the wanderlogue

The trip came about on a whim. Because of cheap flights and a few days off and several coworkers that had raved about the drunken shenanigans that took place in a certain Hungarian city. I was game, as I usually am, but when traveling to an Eastern European country that has only escaped (wrong word choice?) communism in the last two decades, my expectations were low and my concerns for health and safety were relatively high. Perhaps that’s my own naivety (or blatant ignorance) but no matter, I had clearly not given Budapest due credit.

{travel snacks}

Let me start by saying that Budapest is beautiful and clean and filled with gorgeous architecture. There is an abundance of modern stores and restaurants, Zara, H&M, Bang & Olufsen…Hard Rock Café, TGIFridays, Burger King and McDonalds. Now we were not there for shopping and we were certainly not there to eat at a McDonalds (Although I wouldn’t put it pass me).
We had roughly 36 hours to explore Budapest and we wanted to make the most of it. At the Munich airport we ran into our coworker Joe, who was planning on traveling to Budapest alone because he hadn’t found anyone to go with. How our paths hadn’t crossed until this point, I will never know. But Joe joined our group (Mal, Liz and I) and we’re so glad he did.
Budapest is two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube River. Our hostel was located in the Jewish section on the Pest side of the city and it was perfect. The hostel was called 11th Hour Cinema Hostel and the whole space was decorated with movie posters and characters. Now originally, there were suppose to be five of us in a private room but two people backed out and the awesome, helpful, friendly staff told us no problem, they would drop us to a three person private. Needless to say we were shocked when she checked us into a private room with a kitchenette, bathroom and seven beds! Holy amazing!

{hostel artwork}

That night we met up with Mal’s friend Maggie, who works as an English language teacher in the city. She took us to a local restaurant for a dinner of Hungarian goulash and beer. Afterwards we headed to a bar that was built into the ruins of an old apartment building. I must take one minute to say that the bars in Budapest are incredible! Many of them are built into ruins of other buildings and they are often a mismatch of tables, chairs, lamps and other knick knacks. This particular bar had both indoor/outdoor spaces and several bars setup. We sat outside, chatted and sipped on beer and Palinka, a Hungarian fruit brandy with a 50% or higher alcohol content.

The next morning we met Joe at 9a outside of our hostel. Okay, that’s a falsehood. We planned to meet Joe outside our hostel at 9a, however he met us inside our hostel at 9:05 and found us sipping coffee and reading TimeOut Budapest magazine. We finished our java and headed to the Great Market.
The Great Market is a daily farmers/flea market that takes place in a building that looks similar to a train station. The ground floor is all the meats, cheeses, produce and spices (mainly paprika). The second floor is food stands, a restaurant and kitschy souvenir shops. For breakfast we decided to try Langos, a Hungarian snack that consists of a Frisbee sized disc of fried dough covered in sweet or savory toppings. Liz and I went with sweet, Nutella with almond slivers and powdered sugar, and Mal and Joe went for savory, ham and cheese with sour cream. This was a pretty defining moment in our trip, first, there’s a certain closeness that comes from seeing someone devour an entire Frisbee of fried dough with their fingers (I believe Joe said I looked like a pterodactyl). Second, after a serious case of self-inflicted gut rock you don’t feel particularly photogenic, so after that morning we pretty much stuck with scenery photos.

After breakfast we headed to the meeting spot for the free walking tour we had heard about through our hostel. It took 2 ½ hours, was highly informative and is highly recommended by me. The walking tour gave us our bearings in a new city, it checked off a handful of sites from our long list, (which is helpful in a time crunch), and it also answered random questions we didn’t even know we had.
Some interesting tidbits:
--When Budapest was still under Communist rule the parliament building had some sort of statue-esq portion on top that made it a little taller than the church. But when the last Soviet Union occupier left in 1991 the statue was removed to symbolize that Parliament and the church were now equal.
--In the last month the Prime Minister elected a new president because they discovered the previous president had plagiarized 90% of their dissertation.
--Although Hungary is part of the EU, they do not qualify to be on the Euro so they use the Forian. Our walking tour guide said that it would probably be at least one hundred years before they would ever be on the euro, if at all, because much like Greece, their economy is collapsing and it would be too risky for them to be converted to the Euro.

