First off a warning: This is another "one week in one blog-post"-post so it will be long and at the same time be lacking in detail, but you'll just have to live with that. Eat it up or find something else to do :D
After partying and exhausting myself completely in Prague I went off to Budapest. I might upset some people saying this, but I it didn't really happen much there. Much to my satisfaction I might add. I actually didn't visit a single club while in Budapest. I most definitely needed a rest at this point.
I didn't really have a travel guide for Budapest and planned to buy one the Prague airport, but they had no such thing. They had travel guides for Reykjavik, Iceland though! So for the first day or so I was all on my own. Exciting!
First thing I notice when I get to Budapest is that I have indeed gotten a very, very good hotel, the Le Méridien. As the taxi stops outside, there are hotel staff everywhere ready to guide me in and take my luggage. 5-stars for the win!
Arriving pretty early in the day, I quickly unpacked and scoured the area around the hotel. Wow. I probably landed in some sort of luxary district, because this place is classy from end to end.
My first mission is pretty obvious: Trying to find a book-store and get a copy of Lonely Planet Budapest or something equivalent. This was definitely harder than you would think.
Wherever I've been, it has pretty much always had a strong commercialism going. Not so for Budapest: A city proud of its historical heritage which refuses to taint their building with neon-signs and big posters saying what they have to offer. Everything here is low-key, blended into the natural finish of the buildings and trying to find anything requires a keen eye.
But oh so beautiful! I was in love with this city almost at once. The lack of visual noise was very comfortable once you got used to it!
However unlike Prague, the streets actually made sense here, more or less arranged in smaller squares which was easy to navigate without getting lost or anything like that. So I ventured all over the place.
So after walking around half a day, watching lots of beautiful sights, buildings, monuments and statues, I still have left to find a single book-store. Not too happy about airliner meal I know I need some proper food, and by chance land at a restaurant called Cyrano. A restaurant with Michelin-stars no less. It was hot so I got the cold celery potato cream soup for starters and some sort of Hungarian fusion beef medalions as a main dish. Absolutely fantastic.
After this I ended up at a a café called Café de Paris. I'm honestly not at all certain how it is supposed to relate to Paris, as the menu wasn't really very French, it had a cocktail bar in the middle of outdoor serving area. Ah who cares. In that bloody heat, surrounded by planted Palms and parasols who on earth would say no to some cocktails?
So I stick around. This is café is around Vörösmarty square, which seems to be kinda touristy. It is filled with street musicians and after a while some sort of mini orchestra/ensamble fills the spot outside the café. No amps, just horns and drums, and they still play loud.
They were pretty good, so all in all, I enjoyed it up to a certain point. That certain point was when some local jazz-trio playing slow, generic jazz decided it was their live-hour at the café. They were hopelessly outdone both musically and with regard to intensity. I ended up with a hopeless jazz-trio trying to out-loud the orchestra. And I was stuck in the middle. Not good.
To help improve their situation the jazz pianist tried to pad his seat so he could sit higher up and hit his tangents louder. Needless to say, this changed very little and I left after a while.
This was most definitely a good choice. Heading back to the hotel, I notice a park not far off, the Elizabeth park. To me this looked like some sort of mini-Roskilde, with people just hanging out, having a beer in the park, having a good time and all that. Ofcourse I had to check it out.
Just like in the Parukárka park, there is bar/club her (Gödör) where you can either buy your beer in glass, plastic or even a can, and just take along wherever you feel like. So not Norway!
With Eva from Prague which should technically be in Budapest this week not responding satisfactory on the phone, this seemed like a decent way to meet new people and maybe get some local insider info.
And it was! I met lots of people in the park. Some just local, regular folks, some video producers and editors, some in general hopeless souls, some tourists: You know, a happy mix.
I also met someone who was particularly useful: Some locals named Panni and Hajnalka. For reasons I'm not going to speculate too deeply about, they didn't mind spending their time talking to some hopeless, stranded tourist, and besides introducing me to Pálinka, a Hungarian spirit, they even promised to show me around town.
