Back to Budapest

Terror House - Budapest

I did the stupidest thing I've done in years today...I left my glasses in Tokaj.

Not kidding.  We got to the train station, and after several exchanges with the ticket lady (Who spoke ONLY Hungarian) we learned that the bus taking us to our train was an hour late.  Then, when we got to the station, we found that our train was an additional 30 minutes late.  Yet it wasn't until we were halfway to Budapest on the train that I realized my glasses were still in our hotel room in Tokaj!  By then it was too late to turn around and retrieve them.

Luckily, our hostel host in Budapest is very nice.  He called the hotel for us and requested that my glasses be sent to Budapest.  For some reason metal can't be shipped in the Hungarian post from Tokaj, but it can from Budapest.  My glasses should be in Budapest on Monday or Tuesday, at which point the guy here will forward them to Bled, Slovenija, where we will be from August 16th through the 19th.  We may have to modify our travel schedule depending on shipment, just so I can retrieve them.  Hopefully this won't negatively impact our travel schedule too much.  But there are worse places to be stuck for an extra day than Bled.  I still can't believe I left my glasses!  Eleven years of wearing glasses and never once have I left them anywhere until today...and at the most inopportune time ever.  Hopefully this will be sorted out promptly.

We're back in Budapest.  Today we checked out the Terror House which documents the massacre and torture of Hungarians during the World Wars and Soviet control.  It was really intense.  That's really all I can say.  The museum was VERY well done, but intense is the only word that adequately describes the atrocities that it depicts.

Tomorrow we leave for Ljubljana and Slovenia.  Thank God!  Nothing against Hungary.  It's been amazing and beautiful, and while I feel like we haven't adequately explored the country, we've had a patch of bad luck since we entered the border.  In addition to the metro-police fiasco of our first day, Kati got sick later that day.  We headed off her tonsil problems only for her to get a head-cold.  Then, once that started to clear up, her knee started hurting.  Then, she got sunburned in Miskolc.  Then we had travel problems in both Miskolc and Tokaj, and finally, I left my glasses in Tokaj!  It's a beautiful country and hopefully we will be able to spend some more time here in the future, but I hope that our departure to Slovenija will leave our bad luck and travel difficulties here and the rest of our trip will run smoothly.  I'm crazy-excited to be heading back to Slovenija again.

Our train trip to Ljubljana is over nine hours long.  We leave at 12:00 in the afternoon and should get in around 9:30 at night.  Luckily, I know the city and we're staying in a hostel with 24-hour reception that I've stayed at before.  Despite the strange hours, getting there should be relatively easy.  A day on the train will also give our legs a much needed rest after this past week.  See you in Slovenija!

Exploring Budapest

Yesterday was our first "real" day in Hungary.  We spent it taking in the sights that Budapest has to offer.  I was crazy-excited about checking out the city seeing as the Hungarian Parliament is one of my favorite buildings in the entire world.  Our plan was to wake up early and take the city by storm and that's exactly what we did.

Luckily, we snagged tickets to the Parliament tour early in the morning before the line got too long.  The way they run the sale of these tickets is absurd.  There's a big "buffer" of chains and fences around the Parliament but you have to go inside to buy tickets.  The problem is that in order to go inside to buy tickets, a guard has to let you in and he refuses to let in more than 1 (or 2 people max) at the same time.  So he lets you in, you walk all the way to the Parliament, buy your ticket, then walk all the way out, and when you cross his little chain gate, he lets the next person in.  By the time our tour time rolled around (11:45) the line was absolutely ridiculous.  Yet the building was stunning inside!

Between buying our tickets and our tour time, we decided to try and check out a few other sights.  The Basilica of St. Steven was pretty neat.  It holds Hungary's holiest religious relic: the mummified hand of St. Steven, the first king of Hungary.  It's a pretty morbid exhibit, but neat nonetheless.  Our next stop was at the Museum of Ethnography.  It was here that we learned our first unfortunate lesson about Hungarians--apparently they have a strong aversion to work.  We never got to see the Ethnography Museum (or later the Terror House) because for some inexplicable reason about 50% of the tourist attractions are closed on Monday!  Not only that, through my research I found that in the off-season, a lot of tourist attractions are closed on both Monday and Tuesday!  I wish I had a job that I didn't have to work Monday or Tuesday and that I didn't have to start until 9 or 10 every other day.  Hopefully we'll get to see all of the closed places when we come back on Saturday.

The rest of the day was spent seeing all of the other sights.  We toured the Opera House, which was beautiful.  Apparently it has the third-best acoustics in the world...of course the first is La Scala in Milan, and let me tell you, they really are that good in there!  We also stopped by the Castle, which is really bizarre.  It was made for some sort of fair held in Budapest and the architect sought to showcase every Hungarian style, so he included Classical, Baroque, and Gothic buildings in the same complex.  It was supposed to have been torn down right after the fair, but everybody loved it so they kept it around.  The complex is neat, but so stylistically disjointed that it's kind of crazy.

