Budapest

sight see by day, party by night

12.08.2012 - 16.08.2012 30 °C
View Sun siberia and snow on awowchuk's travel map.

I write this as I sit exhausted in the top bunk of a tiny sleeper carriage on the train crossing the border between Hungary and the Ukraine and changing the trains wheels for a few hours late in the night. I was Hungary for 4 days and it was fantastic!
I caught the 9 hour day train from Ljubljana to Budapest. I got comfortable and spent the first 2 hours watching the Slovenian landscape go by before falling asleep. Half an hour later I was awoken as everyone was to get off the train and get on some buses. I had no idea what was happening or why but the buses took everyone about 20 minutes down the road to another station where we all got back on the train. We were on this one for another 2 hours before we all got off again and changed onto another train at the station. This train finally took me the rest of the way, through the large plains of northern slovenia and Hungary to Budapest.
At the train station, I was slightly confused for a while, struggling to work out how to get on the metro to go to my hostel. Eventually after 20 minutes of ambling around I found it and made my way into downtown Budapest. I was gutted though because as soon as I entered the metro I saw I had just missed Budapest's and one of Europe's largest festivals Sziget. oh well.
After checking in to my hostel, Tiger Tim's and getting some food and beers I then joined the drinking games and the pub crawl that the hostel does every night. The bars of Budapest are very cool as lots of them are "ruin pubs" These funky bars set up in old apartment buildings and courtyards, but filled with fantasticly random design and decoration. They are all different sizes and some have a great mix of dance areas and bar areas. (Plus the drinks are really cheap!) I had such a good time with a whole bunch of randoms from all over the world. I was finally, excluding the guy running the hostel, the only aussie.
The next morning I got myself up pretty early and headed out to see Budapest. I walked around the parliament building which was unfortunately half in scaffolding, then over the river and one of the famous bridges to the Buda side, but decided to quickly head back over to the larger and more interesting Pest side. I walked through the downtown shopping areas through to the Jewish synagogue. It was absolutely beautiful inside. I've never been in a synagogue before, and was fascinated with the architecture of it. It feels so much like a church, brick on the outside and a timber structure on the inside and obviously filled with jewish icons and imagery. It also had a very poignant garden remembering the thousands of Hungarian Jews who lost their lives during WW2.
After I continued my walking and headed through the Jewish quarter and then onto one of the main squares in Budapest and St Stephen's basilica. It reminded me very much of a small Vatican, although the colours inside were dominated by burgundy and gold and it had very dim lighting levels which heightened the spiritual atmosphere. I then got to continue my tradition of climbing church domes and towers to see the view of Budapest. It was 302 steps to the top and so cool to see the space between the internal dome and external cladding. The view was pretty amazing. Budapest stretches for miles!
I then headed back to the hostel, via the Budapest Opera house which was swarming so heavily with tourists that I couldn't be bothered to look properly, so I could get my swimmers and head to one of the towns famous natural bath houses, Szchenyi baths. It took ages to walk there and then there were so many people trying to get in, but thankfully because I prebooked my ticket I just walked straight on in. The complex was huge, with 16 pools in total ranging from super cold to 38 degrees, and lots of sauna's of all different temperatures. There were 3 massive outdoor pools, 2 hot and 1 cold filled with people. 1 of them even had a whirlpool in it. There were also lots of people sunbaking in the space around the pool. Inside the pools were much smaller, and I spent quite a while going between them, although typical me, I only went in the hotter ones. Except for the occasional splashing from people, it was incredibly relaxing and my knees and feet greatly appreciated it.
Back in the hostel I cooked myself dinner of pasta (it was my dinner for the next 3 nights) and then had some drinks with people in the hostel before heading out. We only headed to one pub as it was a monday night but it was cool. It was an underground maze of vaulted rooms with bars, dancing, seating areas. The place is ridiculous as you pay 500 forint entry (which is $2.50) and then proceed to get 3 pints of beer. The only downside of Budapest (and frankly all of eastern europe) is that you can smoke inside and in a place like this, with no ventilation you really notice it.
