I like Streudel

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Budapest is an interesting city.
It actually is two towns one named pest and one named buda that were on different sides of the Danube river.. and eventually they joined together to make one town... hense.. Budapest. Of the two areas, I think Pest is probably the nicer part. It has the central downtown core with all the nice little squares and the nice old buildings and such, and is a little livelier than Buda seemed to be.

The hotel that my mum and I stayed at was not bad. It was on the Buda side, but it was right near castle hill, and basically inches away from the metro station, when we were too lazy to walk anywhere. There was only one problem with it, and that was at the restaurant in the hotel. We were a little bit tired from travel the first night and decided to just have a simple dinner downstairs.. Unfortunately, when we sat down, tiny little red bugs seemed to be popping up all over the place, which completely turned us off. But! I must admit some good did come of that, because after refusing to eat at the restaurant, the front desk staff recomended a restaurant to go to, which turned out to be a really good find. It was relatively well priced, the service was good, and they had live music playing that was just the right volume.. it had great ambiance and the food was really good!

My impression of the city is that it has the opportunity to be beautiful. With all the old architecture, and cobble stone streets, it definitely has the potential to be a very picture perfect town. The thing is, that all this pretty-ness seems to be hidden under an inch of graffiti and dirt. Now I admit that some grafiti is amazing and it is an art, but alot of this stuff was random tagging, and really just didnt look good.

We basically saw most of the city int he 4 days taht we were there. Went to the museum, which I DO NOT recomend, because it really has no information and alot of the information is in Hungarian.. Went up Castle Hill, and saw everything we could up there, went to the Opera House, walked the main streets, etc etc etc.

The one thing taht EVERYONE was RAVING about were the Baths. Everyone said that we should go to the baths, that they were amazing and soo relaxing.. And so we decided taht we would save our last day to go there and relax the entire day. We... were... disapointed. There really was nothing extremely special about the baths. Varying degrees of temperature, lots of naked women.. lots of creepy staring men.. it wasn't great. I wasnt relaxed, and we ended up leaving after about an hour and a half. I'm not exactly sure why everyone was so impressed by them. One thought is that, it wasn't that big of a deal since we lived in Malaysia for so long, and we are used to warm pools and going to private clubs which have all the saunas and steam rooms. Maybe that's it.

I do have to say, that in general, Hungarians are extremely friendly, and do try to speak English. It was nice going somewhere that people were actually really nice to tourists.

Anyway, I am in Slovenia now, and heading out for the day! Update soon!

mylis

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Comments

[Darien]

Agreed
I agree with you regarding the beauty and filth. When I was there, we had to play "Dodge the dog poop" on the side walks.