When the days start getting a bit longer, and the temperature starts to rise a bit, we think about travelling a bit to break out of the winter blues. This time it was a weekend break to Budapest. Why Budapest? No real reason, except that it’s there, I guess!
To be honest, out of all the cities that we’ve visited before, this trip was so far the one we’ve been least prepared for. We had no maps, no guide book, no memories of any friends telling us of things to see, no time on the internet beforehand to have a look… Nothing!
Which actually ended up being not a bad way to see the place. In fact, if there are sites that we didn’t see, we don’t know about them, and so we’ll not be missing them. And to be honest, a lot of what we did see we’ve really got not much of a clue what it was as the map got a bit tatty in places, and there is even less hope of trying to remember anything like the spelling to be able to look it up!
So what did we do there? A lot of walking around and taking photos, eating, drinking, and more walking… That sums it up really, I think! And our overall impressions of the place? A really nice town. Made even nicer by noticing all the time how clean the city was in general, especially the really cute metro stations. And we couldn’t help but notice and enjoy how quiet it was. Like really quiet! Hardly anyone around on both days. All we had to do was wait 5 minutes once or twice until a bus tour left the vicinity, and then we felt pretty much like we had the place to ourselves. Superb!
Everyone seemes to think that it should have been really cold too, but it was about 10-14C both days, with a bit of rain that we sat out in a pub on Saturday, but lots of sunshine (with a bit of Wellington type wind thrown in, I’ll admit) on the Sunday. Great walking weather.
Our recomendations for anyone else going there are:
- Write things down on a map as you find them! Things seemed to have a habit of not being anywhere near where you think they are, and the streets can all look the same when it’s raining.
- If you’re looking for a good meal, the Vegetarium restaurant on Cukor U. was great, and has a massive menu. It’s a vege place, if you didn’t work that out yourselves…
- Up on the castle hill is a great little cafe/winebar/restaurant called Miro. Good, cheap wine (great Pinot Noir), and we loved the cheese platter so much we had it 2 days in a row.
- Use the funicular to get up the hill. It’s fun, saves you walking, and you get to say the word “funicular”. Not many places you can do that.
- Have a beer in what must be about the smallest bar in the world. Pub Sorozo, again up the hill by the castle. All you can fit inside is about 8 people around 2 tables, and 4 standing at the side. But a great little place. Friendly barman who kept bringing over bits of cheese and really nice pumpkin seeds etc.
- Check the map carefully, or you may end up at the city cemetry thinking it’s a big park. No, we didn’t do that, but it was pretty close! The wee crosses all over it on the map should maybe have been a bit of a giveaway, but we were walking while reading the map most of the time.
- Check the excahnge rate before you go, and if possible print off a small table so you don’t get as confused as we did trying to translate from the Forint, through the Euro, to Pounds, and it gets pretty boring pretty quickly! I did mention that we were pretty unprepared this trip, didn’t I?!
- Grow a big Hungarian mostache. You know you want to!
Did I mention that the cheese was really yummy wherever we went for some reason?!
