Budapest!

So we departed on our trip to Budapest and the bus ride was 6 hours. During the trip we watched about four movies from the nineties which really take you back, by the way. We also got free hot chocolate, coffee or tea on the ride. We got to Budapest, and we decided that we are going to check out one of the two hostels that we looked up. It was called Mandala. So we get to the metro station and were looking at all the ticket booths and they only take coins. Jack and I have zero cash on us, so we started to look for a ATM. It probably took us a good 20 minutes to find one in this huge metro station. But when we took out money it only gave us the amount in one bill. So we bought some water and got change back. We ended up getting our tickets finally got on the metro. We quickly found the hostel after getting off at our stop on the pest side of budapest. We buzzed in and they told us to come to the second level. It was a really cute little place with about 17 beds. The owners were 21 years old and were amazingly responsible and great hosts. The hostel was beautifully kept and clean. We slept in a room they called the zen room. We settled in and decided we needed to grab some food because we were starving. We went to the owners and asked where good food was. “you in the mood for a good burger?” we said yes and he pointed us down the road to a pub that had American style burgers. ( The ground beef in Europe IS definitely different than the kind in the states and not in a good way). So we make our way there and order some drinks. We looked at the menu and there was no burgers… just pork knuckle and salads, true Hungarian food. So Jack decided to try the pork knuckle soup and I got the greek salad. To our surprise, the food was great. Then we walked down to the river that separates the buda side and the pest side. It was a beautiful view of the city. We made our way back to the hostel and got to know some of the people staying there. We actually met one girl who lives in Vancouver, goes to SFU, exchanging to Prague and she was visiting Budapest the same weekend! CRAZINESS!!! We also met Amaar, our buddy from England. We hung with them for awhile and then went to bed.

The next morning they served breakfast at the hostel so we had some toast and jam and hit the road. We decided to do everything on foot since the tram and metro were a bit expensive. The forecast said it was going to be heavy rain all day. We walked from the pest side to the buda side where most of the sights were. The fog was super thick and could hardly see the water from the bridge. It was beautiful though. So we went to Gellert hill, which was more like a mountain to me. It was a steep incline walk and long, but beautiful and cool which was a plus. We got to the top but you couldn’t see the view, which was the number one reason to check it out. Anyways, we started to walk down. Jack has been quite the amazing GPS however this time the GPS must have been out of batteries because he decided to take us down a different way. We kept going and looking for street names. We figured they were small streets and that they just weren’t on the map. Finally we got to a main road and looked really hard on the map. Instead of being on the Northeast side of Buda we were on the southwest side… needless to say this was a looonng detour. However on our 2 and a half hour detour we got to see the residential side of buda which was pretty cool.
Sidenote: This was a Friday and it was actually a holiday: 1956 Uprising Memorial Day which commemorate the people up rise against the soviet union. This day in the past couple of years has been kind of dangerous with riots and whatnot by the people versus their current parliamentary government.
So we finally get to the castle, which was our second destination. It was absolutely gorgeous up there. The weather had completely cleared up and it was almost a bluebird day by 2 pm. You could see across of the pest side and we heard these chants in the distance. We saw this huge parade of about 300 people marching towards the parliament…. It was nice that it was so far away. We checked out the fisherman’s bastion which is this sand castle looking thing. We also saw the castle, the history museum and church. We were both getting tired so we headed back to pest. We met up with Amaar for dinner and grabbed some gyros or donnair kebab as amaar liked to call them. I hung with amaar for the rest of the night while Jack went out to grab some drinks with another guy from the hostel. He said it was this crazy underground bar that had like 7 rooms and was fun. We all ended the night at a reasonable hour and went to bed.
On Saturday we had our bus leave at 415 pm so we decided to hit up the Turkish baths before we left ( especially after our 6 hour rendezvous in buda). It cost 3100 forints which is equivalent to 15 dollars. We went in and realized we had no towels and no extra money to rent them , so we went without (with bathing suits of course). There were outdoor baths and indoor. The outdoor baths were huge and so warm and nice. We went to the indoor baths and every bath had a different temperature and feature. There were about 40 baths in total. We even went into a sauna that was 60-80 degrees Celsius. Jack lasted about 13 second and I lasted about 50. It was ridiculous in there. Anyways, it was wonderfully relaxing. We went back to the hostel and hung until we had to catch our bus. About 10 minutes before we left, one of the neighbors in the building brought over a Hungarian soup for the owners. The owner, Nicholas said we should try some. It was amazing. It was a cauliflower soup with a vegetable base. It was so delicious, and it was a great way for us to end our journey. We said by to Amaar and our buddies and went back to Prague. It was a great trip.