I honestly didn't see much more of Panni, but Hajnalka kept her promise, and yet again introduced me to even more Pálinka. Including kosher Pálinka. It's evidently a test of manlyness down in Hungary. I passed and yay! I had a personal city-guide at my disposal :D
Ofcourse she was working daytime so I had to do some work of my own too. After some troubles I managed to find a bookstore and get a city guide. First out: Széchenyi füdör. One of the bigger baths in the north-east of the city with lots of indoor thermal baths with temperaturs ranging from 28 to 38, not to mention three huge outdoor baths as well. With the sun shining I saw no reason to stay confined inside :)
While indoor was comfy no doubt, all the fun and all the good pools was outside. And like anywhere respectable you could ofcourse order a beer or a drink by the pool-side. I had left all my stash, in my locker though, wallet included, so tough luck for me.
So there were three giant pools. One obviously meant for relaxation with very hot water. And it had a in-pool chessboard. I played one round, but the hot-water most certainly didn't help. I lost like I usually do at chess :P
The second pool was more cold, and more like your regular swimming pool.
The third one was the fun one with all gadgets included and decently hot water. It was divided into three zones. The inner zone was a circular pool with bubble-bath/jacuzzi stuff going on. Hard to get a spot, but definitely worth it.
Second zone outside this jacuzzi, again circular, had a artificial (and very powerful) stream causing it to go round and round and round. Very nice if you had nothing to do, and very popular with the kids. In fact for a short moment I ended up as some sort of floating bathing-toy rhino for some of the kids who would latch on to me and just float around and around and they seemed to have the time of their life.
The third and outer zone was just the rest of the pool with various fountains and underwater airstreams so you could get that uplifting or refreshing feeling you wanted, depending on your mood and shape.
I want a bath like this in Oslo. Sun included.
Outside the bath there was also the big City Park, with a small lake. Like in Prague, dogs seems to get a free pass here. So after a solid bath I'm sitting at some lake-side café somewhat into the lake, like some aboriginal hut, just relaxing in the shade of a parasol and observe the wildlife on the lake. The lake is filled with ducks going about what ducks usually do.
All of a sudden a dog (again, no leash) just runs into the water, heading for the biggest pack of ducks there, hoping to catch a pray. It failed miserably, and all of a sudden you had ducks flying all over. No feathers in my food or beer though :)
I met up with my trusty guide later on and she showed me around some of the more central areas. I have lots of pictures, but honestly don't remember the names of all these places, nor the details around them. We ended up at Margit sziget (Margaret Island), a island in the Danube river, dividing the city into Buda and Pest, which provided a (what I thought was) unique view of the city.
At request I pick up a Hungarian phrasebook and my first impression is that this is uhm... a "tad" more complex to get out right than Czech. Unimpressed with my phrasebook, locals are more than willing to fill it out with more "local" language, including phrases which are only OK when drunk.
For me, hardly being able to speak the language properly even when sober, the usefulness of this can be argued, but I must certainly say I appreciated the effort. Let's just say there was some amusing phrases there which I will not repeat here in the blog :P
Following this most of my days in Budapest consisted of slacking off daytime, going to cafés, enjoying the sun, shopping with some touristy stuff mixed in here and there etc etc. At least first half og the day. Second half of the day was being guided around, to cafés, restaurants and sights.
Major sights I got to see was the castle area, just on the west side of the Danube river, that is on the Buda side of the river. The castle is on the top of a hill, and hence there was quite a walk to get up there. You can ofcourse take a cab, or use other lazy means which involves money, but that would take the fun out of it.
Walking up the old road towards the castle, made entirely out of rocks, you could feel history creeping in on you slowly. Castle walls, old buildings now abandoned leaving you to wonder what they were used for in the earlier times, portals, getting a better and better view of the city and all its historical monuments, etc etc. The walk was beyond any doubt worth it. It just got you set in the right mood, slowly but surely.
When we finally got up to the castle, it was kinda late, although not very late. This meant that most tourists was probably downtown eating or doing something non-touristy, which meant I could admire the castle in its full beauty, not surrounded by a million people with cameras.
Again: The castle in Oslo is pretty daft by itself, but compared to this, it looks like it was constructed by someone who merely knew square buildings and had once seen a photo of Roman monuments. This was very spectacular. Also the view over the city from this spot was very good.
Walking around in the castle area, it was like being in another city. Low buildings all over, looking like they were constructed in the eighteen-hundreds, and left as is without anyone ever suggesting this should be renewed or modernized. Very nice. Very relaxing.
On the way back to town, there was also the Mathius church, a historically significant church, which is supposed to have some fantastic interiors due to the coloured windows. Unfortunately it was being renovated, so you couldn't really see the church in it's full glory. Also (like many other sites in the town) it was converted to a tourist-attraction, with a somewhat unreasonable entrance fee. Yeah mom, sorry: I skipped it.