After the tour we grabbed a bite of pizza and beer at this underground, pub-style restaurant and then headed towards the house of terror. The House of Terror is a museum that covers the soviet occupation of Hungary, the rise of communism and the effects of Hitler’s deportation plan on Hungary. The basement of the building actually served as a prison during WWII. It was fascinating, depressing and suffocating. The top floors were sauna hot and went a little overkill on the sensory stimulation. Everything was in Hungarian so each room had a printed paper with English explanations of what was going on and what everything said. By the basement we had a handful of 20+ papers explaining everything in the museum and we were sufficiently depressed and sweating buckets. The basement was hands down the most depressing because it wasn’t a re-creation of what the prisoners went through, but actually where people were tortured to the point of death. There were gas chambers, rooms the size of a refrigerator meant to hold 3-4 people and a room with a noose.

We left the house of terror and headed towards the baths. On the way we dropped into a convenience store for a Hungarian treat that tastes sort of like a citrus cheesecake filling dipped in dark chocolate.

The baths were incredible. The building was enormous and yellow with three outdoor pools, two saunas, a steam room, two cold indoor pools, two indoor room temp pools and one indoor hot pool.
After a fairly humiliating moment involving myself and a strapless bikini top, we decided, first things first and grabbed expensive glasses of cheap wine. We started with the outdoor warm pool and from there moved indoors. Joe and I went into a 90 degree Celsius sauna (194 degrees Fahrenheit). The first time we went in I thought I was going to die so we left and jumped in the cold water pool, which sent me into a glorious dizzy spell. Once that went away we tried again (I know, I know) and the second time we stuck it out for five minutes (which believe me, feels like an eternity) and then soaked in freezing cold water for even longer. Amidst this madness we met two guys from Canada, one of whom was a cook that told us if we spent more than 20 minutes in the 194 degree sauna our organs would begin to cook. The other was visiting family in Budapest and he told us that his grandfather had been kept prisoner for six months in the House of Terror, and that his father was one of the 200,000 revolutionists that ended up fleeing Hungary. After another glass of (terrible, terrible) wine we journeyed into the other warm outdoor pool because it had what appeared to be, a lazy river. It was not in fact a lazy river but rather a crazy current that sent you spinning through a spiral shaped section in the middle of the pool. We laughed hysterically and circled around a few times before making our escape and retreating to the hot pool once more.

{heroes square-on our way to the baths)

After that it was go time. We were already well behind schedule so we caught a cab to the hostel and quickly readied ourselves for the rest of the evening (mind you at this point it was 10pm). Once on the streets we grabbed a quick (standing) bite to eat at a Gyro stand on the corner and made our way to popular bar Szimpla.
Side note: In Hungarian if there is an S by itself it’s pronounced with a SH sound, BUDAPESH. However, if the S is accompanied by a Z it is pronounced with a normal S sound. So Szimpla is pronounced like Simpla.

MOVING ON…I wish with all my heart and soul that I could have gotten better photographs. That I could have remotely captured the awesomeness that is Szimpla. However, it was too dimly lit and I was too distracted by the shots and the beers and the American boy who was very excitedly giving us detailed instructions on what to see and do and eat while in Florence (which we mentioned we’d be doing with our parents in a week). The main section of the building had no rooftop. There was a handful of bars and two levels and random nooks and crannies stuffed with mismatched couches and old bathtubs that had been converted into love seats. There were crazy lamps and loud music and the air was filled with Hungarian words and hookah smoke. We stayed for a couple drinks and then for some (stupid, stupid) reason decided to move on to another bar. I suppose we were just hoping to see as much of Budapest as possible, to take in all the sites but no matter we got greedy and didn’t properly appreciate the greatness of our surroundings. And so we moved on, only to be met with great disappointment.
The first bar was nearly empty and the next was filled with snooty Americans sipping overpriced martinis. We settled on purchasing copious amounts of junk food at a 24 hour convenience store and giggled the whole walk back to the hostel. It was a giddy, euphoric drunk we felt, which is strangely better than the real thing.

{only picture from Szimpla}

Sleep came quickly once we settled in to the hostel but 7a came even more quickly. We enjoyed, and I mean thoroughly enjoyed, another breakfast of Langos and coffee at the Great Market, but this time we hung out and perused the shops. Circling and circling because each time another few had opened their doors, or rather their curtains. I pretty instantly settled on the most offensive souvenir I could find, a tin camping cup with the words Communism: It’s A Party printed on it.

Postcards, paprika, fabric hearts and coffee mugs were also purchased and then we made our way back to the hostel so we could check out and bid our farewells. We arrived at our gate 2 hours early so we sampled Palinka at the duty free and spent the last of our Forians on Burger King and. In the end it was an absolutely perfect whirlwind of a trip. And I cannot wait to go back.