Budapest – One place. Two cities. All sorts of awesome.

Something I think I knew but had long since forgotten is that Budapest is actually 2 cities. Buda, the old town nestled in rolling hills and cliffs, dominated by the castle district looks eastward over the Danube to flat, modern Pest. Also, the name Budapest is always mispronounced. The ‘s’ sound in Hungarian is written as ‘sz’ and ‘s’ in Hungarian is pronounced ‘sh’. Hence, Budapest is pronounced ‘Budapesht’ by the locals.

Enough of the pointless facts. This place rocks. We all know how much I loved Berlin, but Budapest is cheaper, prettier, has a more temperate climate and is just as full of gorgeous women. However, English is less prevalent (I still got by with no major issues), the history is less impressive and its language is nigh on impossible to learn. Either way, Budapest is a fantastic city, and the equal of any other European capital.

We got into Budapest at around 4pm and after speaking to the tourist information office at the Keleti train station we figured out roughly where we had to go. Once we found the correct train line we were on our way on Budapest’s extremely efficient public transport system. We got off at the correct stop to be about 400m away from our hostel, Good Morning Budapest, according to Google maps. Google maps was wrong and we walked up the street for another two blocks before we decided that Ryan, Kas and Hannah would sit down at the Irish pub on the corner while I continued to look for the hostel. After walking up and down the street for another 15minutes I remembered that I had cancelled my Sunday night’s stay and would have their phone number in my phone. I got hold of Esther, the girl from the hostel and she directed me to where I had to go. As I thought I had found it she asked if I was wearing a blue t-shirt (which I was) and I looked up to see her waving from the third floor of a building with absolutely no signage. I got the other guys from the pub, which as it turns out was directly across the road and we went to Good Morning Budapest. It had hostel written in magic marker on the buzzer and that would be the only way to tell there is a hostel there. We were buzzed in and looked if a dank smelling hallway, we walked through seeing a rundown cement outdoor area filled with weeds and went up the old marble spiral staircase. At this point I was internalizing my worries at the quality of the hostel, while Hannah was vocalizing her fears that we had made a mistake. However we walked through the door to the hostel on the third floor and found a clean, new hostel with a great kitchen and free internet and wifi. Esther welcomed us, we unpacked, and sat down in Budapest, pleased with our efforts of not getting completely lost and having a nice hostel to use as our base from with to explore.

That evening we walked down to the Parliament building, which is a brilliant piece of neo gothic architecture and walked along the Danube on the Pest side down to Vorosmarty square. The city was gorgeous, bathed in the crimson sunset, the spires of the numerous cathedrals on the Buda side cutting through the orange light reflecting off the Danube and the buildings along the Pest foreshore. At Vorosmarty square we caught the Yellow metro line up to Octagon and ate a cheap fantastic meal at Kocisma Kiado. The urinal in the Kocisma had a cushion at the wall at head height, so if you were too drunk to stand up straight you could just lean your head against it while taking a piss. I don’t know about the cleanliness of such an idea, but it’s a bit of lateral thinking on their part.

The next morning we went out for breakfast, where a full English breakfast (admittedly not a huge serving) cost me about 6 Australian dollars. After that good, cheap breakfast we got the metro up to Heroes square where we took a bunch of photos and walked around the city park, finding one of the natural hot spring fed baths in Budapest and a few market stalls. After going back to our hostel to get our swimwear we got some lunch, where I had a traditional Hungarian dish made with veal, dumpling and spiced with paprika (yes, it was awesome) we went to the Baths. Two pools are fed directly from the hot springs and therefore hover at around 38’C, the pool in the middle is basically the standard temperature you would expect for a pool on a 32’ day. It was great fun at the baths, especially when we tried to create our own whirl pool and when we started messing around with the underwater camera.

At about 6:30 we made our way home and got ready to go out on the town. The Hungarian Formula 1 race was on this weekend, so there was heaps of stuff going on. We planned to hit up a few clubs on our way down to a rave that was happening on a mutherfucking boat. The guy in our hostel said he likes a place called Morrison’s 2, which did 500forint (about $3.50AUD) cocktails before 9pm. As it was 8:00 by the time we were ready, we headed down there, with instructions for Mel and Jasmine, who were staying at another hostel, to meet us there. We arrived and immediately bought 4 cocktails each. This night was going to get loose.

Mel and Jaz arrived, we drank our cocktails and headed to a bar called Godor. It is a public square in central Pest where all the train lines converge. The bar is actually under the pond and has a glass ceiling so you can look up through the water. The whole outdoor square is also full of people, drinking their alcohol either bought at local convenience stores or the removable bars set up around the square. We started talking to some English guys who are driving from London to Beijing, although, they are ditching the Land cruiser in Kazakhstan and taking a train the rest of the way.