I do have to say, the highlight of my day (and I'm confident Kati would agree) was the Royal Wine Cellar.  This place is tucked away in a corner street and you would never find it unless you knew it was there.  It's located where the wine cellar for the Royal Palace used to be and they have a "museum" and do tastings of Hungarian wines.  The museum was interesting in that it was situated in all of the old cellar tunnels which was really cool, and while it was neat to learn about all of the wine regions in Hungary, overall I found the museum lacking in substance.  Luckily, we didn't pay for the museum...because we bought the top-flight wine tasting.  It was totally worth it!  We tasted six Hungarian wines: 2 whites, 1 rose, 2 reds, and 1 tokaj azsu (dessert wine).  They were hands-down, some of the best wines I've had in a long time and our sommelier was fantastic.  We were definitely on the same wavelength because he brought out everything I'd wanted to taste.  The first white was a Sauvignon Blanc followed by a very unique Hungarian white called Jukfurt.  Then we had a dry Pinot Noir rose followed by a red wine from Eger (Not Bull's Blood) and a very spicy red wine from the southern part of the country.  The Tokaj wine was out of this world.  It's one of the best wines made in the region, but we'll be there in a few days so I won't belabor it's glory now.  When we told our sommelier that we were going to Tokaj this week to taste wines he even went out of his way to find the addresses for two vineyards he specially recommended.  It was so much fun!

We finished off the night with dinner on Castle Hill before calling it quits for the evening.  The morning held another day-trip to Esztergom, home of the largest church in Hungary.

Szar Napom Van!

Fisherman's Bastion on Castle Hill in Buda

Over the course of our Czech adventures, we never had a downright horrible day.  Sometimes our plans derailed a little bit or there was our day of rain in Karlovy Vary, but never a day that made me want to scream.  Then we arrived in Hungary.

The train from Prague to Hungary took just under 7 hours.  I was really worried about catching it because we were running late, but everything worked out fine.  First half of the trip went off without incident.  Then in Brno, Germany these 10 English kids that had just "completed University" got on the train.  Nine of them were easily the most obnoxious people we've run into in our travels.  Their plan was clearly to get drunk, loud and obnoxious the whole way to Budapest.  It really was our lucky day because they were partying in the cabin right next to ours and we could hear every word that they said.  We felt really bad for the tenth English guy because he sat in our cabin and just looked unhappy with the rest of them and the whole situation.  Not only did he clearly not want to partake in the festivities, he had to guide all of his drunk friends around Budapest that night.  I don't know why Americans have such a bad reputation in Europe when the English are just as bad, if not worse--because they're in Europe in greater numbers and more often.  Yet if obnoxious Brits was the only problem with our day, I could have managed.

The real trouble started when we boarded the metro.  Using my trusty guidebook, I purchased us each "short" tickets.  My guidebook assured me that the short ticket was valid for 30 minutes as long as you don't transfer trains (Which we weren't).  There was a more expensive ticket, actually called a transfer ticket, which neither my guidebook, nor myself thought we needed.  I couldn't have been more wrong.  We took the M2 five stops from the train station to our hostel.  Upon surfacing in Batthyany ter, we were confronted by the HEV ticket patrol.  With their unwarranted level of intensity, they might as well have been the Allamedelmi Osztaly (The Hungarian Secret Police).  They took our tickets and immediately ushered us over to the side and started spouting off way too much Hungarian for either of us to follow.  I tried to explain to them that I had asked the ticket man what ticket we needed and he gave us these short-term tickets.  They pointed me to some fine print on the back of the tickets that stated they were only good for three stops...we had gone five.  We apologized profusely, but it was to no avail.  We were "spot fined" 6,000 forints each for being in violation.  It's a good thing I had just stopped at an ATM because if you can't pay the spot fine, you have to pay 12,000 forints per violation.  Needless to say, I was pissed.  Not only did I have to shell out almost $65 for our two violations, it used up so much of my cash that I didn't have nearly enough to pay the hostel and had to withdraw money from the ATM again, not 15 minutes after my first withdrawal!

Still fuming from the metro incident, we made it to the hostel.  Our hostel was cheap as dirt (<$10/night) and we definitely got what we paid for.  It's essentially Hungarian college dorms.  It was upon our arrival that I was told the hostel would not accept credit cards.  We threw our backpacks in a locker in our soon-to-be room and struck out to find an ATM.  Upon our triumphant return to the hostel, loaded with 10,000 forint notes, we paid and then went to open the door to our room.  It was locked.  There was no key.  Each room only has one key and someone else in our room, against strict orders from the hostel staff, took the key out on the city with them.  Our packs were locked up and we couldn't get to our beds.  We said, "No problem, we'll just go out and get some dinner."  After dinner, we returned to the hostel only to find that the room was still locked.  With increasing frustration we climbed up a nearby staircase to the top of Castle Hill to waste some time.  We saw the beautiful Matthias Church, took in views of the Danube from the Fisherman's Bastion, and went on an unsuccessful search for a sidewalk shop that would sell me a bottle of water.

We walked back down the hill about an hour and a half later with low spirits and lower hopes that our room would be open.  I was sure the two guys that took the key had left for the night and we would be without anything for the entire evening.  So much for our restful night of relaxing and planning our next steps.  Luckily, our room was unlocked and we discovered it was two bloody English pricks that stole the key for the last almost four hours.  Relieved to have our stuff and our beds, we retired for the night.

In hopes of not ending a post on such a negative note, the Parliament building is absolutely stunning and we're very excited about touring the city tomorrow.  Hopefully we've gotten all of our bad luck for Hungary out of the way and the rest of the trip will run smoothly.