He Oiled His Way Across The Floor – Greg and Mandy's Travels

If it’s Monday, it must be Hungary. But before we left Bratislava, we took one last, leisurely stroll down to the river and across the UFO bridge hoping to grab a pastry from our favourite cafe for the journey, but alas we were too early.

Walked all the way back to the train station from the Old Town. Funny how we didn’t realise how down hill it was all the way when we arrived, until we had to walk all the way back up. The train was on time – actually it was the same train we arrived on from Prague, and we even had the same seats.

Arrived in Budapest at lunchtime. Slight problem. Budapest has two main train stations, and I’d assumed we were arriving at the other one where we are going to be leaving from. Oh well. Adds to the adventure. First up was to put our Euros away and get some Forints out of the ATM. You all knew that didn’t you. The maths does your head in a bit. In Poland we had to divide by three, in Czech Rep we had to divide by 16, in Slovakia we had to add an extra half, and now we have to divide by 200 (and hope we don’t get the zeros wrong).

Worked out how the tickets worked for the Metro, and which lines we had to catch, then disappeared into the bowels of the earth. After walking a few blocks, we arrived at the Shoebox where we are staying. Our caravan is bigger. I can touch the walls on both sides of the apartment. The bedroom is a half loft, and you have to kneel, and crawl around the bedroom or you’ll hit your head. What you do to save a buck, but it’s only for one night.

Budapest is a large, busy, noisy, traffic congested city. Kind of like Sydney, but with a river not a bay. No pretence about having a small, compact historical centre to walk around. So, we decided to buy a hop-on hop-off bus ticket in the hope that we would see a bit more. Did a leg of the tour down both sides of the river, past the Castle, Parliament and Museum, principally to get our bearings for an assault tomorrow.

I didn’t really know much about Hungary, except that they have Magyar Posta on their stamps so they are unrecognisable, they had a bloodbath in the water polo pool at the Melbourne Olympics against the Russians who had just re-invaded them, and that Professor Higgins always seemed to have it in for them.

However, they are a reasonably strong country economically-wise. Territorially they have been much bigger and stronger. Entered a strategic and economic alliance with Austria for 200 years, and did very well out of it, until they were forced on to the wrong side in WWI. Then they were broken up, and they lost a lot of land. As I’ve mentioned before, Bratislava was actually their capital for a long time.

Budapest is actually two separate towns on each side of the Danube – Buda and Pest (pronounced Pecht), and the locals still refer to them as separate. The Big Mac index is AU$6.40 which is fairly cheap.

After tea, we walked all the way back down to the Danube, through the night market, and onto the night cruise down the river. It really was spectacular.