After Godor, Mel decided to call it a night and go back to the hostel, while we set off to look for a summer bar that is set up in the university square. Unfortunately we had lost our book with the directions, and hence had to stop some people and ask them, also unfortunately, they had no idea what we were talking about, but after a few wrong turns and some crankiness, we finally found it and sat down for a drink. Hannah and Jaz sat next to a table full of Hungarian dudes and started talking to them. It all seemed in pretty good fun, but afterwards we were told that they wanted us to save them. Why is it that women don’t know that men rarely pay attention to sideways glances and innuendo? If you want something done, tell us!

After leaving Treffort, we had to make the very long trek to the motherfucking boat club, known as A38. After a long walk across a bridge, where we passed a club under the bridge on the Buda side that was absolutely banging, foolishly we decided to carry on to the boat. However, by the time we got to the boat, it was only 1:30am, but they were closing and they were not letting anyone else on. Quite a disappointment, as we’d heard numerous reports that it was a really cool club. And it did look cool. From the outside. It was, however, 1:30am on a Tuesday night, in a city that only has a slightly higher population than Perth, so I can’t be too upset.

We walked up to the nearest bridge where the tram would take us back to our hostel, only to find the trams were no longer running at 2am. A bus pulled up in front of a crowd of about 50 people outside a nearby club called Rio. We decided to jump on the bus too and see where it goes. It was going in the right direction, and if it stayed on that road it would take us within a block of our hostel, so we ran to the bus and climbed aboard with fifty inebriated Hungarians. To our great relief, the bus never turned off the main road and we were home within 10 minutes without spending a dollar on a taxi. Brilliant.

The next morning we headed out to the supermarket quite early and bought a bunch of food to cook up a big, delicious breakfast. Hannah cracked the shits that she couldn’t find pancake mix, but it was a kick ass breakfast all the same. We then headed out for the free walking tour of Budapest. It was probably the worst tour I’ve been on. One of the girls running the tour was hot and really friendly as I spent most of the time walking along talking to her. However the delivery seemed amateurish and was filled with the same info over and over again. It was unfortunate as the places we walked to such and the Buda castle at the top of the hills and St Matthias cathedral are really beautiful, and probably has heaps of interesting stories attached to them.

That night we had planned to go on the pub crawl, but we were the only people who turned up, hence it became pointless for us to pay 3500forint for a pub crawl that would be just us. The guys running the pub crawl were pretty nice and took as to the first pub anyway, which was called Instant and was in what looked to be an old apartment building. The interior ground floors was all bar and standard seating areas, where the stairs went up to rooms with lounges and chairs in smaller, dimly lit rooms. I picked up Jaz, who was running late and we then headed to another bar which the pub crawl guys said was pretty good, called Szimpla (pronounced simpla). After a few drinks at the bohemian Szimpla, which was a warehouse shells full of lounges, fuseball table and car shells altered to be seated areas and tables, we ran into Kelly, who had been at our last few stops with Busabout, but had just come from two days in Bratislava. She was on a pub crawl organized by her hostel, and they informed us of the next place they would be going which was a big club with a roof garden chillout area at the top.

We left Szimpla and Hannah decided she wanted to go back to the hostel as she was feeling sick, so we gave her directions to stay on main roads and let her walk the 5 blocks back to the hostel. We arrived at the big nightclub and went up the dimly lit rooftop bar. Jaz had some mini cards in her purse so we sat there drinking, laughing and playing bullshit for a few hours. We were all having a great time, laughing loudly and often, but we still had an inebriated Hungarian girl come and ask us if the club was so boring that we needed to play cards. We explained that this was a chillout area, and it was actually quite fun. We asked her to join us, but I don’t think she saw the allure of playing bullshit with a bunch of Aussies and a Brit at a rooftop bar in the middle of Budapest at 2am. I walked Jasmine home at the end of the night, whereas Ryan and Kas decided to go to Jolly Rogers, the local strip club. As I found out the next morning, they soon wish they hadn’t as it was a very expensive beer, and one of their more uncomfortable experiences of their holiday.

We packed up all our stuff the next day. Said goodbye to the girl at the Hostel, who’s name I can pronounce, but would have no idea how to write in English. All three of the girls that worked at Good Morning Budapest were smoking hotties, and very pleasant, even when we were ringing the bell to get let back into the hostel at four in the morning, so that’s one more pleasant memory from Hungary.

As far as Budapest goes, I will come here again. It’s everything Prague promised to be. It’s beautiful. It’s cheap. It’s not full of tourists. It is full of lovely people who are friendly and happy to help. It’s the country that initiated the fall of the iron curtain. It’s full of great bars and clubs and gorgeous girls. It’s Buda. It’s Pest. It’s awesome. It’s Budapest.