After our overnight train we arrived in Budapest at 8am, tired, but ready to see the city. Our first introduction to Hungary came when we tried to take money out of the ATM to find that our options were limited to amounts ranging from 10,000 to 100,000....200 Hungarian Fornitz is equal to 1 U.S Dollar. So carrying around a few thousand in your pocket is really nothing...The smallest bill is 500...100 and 200 are coins, going all the way down to 10 fornitz coin, which is equal to about half a penny. We easily found our hostel since the Pest side of the river (where almost everything is besides the castle) is set up like Paris, with two main avenues running pparallel and two that run perpendicular.
We set off and went to the Terror museum, a museum showing the history of the Nazi's and Communism in Hungary.It is in the building that the Nazi's and then the Communist actually used as their headquarters, complete with the actual dungeon in the basement. It was really interesting to see the history of all the countries we were visiting and understand what the people had endured in there past. As our Hungarian tour guide put it, "Hungary was once great and huge, then we chose the wrong side in WW1, then again in WW2, then the communist came to liberate us, then they stayed for 40 years just to make sure we really were liberated."
After the museum we walked even further down the road and saw Hero's square and found the Turkish bath house. Budapest has a ton of mineral and thermal springs so when the Turks came they built bath houses everywhere. This place was like a palace, huge and ornate. It was about 18 euro to get in, and having no swimsuits we went in our bra and underwear. There were about 18 indoor hot tubs of varying degrees from very warm to freezing, a lap pool filled with old Hungarians doing aerobics, and about 6 saunas. All that would of been enough to make us happy since it was in an amazing environment, but then we went outside and our minds were blown. It was the largest hot tub (with natural mineral water) I have ever seen. Probably 400 meters long and filled with statues and fountains shooting water jets. There were even bubbles people would stand on (it made water go in places water shouldn't) and a whirl pool! It was like being a princess!
After becoming total prunes in the bath we hunted down a restaurant we had read about in our travel book. It was described as a small intimate place where the women just serves you whatever she is making in her kitchen. That was no exaggeration, the meal was wonderful, a sauerkraut sausage paprika thing, everything had paprika, apparently it is the spice of Hungary. We literally were sitting in someones basement though and the only other people in there were the old men friends of the family who were singing and dancing the whole time. We did met two Hungarian high school students there who took us to a bar after dinner. It was in the old Jewish ghetto and was an apartment building that had been abandoned and since turned into a bar. It was the coolest thing, a crumbling building filled with artwork and random Christmas lights, you could tell what used to be the bathroom and kitchen, all now filled with mismatched couches, graffiti and d.j's.
The next day we joined another free walking tour and saw the major sites of the city, including the castle on the Buda side of the river and the Parliament building; which is almost an exact replica of the one in London but one meter longer. Our guide told us all about life in Hungary and explained how in many ways it is still very much stuck in a communist mind set. All the people seem slightly run down and tired, as do the buildings. Some amazing Victorian buildings were just completely deserted and slowly falling apart. About every fourth shop was vacant and some amazing mosaics and statues were just left in doorways, slowly being destroyed.
After the tour we walked around the castle a little more, climbed up a very high hill to see a statue and a view of Budapest, and then found the market where we bought some paprika. After that we decided to class it up a bit and went to the Opera house. It was only 2 euro for tickets to see the ballet and enjoy the pretty much all gold interior. The ballet was Gone with the Wind, very random but it was enjoyable despite the fact I had no idea what was going on. The weirdest part was that at the Opera house I ran into someone I knew from high school! She was studying abroad in Vienna and was on a school trip, talk about a small world.
Our last morning in Budapest we went to the Synagogue (which was restored after the war by Jamie Lee Curtis's father) and then walked back to the train station to set off for Prague.
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