Budapest, up to New Years Eve
The holiday celebrations are finally winding down. Bill left on Friday morning for a long flight back to Boston and I’m ready to give my liver a much needed break.
I’ll split the blog into a few sections. This first section will cover Budepest up to New Years Eve.
Bill flew in on Wednesday the 27th of December and spent exactly 14 hours in Sofia before getting on a plane again to fly up to Budapest. We flew Wizz Air which means we left Sofia at 6am and arrived in Budapest at 6am due to the time difference. We made it to our Hostel, the Mellow Mood Central Hostel, without any problems. The hostel is located in a great location in Pest’s district V, near Deak ter. We met up with Joel, who was flying in from Germany, later in the morning. Julia was supposed to come in that afternoon but postponed her flight for two days to shop in London. Women
We hit a few museums during our stay in Budapest. Our first stop was the Dohany St. Synagogue and Museum. We signed on for a guided tour in English which was quite interesting. It was also Bill and my first time sporting a yarmulke, a requirement of entering the synagogue. The inside of the synagogue looked very much like a Catholic church. As we found out this was because it was designed by a couple Christian architects who didn’t know what a synagogue was supposed to look like. The synagogue was complete with side pulpit and pipe organ. Apparently, because of the organ, orthodox Jews don’t go to this synagogue. There was also an interesting museum attached to the synagogue talking about the plight of Jews in Hungary.
The next stop was the Hungarian Museum – a museum of Hungarian history. Here in Bulgaria, the Bulgarians don’t like to talk at all about the period they were under communist rule. Hungarians are just the opposite. They highlight this period in many of their museums, always making sure to note how the Monarchy/Fascist/Communist (depending on the year) Hungarian ruling party was rubbish.
We also hit the Terror Haz which is an interestingly designed museum about the Arrow Cross Party and the Hungarian State Security Police, both of whom used the building as their headquarters at some point in time. The Arrow Cross Party is the ultra-right wing party in Hungary that gained power starting in 1937.
Of course we also checked out the local nightlife. The first night we wandered around near Oktogon and found an interesting place called Cactus Juice. While there we ran into a group of Brits and Kiwis who were in town for the New Year. They were quite entertaining and spent most of their time trying to lift up various people in the bar. We also talked to a Hungarian who was there with her friend. Her friend didn’t know much English and wasn’t terribly social, but the one girl, Nora was quite nice and we all had a good chat with her. She invited us to her friend’s New Years Eve party, but we ended up choosing other plans on New Years.
The next night was the night of the infamous scam. Joel made a nice write-up about it so I’ll just direct you to read about here, on his page. The only thing I’ll add is that we ran into several other people in our hostel who were caught in the same scam. It wasn’t surprising considering the scam restaurant was directly across the street from the hostel. We asked why the hostel doesn’t post something noting the restaurant was a scam and they said, “we don’t want to make Hungary look bad.” Typical Eastern European mentality.
Anyway, after the scam we were still able to salvage the night by hanging out in the 24 hour bar on the top floor of the hostel. Up there we were able to find cheap beers and good conversation with some Croatians, Italians, and Brits. Bill took a fancy to one of the Croatian girls and spent a good part of the night talking to her. I found this surprising considering his opening pick-up line was, “What is your favorite farm animal.” Only Bill can open with that line and keep the attention of the woman. We stayed up in the hostel bar until around 4am, although I stayed up a bit later listening from my room to an Italian guy in the hall essentially begging for sex from some Australian girl. I don’t think he was successful because the Australian girl wouldn’t talk about anything except her ex-boyfriend who she had dated for 645 days and 4 hours – yes, that is what she said.
