{"id":211,"date":"2007-03-11T11:05:28","date_gmt":"2007-03-11T11:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=211"},"modified":"2007-03-11T11:05:28","modified_gmt":"2007-03-11T11:05:28","slug":"budapest-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"Budapest Break"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s there, I guess!<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img alt=\"budapest.jpg\" id=\"image214\" src=\"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/budapest.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>To be honest, out of all the cities that we&#8217;ve visited before, this trip was so far the one we&#8217;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&#8230; Nothing!<\/p>\n<p>Which actually ended up being not a bad way to see the place.  In fact, if there are sites that we didn&#8217;t see, we don&#8217;t know about them, and so we&#8217;ll not be missing them.  And to be honest, a lot of what we did see we&#8217;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!<\/p>\n<p>So what did we do there?  A lot of walking around and taking photos, eating, drinking, and more walking&#8230;  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&#8217;t help but notice and enjoy how quiet it was.  Like really quiet!  Hardly <em>anyone<\/em> 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!<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img alt=\"castle.JPG\" id=\"image215\" src=\"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/castle.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll admit) on the Sunday. Great walking weather.<\/p>\n<p>Our recomendations for anyone else going there are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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&#8217;s raining.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re looking for a good meal, the Vegetarium restaurant on Cukor U. was great, and has a massive menu.  It&#8217;s a vege place, if you didn&#8217;t work that out yourselves&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>Use the funicular to get up the hill.  It&#8217;s fun, saves you walking, and you get to say the word &#8220;funicular&#8221;.  Not many places you can do that.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>Check the map carefully, or you may end up at the city cemetry thinking it&#8217;s a big park.  No, we didn&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>Check the excahnge rate before you go, and if possible print off a small table so you don&#8217;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&#8217;t I?!<\/li>\n<li>Grow a big Hungarian mostache.  You know you want to!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Did I mention that the cheese was really  yummy wherever we went for some reason?!<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img alt=\"funicular.JPG\" id=\"image216\" src=\"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/funicular.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s there, I guess! To be honest, out of all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coffeehouse.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}