I didn't manage to get up quite as early the next day, but when I did, I then headed to the House of Terrors. A musuem remembering the Nazi and then Soviet occupation of Hungary. The museum had great exhibition design with lots of great graphics and multi-media display but there was no english so you couldn't really understand what was going on, but saying that you did get a pretty good sense that Hungary and its people really got screwed over for a long time. The cells and gallows in the basement were pretty horrifying. Next I walked over the Buda side. It is much hillier and I had to go up and down quite a few hills to see all the sights. I visited St Mathius church which had a multi-coloured tiled roof and also saw the Fisherman's bastion which was this beautiful stone wall and pavilion like structure that hung onto the edge of the hill with great views back over the Pest side. I then walked back down and up the next higher hill. It is a park with Liberty statue looking out over Pest. After taking in the view for quite a while I ambled down and went back over to the Pest side and went to the Central Markets. This 1920's grand hall had a main floor filled with fruit and veg, salami's and stalls selling paprika and other spices and then a lower level selling deer meat and seafood and an upper floor selling tacky souvenirs and food stalls. I was starving after walking around all day so I decided on getting something which I later found out is a very hungarian thing called Langos. It is a deep fried pizza dough topped traditionally with sour cream and cheese and garlic sauce. I had this one, but there are a huge array of toppings both sweet and sour you can have. It was like a heart attack on a plate. 3 bites in and I was kind of regretting this, but I did eat the whole thing, but I had to take most of the cheese off. It was intense. I had wanted to take the metro back over to my hostel but instead decided I needed to burn off the gazillion calories I had just consumed so I walked for an hour slowly back to my hostel.
I was so buggered but I still headed out that night, we started at a tiny uninteresting little bar before moving onto a mexican canteen styled outdoor courtyard bar then finally ending up in a huge ruin bar called Instant. It was a whole building with a maze of different types of rooms and bars and fantastic interior design, slightly oddball but so interesting. This was such a cool bar, I just wish I had been a little less tired.
On wednesday I decided to do a little day trip 1.5hr north of Budapest to a place called Visegrad, famous as it used to be the capital of the area in the medieval times and now it has castle ruins on the hill top over looking the danube and surrounding valley. No one from the hostel had been so I had to work it all out on the go. After heading to the wrong bus station, I eventually got the bus up there but then had no idea when to get off, there was no bus announcement, I had no map, the town when I eventually got off the bus had no signage as to where to go, but with an older Israeli couple who were also just as confused as I was, we just started to walk up as we could see the ruins. It was a long steep dirt path (that once again I conquered in thongs) to get up the top. First I went to a tiny little tower at the highest point on the hill where you had 360 degrees around the area and could see many bends of the Danube and all the little towns along it and then to the castle ruins 800m down the road. The ruins were fairly average, with a terrible wax work exhibition about the medieval time in the castle, but the view, perched on the edge of the hill was stunning and definitely worth the effort. After sitting up there for quite a while I headed back down to the town via a shorter steeper track and finally got karma for wearing thongs while hiking and stacked it, grazing my knee in the process. It's not a very bad one but proved to be really annoying the next day. Once I got into the town I went and had a late lunch of a Hungarian soup (a broth with beef, potatoes and carrots) at a restaurant on the riverside watching the punt go back and forth across the Danube. I was buggered by the time I eventually got back into Budapest and couldn't wait to have a shower and get a bit of rest before heading out again for my last night in Budapest. Tonight we went back to two of the bars I had already been to, which was fun and then headed to a club somewhere in Pest. Not my favourite but still pretty cool.
I had an early start on my last day in Budapest as I decided to go caving. The hostel had posters for it and 3 others from the hostel were going so why not go too. It took an hour to get there and then we got suited up in big tough overalls and helmets and then headed into the cave. The cave network was 30km long and mainly formed of limestone millions of years ago and was about 10 degrees but had ridiculously high humidity. We entered in, headed down a ladder and then spent the next 2.5 hours crawling, wriggling, sliding, climbing and walking through this amazing place. The first point where we had to get down onto our hands and knees and then stomachs and worm our way through was quite nerve racking for me. My heart was going through the roof. Plus I couldn't put any pressure on my grazed knee so it was slightly difficult crawling on one knee. I was second last out of 12 for most of the time and it was nerve racking watching all these people enter these cracks and holes in front of you. It took probably 20 more minutes for me to be properly enjoying this crazy experience. We headed down 50m into the cave before making our way back up through caves and tunnels with names like wedgie and birthing canal and big rooms like the cathedral and the theatre. On our way back towards the entrance 6 people spent 10 minutes going through the cave in pitch darkness. I just couldn't bring myself to do this so instead the other 6 of us went through and then waited in a bigger room in the dark for 15 minutes for the others to come through. Being in absolute darkness is sooo weird and such a strange sensory experience. Your eyes just cannot adjust and so start to imagine they can see things. It was quite a strange relief to see such a simple thing as daylight, and to be able to stand up properly.
It was so nice to finally have a shower after getting back to the hostel. I felt like clay and dirt had seeped into all my skin. I didn't really get any down time as I was booking accommodation, getting food for my long train trip and packing before leaving the hostel and heading to the train station for my 16 hour train to Lviv, Ukraine.

At St Stephans basilica