Blogs from Buda, Budapest, Central Hungary, Hungary, Europe - page 13

Hi everyone, we have now completed another good chunk of our travels in Eastern Europe. From Bulgaria we headed straight into Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The main thing to see here was the monolithic Presidential Palace which was only completed after the dictator, Ceausescu was removed from office. This place was immense, being second only to the Pentagon in terms of the world's largest building. The streets of Bucharest reminded us of post WWII Paris, with lovely old buildings all over the place desperately in need of some repairs and a fresh coat of paint. Next we headed north into spooky Transylvania straight into the arms of a massive rain storm. We stopped initially in a small town called Sinaia, which is apparently one of the country's best ski resorts in the winter. During our ... read more

"I wanna know..Have you Ever seen the rain.." As our train pulled away from Bratislava we made our way to Budapest, It was the words of Rod Stewert's song that echoed through my head....and I truely began to wonder of that very same question looking out across the beautiful landscape, Have you ever seen the rain?....At that moment it all seemed so perfect..The sun beamed in through the window and I began to look forward to another Glorious city... Budapest, It surprised me to be honest but i don't really know how to explain that..I guess it was nothing like what i expected..Nothing like the rest of the cities we visited really. I don't know if it was mostly because of the great weather we were blessed with or what...but it semmed more of a holiday ... read more

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 ... read more

Now when you hear about guys going away on a jolly this was one of the best Jollies of them all. The Aberdeen guys left The Granite City at 02:15 to get to Edinburgh to meet the Linlithgow Boys for our 06 15 flight to London Gatwick.At Gatwick we met up with Scalesy who was working in London the day before and GP who flew in from his home in Jersey. The flight departed from Gatwick to Budapest at 09:30 and arrived in the Hungarian capital of Budapest around lunchtime where we were met by Eric our friend from Paris and our Tour guide for the trip. We were then transported from the airport to our hotel right in the heart of Budapest where we quickly showered and changed and thereafter met in the outside bar ... read more

I started planning this trip more than nine months before we left. I worked and re-worked the itinerary constantly. From the start we were certain that we wanted to visit Berlin, Prague and Budapest. It was where we would go in between that took the most consideration. Once I had a fairly concrete plan I spent nearly every night up until our departure date booking and canceling our accommodations. I was continually searching for better deals. First priority in selecting a hotel was price, followed by whether breakfast was included, with location being an afterthought. Knowing we had our own transportation allowed me to consider almost any cheap place within 30 miles of where we wanted to tour. For the final leg of our trip (Bavaria) I must’ve changed reservations 10 times for each destination. The ... read more