Arvi ja Leah aeg reisimiseks: Buda+pest

Istanbul decided to leave us both a present, a stomach bug that lasted pretty much all our 6 nights in Budapest… But we battled through it and still managed to enjoy this beautiful city.

We arrived on St Stephan’s day, the biggest national holiday in Hungary. We didn’t realise it was a holiday until the afternoon but we managed to catch the fireworks at night.

fireworks.

old , unkept buildings

We did lots of walking around as usual and saw all the major sights such as the chain bridge connecting the Buda and Pest sides of the city, the Buda Palace and churches on the Buda side decorated with interesting tiles. We also saw Budapest’s amazing parliament building, which was under construction during our stay. It’s a pretty impressive building, more like a castle and is the second largest parliament building in Europe after London’s. During one of our walking tours we also learnt that Budapest has been the backdrop to many Hollywood movies such Die hard 4 and Munich. It has played places such as Russia, Berlin, Paris and Rome, all because it’s cheaper to film in Budapest!

Opera house

chain bridge

looking back to the Pest side

Matthias Church

Fisherman's Bastions

Matthias Church

St Stephen's Basilica

Eating out in Budapest was pretty cheap so we went out for a few meals to sample some famous dishes such as beef goulash soup and langos; a kind of fried pizza base topped with sour cream, cheese and bacon, healthy! We also browsed around the Central Market where we ate fresh blackberries, cabbage rolls and some delicious sausage and potato dish.

Hungarian sausage and potato.

Cabbage roll on more cabbage!

Central Market

The beer was also cheap so we went to check out some of Budapest’s famous ‘ruin pubs’. These are pubs built in abandon, run down buildings that were deemed unfit to live in but fit enough to drink in, go figure! These pubs look so cool inside with a collection of random things like a wall of 15 old computer screens, wires and old bikes hanging from the roof, parts of old cars everywhere and even a tree growing in the middle of one pub! We met some cool Aussies (not the annoying ‘Let’s get totally wasted everyday’ Aussies we have come across) and hung out with them a few nights.

one of the walls in the ruin bar

One day we decided to visit the thermal baths. Hungary has over 1000 natural thermal springs, some of which have been made into elaborate bathhouses. We visited a huge bathhouse with 15 indoor baths and 2 huge outdoor baths ranging in temperature from 20 - 38 degrees. Once we got over thinking of people’s germs breeding in the warm conditions we had a relaxing day moving from pool to pool of supposedly ‘healing’ water and using the many steam rooms and saunas.

nice sunny day for it.

32 degree pool

indoor baths

all shapes and sizes.

a nice 38 degrees but was a bit much for me after a few minutes!

We also had a bit of a communist day, with a visit to the House of Terror in the morning followed up with a walking tour about communist times in Budapest during Soviet occupation. The House of Terror is a memorial in a corner building where interrogations, torturing and killing took place during the two communist regimes. We both thought the museum was very well done, in a modern way while still respecting the past. We liked the fact that there were so many videos of personal experiences, most of which had English captions. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any photos. On our walking tour that afternoon we learnt what life was like living in Budapest during the communist times, how travel was limited and blue jeans became a symbol of status and a highly sought after trading item. Our guide had some interesting stories from his childhood when he helped his father smuggle in luxury items back from Vienna during their trips to visit family, bribing the train guards with coffee.

Imre Nagy Monument

On our last full day in Budapest, we visited some nearby Sunday markets and a fresh produce market held in one of the ruin bars where we tried homemade dips and chutneys.