everyone at Monument Park could easily hear everything he was saying. I had to stand about 15 ft. away from him just to protect our hearing. At the park I was expecting a bunch of monuments strewn about in a park, but they have been set up and arranged for the tourists. After the tour of the park our tour included an “authentic communist apartment.” Well, not really, but it did have authentic communist era furnishings and we saw some old passport documents which were interesting. It also included a free taste testing of some Hungarian brandy (or something). It was good whatever it was.

I also went to one of the (many) public bath houses in the city. I went to the Szechenzyi Baths which are located in City Park. City Park is at the end of Andrassy St., a beautiful tree lined street, which connects the center of Pest to the city park. The baths were huge with multiple pools, each of different temperatures. There was also a wet and dry sauna. I spent a couple hours there before walking back to down via Andrassy St. to district V (Budapest is separated into districts designated by roman numerals – I stayed in district V, which is made up of most of the riverfront land in central Pest.

Other activities included just walking around enjoying some of the architecture. There are some impressive churches, the Chain Bridge (connecting Buda and Pest) and Margit Island. The latter is a island in the Danube which you can get to via a bridge. The island is pretty big – if you were to run around the edge it would probably be a few km. In fact they have put in a professional running surface around the edge of the island for runners. There are some ruins of an old monastery there (although I’m starting to get a little tired of old monasteries), an old church, a couple bath houses, a soccer field, botanical garden and probably more we didn’t see. We rented bikes at the entrance and biked around the island for a couple hours.

Three days in Budapest wasn’t really enough – there are still things I would like to see, but it’s only an hour away so I’ll probably get back at some point.

Share on Facebook