A Fish On Ice

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I am writing this a month or so after the actual day, so again you'll have to excuse me on the vagueness of my details.

I remember waking up massively dehydrated and struggling to figure out why until Rob pointed out that we had tried about fifty bottles of wines less than twelve hours earlier. Being as organised as we always are we didn't have any bottled water only apple juice, so I guzzled that before I could even begin to function properly.

We hadn't seen anything of the castle up at Buda other than the entrance gate so we decided to go up and see it properly. Again it was a very cold and windy day so we were battered by the wind once we were exposed to it at the top. People were rushing past the open areas into places that were sheltered by the castle walls. I was rather cold and wanted to hurry around the grounds but no, Rob wanted to take pictures of every boring thing he could find. If we hadn't seen enough Roman Ruins to last us a life time, he then decided to take a picture of the old castle foundations that were under excavation. Dull. The castle itself holds a museum and art galleries etc but we had no interest in visiting them so we just had a walk around the courtyard instead. Amusingly all the fountains in the grounds seem to have been painted in a green that runs when wet, so the fountains look like they have been graffitied.

We did walk out onto the city walls but it really was too windy and cold to stay for long. Just as we were returning to the relative protection of the sheltered streets, it started to snow. Not full on Sarajevo snow, but nice light fluffy snow like you see landing on people in the movies. We nipped along the inner streets and then visited the Fishermans Bastion to see what it is like during the day time. It is pretty much the same as night except lighter and there are more people attempting to get money out of you. It was so cold that hanging in some of the archways were little icicles which amused me immensely.


I can't remember when or where we ate but I am sure that we did. We caught the metro to the central market which we had been told to visit. We think that we are spoilt when it comes to markets after being in Riga and Istanbul and now we don't appreciate the mediocre markets. We did have a mooch around and looked at the various lethal alcoholic potions that were on sale. Rob actually bought the tiniest bottle of Unicum for his friends present though I doubt whether even that small amount will ever be entirely consumed. It is foul. We walked around the tackier parts of the upper market which sold souveniers and lace etc and took a few obligatory pictures.

When we left the market it was snowing properly and so we hopped on a metro back to the hostel. I can't remember for sure what we did this evening but I think we watched two films and cooked ourselves pasta at the hostel. The films we watched were Alpha Dog which was attrocious and Resident Evil 2 which wasn't terrible. At a guess we probably stayed up fairly late sorting out blogs etc and uploading millions of pictures.

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