Is this the balcony, or is this your house?

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I know the feeling too well now - rushing to pack, to tie up everything you need to with uni or work or whatever, and then to make sure that you get enough spirits in your body that you get to sleep at a sensible time... but really? Yeah, this time I had a little extra detail involved in my preparation for this rather epic trip. My birthday, and the need to go and celebrate it (two days early) in Prague before I left for two and a half weeks. This meant that after a lot of beer and slivovice, I arrived home at midnight, and then for some reason only slept until 4am. I was unable to function properly from the excitement. I spent the remaining time in the nether hours preparing a list of vital phrases in Serbian, Bulgarian and Romanian.

Excitement about leaving on a trip is just weird. It's exciting before you leave, but then the flight, or in this case, that same old 3 and a half hours "zipping" down the Czech corridor from Prague to Břeclav just sucks it all out of me - especially in this case as my iPod battery was dead. Jitka joined me at Břeclav which lightened things up a bit, and two barrages of texts from Vodafone later we arrived at Keleti Pályaudvar, where we were repeatedly harassed by people offering us taxis and accommodation, welcoming us to the land of chromatic scales on amphetamines and the most estranged language in the whole of Europe.

Thankfully, we already had accommodation at a place called Maxim Hostel, which I really recommend to people, it was very cheap and we happened to have 5-bed room all to ourselves, which was removed from the rest of the hostel. I felt we were lucky in this since while I was sitting outside the main part of the hostel with my laptop to use the WiFi, a pack of six miniskirt-wearing English interrailers walked past me and took turns to look at me with screwed up faces before the last muttered to me "is this the balcony, or is this your house?", thereafter walking inside the hostel without waiting for a reply.

Not only was I bloody glad to be one floor apart from such people, the fact that we were removed from the rest of the hostel really did make us feel like we were at home. We slept long, knowing we wouldn't have so many chances to do this elsewhere on our trip, and spent the rest of the days sightseeing in a city which both of us had rejected to explore in such a way on our respective previous visits. On our first night we just explored the surrounding area of the centre and drank - we have been absolutely loving the local beer "Soproni", definitely different from Czech beer, but nonetheless delicious.

On the second day (my birthday), we first went to explore the castle area on the Buda (west) side of the river. We didn't do the castle tour, however we did see the national gallery, which was definitely worth it, three floors of Hungarian art starting with classical art (all the portraits of women looked exactly the same!) on the first floor to modern art, including that of a few names I remember with instalments at the Tate Modern, on the top floor. Above this there was a large spire with an absolutely epic natural reverb, and a viewing tower. The Pest side of the river was so flat, that nothing was blocked from sight that managed to endure the smog enshrouding the city. It was a somewhat unique skyline that we saw.

We then went onto the large park on the other side of the river on Metro line 1 (which is a UNESCO world heritage site, for reasons you just have to see it to understand), just to drink some beer and rest for a while. Our choices of food here have been rolls with processed cheese and gyros sandwiches; the Hungarian national dish (fish soup) really doesn't appeal to me much. That evening, we met up with my friend Blend (a DJ and producer, who runs a night called "GhettoBazaar" which I came to last summer - see Pics only entry from Budapest, How many pissed off, confused backpackers can you pile in to bratislava hlavná stanica?). We sat and finally drank the bottle of wine we bought from the wine tasting session I mentioned in A weekend of tasting things in Déak Ferenc Tér, which is a really good place to come to to sit and relax with drink. The only thing I recommend is to bring insect repellent! The mosquitos here are ruthless and brutal and I am currently swelling up all over. Anyway, afterwards we went for another drink in a pretty cool bar downtown, and then went for a long walk along the river and down many streets lined with bars showing the World Cup, just in time to see the absolutely epic end to the Uruguay - Ghana match (I still feel so sorry for Ghana)...

Today, we checked out of the hostel and then headed to Keleti Pályaudvar to leave our luggage, as we're leaving tonight on the 11pm train to Serbia. I want to give very strong words of warning about the left luggage in Keleti. The normal style left luggage office (with humans behind a counter) was basically closed down, and signs directed us to the self service lockers downstairs, half of which were broken and in any case, there were not nearly enough of them to satisfy a major international station like Budapest-Keleti - I'm actually pretty sure Brno hlavní nádrazí had more. We also had to buy loads of snacks to get the change we needed to use them. Luckily, we managed to take the last two tiny ones which were working.

After this confusion, we set off on our way to the communist memorial Memento Park far far on the Buda side of the river, which involved taking a lot of public transport. Aside from the left luggage at Keleti, the public transport in Budapest also baffled us a bit. The only single tickets for trams and buses which you can buy cost 320 forint (about £1.10, which is quite a lot for central/eastern europe) and allow one journey on one tram or bus or metro without interchange - meaning that even if you want to change metro line you have to buy 2 tickets. Being used to the system of a ticket lasting for x minutes where you can change however many times you want, this seemed a bit weird to us. I would advise future visitors to Budapest to be prepared to walk a lot to save money.

Anyway, this park was REALLY far, like literally situated next to a roadsign telling us we were leaving Budapest. It cost 1500 forint for admission and was pretty small, though interesting. The park was basically full of old statues and sculptures which had been placed around the city during the dictatorship, something which Prague actually lacks - we assume all the old communist statues in Czech Republic were just destroyed. It was interesting, although the free exhibition next door, about the rise and collapse of communism in Hungary, was more interesting. I had never previously realised how much of a catalyst Hungary's demonstrations against the regime had influenced the rest of the eastern bloc. The most chilling however, was a film they were showing, basically a collage of educational videos shown to the Hungarian secret police about how to search houses, how to "enlist" people, and so on... I definitely needed a beer to shake it off, which we took in a small pub in the suburbs along the bus route home, while we watched Germany massacre Argentina.

After finishing this entry we're off to eat some more gyros sandwich and drink some bottles of Soproni in a park before facing the 5 hour zombie train ride. After this, my number of countries visited will be pushed up one as we go and explore Novi Sad. I'm looking forward to being in a country where I do know the language (or one which is mutually intelligible with it) a little bit, so that I don't have to do even silly things like ask for beer in English all the time. That still annoys me. But then, the Hungarian language is just out of this world. Budapest, however, is not. I'm glad to have finally seen more of Budapest - it really is a beautiful city.

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Photos

Our hostel
The balcony, which may or may not have been our house.

Me at the castle
replying to Birthday texts

Spire in the gallery
with weird natural reverb

Metro line 1
A UNESCO world heritage site - it's difficult to explain why, but it's obvious when you go on it :)

Soudruzi
Memento park