The following evening it was time to visit the Citadel, south-west kinda outside the city. Only way to get here is by car, taxi or a mass-transport tourist bus. The definitively best time to go here, I was told, was at night. Then you could see the entire city light up and observe something entirely different than you did daytime. My shitty iPhone pictures does not do this justice.
Otherwise I had a very cultural stay in Budapest. Among the things I did was visit Margit sziget on my own daytime and here I discovered possibly the best way to get young children to enjoy classical music.
In the middle of the island there is a spectacular fountain. Besides being able to bath in and being spectacular on its own, what made it even better was that there was speakers somewhat discretely placed around the fountain. Speakers playing classical music. As far as I could tell, the fountain would run its show based on the intensity of the classical music in the background, so that when the music hit a peak, so would the fountain. I stayed here, dipping my feet, getting lightly showered and listening to classical music for quite a while.
I also visited the Budapest Opera. Fortunately/unfortunately (depending on your point of view) there was no show there the day I visited, but at least I got a guided tour. This place was just so grand, so spectacular, so amazingly overdone, it's hard to describe properly.
Let's just say that the chandelier in the main opera hall was made out of gold and weighted 2,1 metric tonnes all on its own. Now imagine the rest of the room.
The guide was also very good at highlighting trivial and historical things. Like how this hall had one of the best acoustics around when built in the late eighteen-hundreds, something which really didn't impress me much when it was being told. However later, when being allowed access to the spectator booths in the second floor, I was simply amazed.
There were musicians down in the orchestra area, just doing small tests for some upcoming opera performance. No amps, no speakers, no artificial amplification at all. Just the hall, just the acoustics. And I could hear everything loud and clear. Very impressive. I would have loved to see any performance here.
As for interesting historical tidbits, there was this area near the main Opera bar/café where people would settle before performances. Just nearby this area was the smokers lounge. A very small, thin, hallway passing around the bar area really. But back in the days, gentlemen smoked, so everyone who wanted to pass as a gentleman would go out here to smoke.
Apparently the air would get so thick that this was one of the few places in town where you would have guaranteed privacy, so back in the more conservative, "Victorian" days, young lovers would go here to in secret, share notes and maybe, if they were very daring, a kiss. Am I the only one finding this extremely cute? :)
As for other "cultural" activities, my hotel had its own cigar-lounge and a decent selection of cigars in a huge humidor cabinet. On a slow day, I parked by here and got me a Cohiba Sigla III (2003) and a 1991 Talisker single malt whisky. Being a 5-star hotel, they sure knew how to charge for stuff, but as I got the room at near 75% discount I could most certainly afford this.
Last day in Budapest, much like in Prague, wasn't really in the city at all, but a small excursion outside. I was taken to Siófok and the Balaton lake, some 115kms south-west of Budapest, one of the biggest lakes in Europe, with an equivalently sized beach.
What surprised me the most here was how extremely privatised the entire premises was, especially for a former Soviet occupied nation. You had beach-clubs all over, hotels all over. All with their private part of the beach, and the accompanying "guests only" signs. I was at the biggest lake in Europe, yet walled off from the bloody water.
After some fooling around, we found Coke-beach (yeah Coca-cola beach) which had a moderate fee of 500 Hungarian Forint (around 2 euros) per person entry and seemingly few complex rules. It stated that you couldn't bring alcohol, but we had already bought white wine and nobody seemed to care, in the entrance nor at the beach. In fact everyone seemed to have some sort of alcoholic drink there.
Once in, it was bathing time, and boy was I ready for this. The train out here had taken its time, once again showing that trains in Central Europe is not like trains in Norway. While it was subtly hinted that I should go to the mensroom and change, I just did the regular hide-your-stash-behind-a-towel routine. I had no time to waste!
The water was wonderful, the sand was wonderful, and you could just walk on for hours out in the water without it getting too deep. I'm pretty sure we have no beaches like this in Norway, and yes I will miss it.
On the way back home, the train didn't break down, but it was a local train, increasing travel time from two hours to three. Once again it turned out to be full daytrip.
Either way. I had lots of experiences in Budapest. Very nice, very cosy, very relaxed experiences and while some of the locals insist the city is "crap", I have to say I can definitely see why some would call this one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
I might just go here again.