Basically, this past weekend was incredible. We left for the airport at about 6am on Friday morning and arrived in the city around noon. As we were on the bus getting into the city center, my friend Taylor turned to me and said, "It has such a dilapidated beauty about it." He was completely correct. Budapest is absolutely gorgeous. There's no other way to describe it. But it's old gorgeous. It's not fancy and flowery and insane. It just is. And it's beautiful.
We managed to navigate the metro very well, if I do say so myself. Apparently the Budapest metro system is what the NYC subway system is based off of. It's insanely efficient. There are even little timers at each platform to tell you about when the next train will arrive. We got to our hostel, which was down this side street a few blocks away from the metro.
Our hostel...was amazing. Despite the fact that it was sort of hidden, the way it was set up was that there was a main hallway with a kitchen, bathrooms, and four bedrooms off of it. Each of the bedrooms were themed. We stayed in the 8-person dorm, which was the Africa room (pictured above). It had a loft with 4 beds and a bottom area with 4 and the entire room was decorated like crazy. There was also an India room for 6 people, a space room for 5 people, and a Japan room with a double bed. The best thing about this hostel? It was 13 euro a night. It's probably the cheapest hostel we'll stay at the whole trip. Not to mention the staff was SO nice, the showers were clean, it had breakfast, had free computer access/internet, and they made our beds/cleaned our room each morning.
Here's a blurry group picture taken on the stairs at the hostel. It was pretty much the entire second floor of an apartment building and we didn't have keys or anything, we just had to buzz up when we needed to be let in since there was always someone sitting at the desk to open the door for us. On the top are Andrew and Taylor, and bottom are Kendra and Nicole.
The street our hostel was on! Kendra, Andrew and I went exploring for a bit on Friday night because Taylor and Nicole wanted to do this caving expedition thing that we did not have any interest in. We walked around, found this awesome underground mall, got gelato, and then headed back to the hostel. Then? We got massages. Yup. The hostel has this deal with a masseuse where you can get an hour-long Sweedish massage for about $25. It was SO GOOD and SO RELAXING.
Afterwards, the woman working at the desk (Agnes, who was one of the co-owners) booked us dinner reservations at this crazy Hungarian restaurant a few blocks away. She kept raving about how incredible and cheap it was. It was about $18. For all you can eat. And drink. Needless to say, we took advantage of this.
Yes please.
Saturday morning we wandered into the center of the city to this gorgeous basilica because Taylor and Andrew wanted to try and get tickets for a show since they have to for their History of European Music class. This is the square it was in.
We decided to spend $20 on this bus tour that would take us all around the city. We thought it would be convenient because we could use it for a total of 24 hours and it would take us to a lot of hard-to-get-to places. We also got a coupon book with it, and I haggled the guy selling the ticket down to $20 from like $35, so it was definitely worth it.
Something else to note about Budapest is that they don't use the Euro, they use the Hungarian Forint. This is why most things we spent money on (with the exception of the meal and bus tour) were SUPER cheap. The exchange rate is wonderful. It looks really expensive though, which is sort of funny.
This is Heroes' Square, a stop on our bus tour. Kendra and Andrew took turns climbing on the statues while we all took pictures.
This is the grand synagogue in Budapest. (Photo credit to Nicole) It is apparently the second largest Jewish building in all of Europe (I don't know what the first is though). It was simply incredible. We couldn't go inside though, which was sad.
After seeing the synagogue, we took the bus all the way up to this citadel on literally the tallest cliff in Buda (the city is divided into Buda and Pest), which overlooks the entirety of Pest, and some of Buda. The view was phenomenal, and I'd be lying if I said we all didn't tear up just a little bit seeing it. Of course we had to pose to take many pictures.
Since we hadn't really spent any money on anything but the massages, bus, and hostel (we didn't even get lunch on Saturday), AND since the prices for dinner in the fancy part of town were really reasonable, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner. We went to this AMAZING restaurant called Fresco and sat outside at 9pm laughing and talking. We split two appetizers, and I ordered a drink along with my huge meal, and the total cost was $27. This meal would have cost probably about $40 for each of us if it had been in the states. And it was probably the best meal I'll have all trip.
Sunday morning we went to the House of Terror, which I thought was going to be a haunted house when I first heard its name, but in fact was this awesome museum all about the terror regimes of WWII. They had all these insanely cool Nazi and communist things displayed, and the museum itself was set up in this giant old house and was so modern and cool looking. It was definitely worth it.
After grabbing some lunch we headed towards the Danube to take advantage of a coupon we'd gotten with our tour for a free one-hour riverboat cruise. It was SO worth it. The weather was absolutely gorgeous (which didn't prevent us from freezing our asses off, but it was worth it in the end) and we saw so much of the city. From the river it is even more incredible, which I didn't think was possible. Seriously...these next two pictures don't even look real.
After we were done, we headed back to the hostel and got ready to head back to The Netherlands. We tried to go to bed early (if you consider 11 early), but I didn't end up falling asleep until around 1. We had to be up at 4:30 to catch a cab to take us to the main square to catch our bus to take us to the airport by 5, and we did with no problem. Our flight left just after 7 and we touched down back in Germany (since technically the airport is in Germany...even though it's 20 minutes away) at around 9. We got our (reserved!) cab and made it back to the castle by 9:25, ran to the dining hall to scarf down some breakfast before it closed at 9:30, and by 10am I was in my Art History class giving a presentation on the Pop Art Movement (which I totally aced, by the way).
It was a good weekend.
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