Budapest

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Budapest is a wonderful city, but geographically its pretty big, especially when your triying search for hostels with 20kg of luggage on your back. They seem to be hidden off the main streets in elusive alley ways and unless you're face to face with the sign you wont see them. Even with maps and directions they are hard to find. After about an hour of hiking yesterday I finally found myself a hostel near the nyugati train station in Pest and although I could tell that the atmosphere wasnt going to be that great i didnt care because I was not going back out into that jungle to search for another one. The hostel was on the corner of a busy street, the staff were helpful but not all that pleasant and they physical layout of the hostel was poor (no common room, walking through one person's room to get to yours) but Ive had a surprisingly good time here. I guess the fellow backpackers made it. After the 3 or 4 hour train ride and 2 or so hours of getting into the city and finding accomodation I was ready for an early dinner and then bed. However, and so often is the case, when you plan an early night in you meet someone and it ends up being an incredibly late night. I met an amazing Brazilian girl call Renata. She was having trouble entering the security pin to open one of the doors so I helped her out and the conversation didnt stop till after midnight. So much for my early night! That was yesterday, today I decided to go and check out Pest (for those of you who dont know, budapest is divided into two older cities with Buda on the west side of the danube river and pest on the east. Buda is a mountainous region with castles and the more wealthy residents while pest is almost completely flat with most of the cbd occupying the area, however pest also has the majority of tourist sights/monument/etc). After walking around following a map to all the sights of pest the sun was getting a little too much for me. So I decided to do as the locals do and went to one of the famous hungarian thermal spas. The water here is accessed from a couple of 1250m wells (in springs) and the temperature of the water is around 75 degrees when it reaches the top (they have these everywhere around budapest). Obviously they cool it down before pumping it into the pools and spas. Ive never seen such a large pool with such amazingly warm water, it was over 30 degrees for sure but I didnt pack my thermometer unfortunately. I wasted a good 3 hours in the pool/spa and by that time it is time for dinner and bed (finally I get an early night).

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