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Old, old Budapest
the buildings near our hostel Sarah wants me to note that I was the one who came up with the title for this blog.
Before we start our next chapter, we'd like to mention that this entry was originally supposed to be part of our Poland blog. However, since our last entry was getting too long, we decided to do this one separately. It will be quite short, as we didn't have much time to explore all that Budapest has to offer.
Before we start, there is one more thing we'd like to add to our Polish experience that we think you should know about.
When we arrived in Poland Sarah had made it her mission to eat her bodyweight in perogies. So, most times when we were looking for restaurants, we were always on the lookout for "dumplings" or "perogie rusky". Perogie rusky is the only "vegetarian" option they had for perogies, other than the dessert kind.
One night, we went out for a bowl of delicious beet-root soup and a plate of perogie rusky. At this particular restaurant, for a complimentary appetizer, they bring you a plate of bread and a bowl of lard. We had to call the
waiter over a second time to confirm that it was in fact a bowl of fat.
After the bread and soup (without the pig fat), we were both quite excited for our first plate of perogies in Poland. When they arrived, they looked even better than we could have imagined. Handmade perogies with, seemingly, fried onions sprinkled on top. I was the first to dig in, only to realize that the "onions" were not onions at all. They were chunks of pig fat. I quickly warned Sarah before she had an "onion" as well, and we called the waiter over.
At first, he argued with us telling us that it says on the menu how they cook them. We showed him that he was wrong, and we simply asked to have a new plate without pig fat. He said that he would replace the perogies with a new plate in a few moments.
While he was off doing whatever, I suggested we poke them with our forks, just in case he decides to give them right back to us. When they arrived the second time, we were both quite shocked to see our same perogies, fork holes
House of Terror
Picking Stalin's nose. Take that communism! and all, but no chunks of pig fat. And Sarah had somehow lost a perogie in the process.
Needless to say, we called the waiter over again. His defence was that "I took them and washed them off. There is no pig fat now." We told him we would rather just pay for our soup and be on our way, which he wasn't too pleased about. He then left to talk to his manager to figure things out.
All in all, the manager ended up apologizing and getting us a new plate of perogies. He also ended up serving us for the rest of the meal, as the waiter glared us down.
We had several similar occurences when it came to ordering perogies in Poland. Apparently their definition of "vegetarian" includes pork, or at least pork fat.
Now, back to where we left off...
We arrived in Budapest the following morning, and were pleased to find out that the hostel received our email in time, and was able to fill the beds.
Since we now had less time in Budapest than originally planned, we didn't get to see all that we had
House of Terror
A tank and the faces of the victims of Hungarian Nazi and Soviet rule hoped for. Some of the sights we did manage to see were the House of Terror - a museum dedicated to the Nazi and Soviet rule of Hungary, Heroes Square, Castle Hill, and an extremely rare and amazing vegetarian restaurant.
Hungarians absolutely love their pork and pork fat (like the Polish), so we were very excited to find this diamond in the rough! *Little known fact: Hungarians eat on average 1lb of lard a week*
We had intended on spending our last day in Budapest going caving, visiting the naturally heated thermal baths, seeing the second largest synagogue in the world and taking the night train to Prague. However, once we realized that our Eurail timetable book was wrong, we quickly had to change our plans.
The train we had intended on taking was supposed to arrive in Prague at 6:22AM, or so our book said at least. Fortunately, we double checked the train information online, and realized that it would arrive at 3:22AM. If we had arrived that early, we would have had nowhere to go. We wouldn't be able to check into our hostel until 2:00PM, so, we decided to take a day train instead,
getting us there at around 9:30PM.
Our new train was scheduled to leave at 1:10PM, approximately three hours from the point we decided to change trains.
We managed to fit in a quick trip to the nearby thermal baths before heading to the train station. Once again, we arrived at the station only moments before it was scheduled to leave. The train that we were currently on was destined for Vienna, Austria, where we would have to switch trains to go to Prague.
While sitting on the train, thinking we finally had everything in order, I decided to double check our plans. I then realized that our train arrived in Vienna at a different station than our connecting train going to Prague. We would have 45 minutes to figure out how to get to the other station, and find our next train.
We pulled it off with time to spare, and made it to Prague later that night.
Up next, after a brief commercial break. . . The Prague Blog.
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