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Published: April 15th 2009
We arrived in Budapest in the late afternoon and with the aid of a tourist leaflet from the station we embarked on the challenge of finding our hostel. We'd heard from other travelers that in Budapest the best hostel was at the top of a huge hill inside the walls of the city's former citadel. After much confusion over the bus system and a steep half hour hike we finally arrived at our hostel. The view from the top was amazing and thoroughly justified the long walk. You could see right out over the city and the citadel is situated right next to the Danube so you can see both Buda and Pest depending on which side you are on. On arrival however we found the nearest source of food was at the bottom. So after a dinner of a chocolate bar each from a nearby bar we settled down for some much needed sleep after the 2 hours we had had whilst sleeping on the train the previous night.
Waking up refreshed the next day we ventured into the town below and into Buda's famous indoor markets. We spent a considerable amount of time wandering around the stalls and
had fried dough with sour creme and cheese for lunch, a Hungarian traditional dish.
A visit to Budapest is not complete without a visit to one of Budapest's 9 thermal baths, so during the afternoon we went to the most famous of these, Gilert. It's housed in a lovely old building and each bath has statues giving out hot water into the baths. It consisted of of 2 big mixed pools and then separated gender areas with more thermal pools, saunas and steam baths as well as mineral drinking water and an ice cold dip for after the steam. So we spent a fabulously relaxing afternoon lounging around in the baths and washing away days of traveling dirt. After leaving the baths we bought our dinner and traditional Hungarian banana Polinka (fruit schnapps) and climbed back to the citadel to eat our lunch looking out over the city.
During the evening we met some English tourists who visit Budapast every year for their daughter's Cerebral Palsy treatment. They told us about a restaurant the other side of the town which for 10euros provided you with unlimited food and drink (including champagne). We vowed the following day to go in
search of the restaurant and treat ourselves to a proper hot meal!
The next day after another trip to the market we walked all the way along the river in Buda looking at all the old buildings and eventually ending up at the houses of parliament outside which there was a memorial to the people executed there when it was an execution site a couple of centuries ago. The memorial, stretching down the side of the river was lots of odd shoes on the ground. We then, following the directions of numerous helpful locals found our way to the restaurant where we settled down for an afternoon of intense eating. The restaurant was amazing and we dined on steak tartar, quails eggs, cheese board, stews, Hungarian fruit soup, grilled haloumi, a total of 24 balls of ice cream (18 of which were shared by me and Alice 😊 and unlimited champagne, beer, fruit juices and much much more. The long walk back was punctuated by a stop on Margit Island (In the Danube) where we sat on a bench and sung and James attempted to climb a tree before falling out!
Our last night was spent sat on the
top of the citadel looking out at Budapest and we all decided Budapest was one of our favorite cities so far.
Then a quick game of scrabble before bed ready for the 4 am start to our journey to Croatia the next morning.
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