So for St. Patty’s Day weekend, I was planning on going to Dublin for the longest time. But when I started to plan it, the plane tickets were ridiculously expensive so my friends and I started to look for some other options. First we were set on going to the Canary Islands, and then the flights for that shot up too. So randomly, my friend Kyle says “What about Budapest?” And we booked the flight within the next hour.
Nine of us went, and we were pretty nervous about the language barrier because Hungarian is a freakin weird language, but all we could do was write down a few phrases and hope people spoke English (which they did). We got into Budapest pretty late on Friday night, so we took cabs from the airport to our hostel, which was the best hostel I will probably ever stay at. It was right around the corner from the Danube River, and we could walk everywhere from there. The decorations were awesome, and people who had stayed there in the past had written on some of the walls, so there were different languages and handwritings everywhere. The guy who owned it, Andrew, must have been around 70. He was insanely nice and showed us everything we needed to know. He went out of his way to help us with everything including food recommendations for every meal. On Saturday, his daughter had a baby so he brought us in a bottle of wine and we all toasted.
On Saturday, we basically just walked around the whole city. We saw the Parliament building (which is huge), St. Stephen’s Basilica, and the synagogue. We went to a little island, and tried the typical plate of goulash for lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the river and the Parliament building. We got some drinks and snacks and sat by the river for a while, just soaking it in. It’s a really beautiful city. I didn’t really know anything about it before I went, but it’s divided into two parts- Buda and Pest. It also still seems very communistic. There’s still a Communist district and a Jewish district of Budapest, it’s weird. I had no idea that the Nazi party had such a big influence there, but the Hungarian Nazis basically did the same thing that the Germans did. There was a monument by the river- replicas of the shoes of the Jewish people that were shot into the river. It was really depressing, but beautiful. There were a few pairs of kids’ shoes, which was terrible to see. How someone could kill a child based on anything, let alone the religion that they haven’t even had a chance to explore yet, is beyond me. That night we went to what our hostel owner called the third best bar in the world. And it was really cool, and huge. But I’m not sure if that statistic is true. We just hung out, it was relaxing and a great time.
On Sunday, we woke up and went to an awesome bakery around the corner for breakfast. Then we went to the baths! Apparently Budapest is famous for its healing baths, so we had to check them out. We went to the oldest and biggest one. It was a gorgeous day, and there were three big baths outside. They were basically just like heating pools full of hairy Hungarian people in speedos. There was a whirlpool in one of them, and as we were all getting whooshed around this whirlpool, giggling and bumping into Hungarian men in a Budapest bath, one of my friends says “This is the most surreal thing that’s ever happened to me.” And that was probably the best description ever. Later we went inside to explore the indoor ones. These too were absolutely packed with people, and were basically like hot tubs with no bubbles and they smelled TERRIBLE. I think it was the chemicals or something that was supposed to be healing but they smelled like sulfur and eggs. So that was an adventure. I’m glad we experienced the baths, but they were honestly pretty gross.
After that, we went to a museum called the House of Terror, which was in a building that used to be the headquarters for the Hungarian Nazis (I think). It was very disturbing, even though most of it was in Hungarian. The basement was basically filled with torture chambers and jail cells. Pretty terrible stuff.
Even though it’s a big city, a lot was closed on Sunday so we decided to stay in that night, and we played cards and hung out. On Monday, we got up and just kind of walked around again before making our way to the airport. We flew with Ryanair, which is sketchy and doesn’t give you seating assignments, so we had to get to the airport super early to get a seat in the front of the plane so that we could make it to our bus that left 30 minutes after we landed. Somehow this HUGE Spanish family got in front of us. They were hilarious- and so typical. They were very unorganized, pissed off the people who were checking tickets, and just yelling the whole time. It was great. They got the first spots on the plane, but we pushed through the clan and made it to our bus on time.
"Hairy Hungarian people in Speedos" - too funny. Paints a picture!
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