We arrived in Budapest in decent form excited to explore a new city. Vienna was beautiful but we heard Budapest might be a little more our speed. We had a lucky find on the hostel we booked, and while it wasn't as communal as most hostels we've seen it happened to be almost right in the city.
We showed up at the Sleepy Snail on the earlier side of mid afternoon Sunday, anxious to start exploring. After chatting a bit with our hostel host and getting a map with a decent laydown of the area, we were off to our first stop of the day. On a recommendation we walked over to a nearby street for what we thought was going yo be a food festival of sorts. And it was, but either something was lost in translation or we just didn't know how to participate, in either case no random food for us. Bummer.
We were happy to keep doing some wandering. So we did. And lucky for us our wandering feet found us tacos! We were thrilled. They were decent. By this point it is getting towards early dark so we decided we could use a beer or two and see what the night brings us. We went to a recommended spot with a few bars surrounding a big open courtyard. We were just finishing our second beer and it was getting towards ten o clock. I tried to stifle a yawn but it was obvious we were both tired. Unwilling to just roll over and call it quits we put it in the hands of fate. We flipped a coin. Heads we have one more beer, tails we go home.
It was heads as you probably guessed. And then suddenly it was 5 am, the intervening hours mostly a blur. The late night crowd poured in, everything started picking up the pace a little bit. We ended up chatting with an older man for a while, he was there visiting his daughter who decided she was done with him for the night. We kept him company for a bit before he called it a night. Then we spent a couple hours drinking with a couple nice french guys (one of whom we met back up with in Split). By this point its pretty late, and we're talking to a couple Indian guys that are in from London. They really wanted McDonald's and we decided we could help them get there.
We did our best but it had just closed or something and we ended up sitting at a pizza shop with them determined to meet them again in London (which I don't think we'll have the money for at this point) but they were really nice guys. This is when we noticed it was 5 am and we were way past bedtime. We trudged home and needless to say didn't get a lot done the following day.
The following day was our true recovery day. We still didn't really get a lot done but we managed to go to the north side of the city to hang out/lounge/tan/swim at a pool. We thought we would be able to swim in the Danube like in Vienna bit we couldn't seem to find anything to verify this. But no problem the pool was cheap and cold and the weather was really really hot, so it was welcome.
The day after we recovered we finally got walking around more of the town just checking random sites. Doing your basic tourist walk around town. We intended to catch the sunset but were a little late getting moving as we misunderstood how far it was to the site we wanted to watch it from. We ended up turning around to go find some food to eat and settled on some pasta at an easy enough place on the tourist strip just to keep from having to look too hard.
The next day we planned well for our sunset excursion. After enjoying the biggest part of the day walking around, we stopped by a shop to gather supplies. Feta, wine, some olives, crackers bread and brie oh my. We had a sunset picnic ready to go! We hiked up a trail to The Citadel, one of the highest points in the city near the Old Town and proceeded to find a shady grassy spot to watch the sun go down and read. We had about an hour to kill.
Unfortunately for us, right when the sun was getting close the stupid clouds started moving in. We didn't actually get to see the sunset, which was a Bummer, but we had a good time waiting for it and that was important. This was our last night in Budapest so we didn't want to go home just yet. Instead we went to a craft beer bar we had been hoping to get to all week, and finally did. Nothing too fancy but they had twenty craft beers on tap and that was a rare treat. We missed drinking good beer!
We only had a few and then decided to call it a night. Well we now know how much we don't like to travel hungover. And the next day we were off to Croatia. It was during one of those lazy days that we decided we needed a break from going going going, and since Croatia is out of the Schengen we figured we'd pick a beautiful area and stay for a month. Because ya know, why the hell not!?
Until next time
