It's been a while...

Many apologies for the lack of updates recently; there are many things I could blame but a good reason is that perhaps I am now finally starting to feel a bit more settled so there are fewer things to write about. However I did go to Budapest last weekend so I reckon that’s probably worth a mention here.

In a word Budapest is beautiful, I’ve never really felt I could honestly say that about a city before but I really can about Budapest. Even in the grimier backstreets the architecture is still breathtaking and the numerous side streets leading to courtyards enclosed by floor upon floor of businesses and flats where so much is packed into what little space there is are wonderful. Our hostel, the ‘Activity Hostel’, was in one of these blocks and you could tell from going up the stairs that the building was old. The hostel was just one floor with two bedrooms, a kitchen and three bathrooms with the reception where the living room might have been. It was very cosy, very clean and very cheap (less than ten Euros a night!) and I’d definitely recommend it to people. We arrived quite late but by the time we went to bed we’d already booked a wine tasting and found several things that we wanted to see, definitely predicting a packed few days. I’ll probably just present the highlights here.

You can definitely say that Budapest is steeped in history and not just the recent history, which is clearly remembered by many, but also the very early history is rich. We managed to visit both the History of Budapest and the National Hungarian History museums which were very interesting, despite history not being one of my strong points. By far though I think the museums that left the biggest impression on me were the House of Terror and the Ethnography museums. The first is actually situated in the old headquarters of the secret police that operated in Hungary during the communist era. It was incredibly moving and all of the exhibitions were well thought out and engaging as well as interesting. The same could be said of the Ethnography museum which we visited in order to see the World Press Photo exhibition which was a collection of photos taken by photo journalists and submitted for judging to eventually come out with the World Press Photo of the Year. It’s definitely worth googling but with a warning that many of the pictures are disturbing. However the things it shows you about the world are simply incredible. It was definitely worth the four or so Euros that it cost us to get in.

This is another thing that struck me about Budapest, or perhaps Hungary in general, and that is how cheap everything seemed. It was definitely annoying having to divide by 300 every time I wanted to find out what the equivalent in Euros was but once you’ve done that you realise that it isn’t that many Euros after all. The market in particular was wonderfully cheap, with large pieces of cake costing the equivalent of 40 cents and bread rolls for about 10. I may be being too general but it definitely seemed like everything was a lot cheaper over there, we were definitely able to buy a lot of cake and strudel at the market that’s for sure.

The food was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me and I’m very glad that we got to try so many of the national foods. Particularly langos, a deep fried circle of dough smothered in sour cream and cheese (you could have pretty much any topping but that one is traditional apparently). We bought some from a street vendor and they were delicious. Whilst there I even had a very confused conversation with an old man which ended with him dropping a piece of paper in front of me and then leaving. We still haven’t managed to work out what it says and I have no idea what he was trying to tell me, or even for definite what language he was trying to use. Another thing we got to try was pogacsa, a type of Hungarian scone which we first tried at the wine tasting and they were warm and delicious. I was also probably far too happy about the fact that we managed to find a Tesco and I was able to buy a large bag of Tesco Value pogacsa for about one Euro fifty. I just loved the fusion of something so English with something so Hungarian. The final delicious thing I want to mention is the strudel, which although it is found in Austria and Germany I still count as a Hungarian thing as well because after all Austria and Hungary were all one country many years ago. I’d also never had strudel with cabbage or strudel with potato before and believe me both of these options are amazing. Quark is also a wonderful filling and it also formed part of the base of (in my opinion) the most delicious slice of cake out of the ten different types that we tried over the three days. I told you it was cheap cake!

So without a doubt it was a brilliant weekend and Budapest is definitely a city I could go back to. We never got to tour the parliament building for example and there were several museums and famous buildings we never saw that it would have been nice to. However I am pleased that we did manage to see such a huge amount in such a short time, even by simply wandering we happened across interesting things, like the Cave Church or the original foundations of the city by the river or the mini Christmas market.

Thus concludes this overview of our trip, I’d probably be able to write double this amount if I listed everything we did and saw but then you might get bored. I will leave you with the knowledge though that I am still alive and well over here on the continent and, despite the terrible trouble I’m having with my download limit; hope to bring you more blog soon.

Bis dann!