Budapest

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. I love Buda & Pest. They are lovely towns connected and divided by the Danube river. I completely understand why there is such a large expat community in Budapest. The fantastic architecture, the thriving pub scene, the good weather, the great metro system, & the baths. Oh, the baths!

My trip originated as a vague impulse to go to Budapest and try out the different thermal bath houses. Then, in my research, I discovered how close Vienna and Bratislava are to Budapest and I decided to try those as well. Austria was lovely, Slovakia not-so-much, but Hungary is fantastic.

As you may recall, I cut short my trip in Slovakia (because of it sucking so much) and went to Budapest a day early. Actually, I feel certain that The Slovakian region was saying to itself, "Go, flee, we got rid of your ancestors almost 400 years ago! Don't come back!" My maternal grandfather's family was originally from outside Prague back when it was still Bohemia. Anyhoo, I have rarely been so happy to leave a country or so certain that I will not be back.

Maybe it was only the contrast or maybe Budapest really is one of the best cities ever. My mission was to visit as many of the thermal baths as possible. After dropping my stuff off at Carpe Noctem (the all-time best hostel - I love Susie & Ian!), I headed off to women-only day at Kiraly. This is a 500 year old Turkish bathhouse. When I say women-only, I mean because we were nekkid! It was fantastic. I was floating in a pool of hot mineral water, looking up at a 500 year old dome. I had momentary blips of time-displacement, imagining that I was different people in different phases of the baths' history.

After my soak, steam & sauna, & walked along the river on the Buda side. I stopped for a very strange tofu burger, then crossed over the Chain Bridge before continuing my amble on the Pest side of the river. I stopped again to watch a gorgeous sunset before heading back to the hostel for a rowdy night of partying. Well, everyone else was rowdy. I enjoyed their excitement.

The next day I went to visit St. Istvan's Basilica to see the famous incorruptible hand of St. Stephen. Yuck! I also climbed the stairs to the top of the dome, and took the elevator back down. After lunch and a short nap, I meandered around Margaret Island and then made my way (after much trial and tribulation) to Gellert Baths. Fantastic! This is baroque at its best. I loooove Gellert. There is a men's and women's segregated thermal area with changing rooms, massage rooms, different temp pools, sauna, steam room and showers. Then there is the main pool in a two story high open ceiling, columned neoclassical delight of a space. Upstairs and outside is the wave pool. It was fantastic. I also bought myself a 20 minute massage which turned out to be more of an oiled pinching session than a massage, but what the hell.

After that, I felt fantastic and so decided to climb Gellert Hill to the Citadel and explore a bit. I took silly photos & then tried to come down the other side of the hill on foot. Hah! After walking for 20 minutes, I flagged down a cab and discovered that I was so turned around that I was literally walking in the opposite direction from the river. Whoops! I got dropped off at the river and then went on an expedition in search of Eden Vegetarian Restaurant which was right there according to Lonely Planet. Harrumph! LP is normally my bible, but for Budapest, it sucks! Maybe things just change too quickly for LP to keep up, but it was unreliable.

I ended up walking all the way up to the metro line and had a fantastic couple of crepes at the 24hour crepe place. Then, I turned a corner, and there was Eden Vegetarian Restaurant. Unbelievable! I had spent almost an hour walking around in circles, asking random people and thinking, LP says that it's right here. Then, after giving up, in a completely different section of Buda, I randomly run across Eden's new location. Too strange. I then just had to have a second dinner. :)

That night was another party night at the hostel. It was also the night that an extra person was apparently booked into my dorm room. In around 3 in the morning, an extremely drunk Brazilian guy woke up the whole room by exclaiming, "This is my bed. You are in my bed." The sleeping German guy responded, "Yes, that is because she (Japanese girl) is in my bed." After a few repetitions, drunk Brazilian guy approaches sleeping Japanese girl and says, "We can share this bed, OK?" After she says, "NO!" he repeats this exchange about 5 times. The Japanese girl finally goes and sleeps on the couch. Whoops! Fun for the whole room.

The next morning, I headed of to Szechenyii baths with a lovely girl that I'd met. We walked down Andrassy Ut to get there, were passed by an intense motorcade (there was some sort of ceremony going on at Independence Square) and then discovered that the outside baths weren't open that day, only the inside thermal ones. Hmm. This is the point when I should have said, "Oh, I'll come back tomorrow." Instead, I decided that I was more interested in the thermal baths anyway. This was a HUGE mistake. After wandering around inside for 45 minutes (no one speaks English or is very helpful), I finally located a changing cabin, a bath sheet, and the entrance to the baths. Once inside, I saw three pools. I tried the water in all of them and was disappointed to find that none were very hot. I sat in the hottest one with about 20 other people, ick, and was disgusted to see crud floating in the water. I jumped back out and decided to go up, get my camera, take a few pictures and then leave. I got my brand new, 10x optical zoom, 9.2 MP camera that I loved like a child and took some fun shots of the main room, the side rooms with other (even colder) pools, including a great one of a senior citizens' water aerobics class, and then thought, "huh...I don't want this whole thing to have been a huge waste of money...I should at least go in the steam room for a few minutes." I didn't want to go to my cabin upstairs, come back down for two minutes and then go back upstairs, so I looked around, and decided that it'd be safe to leave my bag of stuff (water, book, camera, towel, cabin key, sunscreen) in one of the cubbyholes with everyone else's bags of stuff. I went and sat in the steam room for literally 120 seconds - I counted - then I rinsed off in the shower and came back to find my bag still there and my brand new camera gone.

Devastated, I made my way back to my hostel. I had lost my camera, my memory cards, my new camera case, my spare battery, but really I was most upset by the loss of my 2 memory cards. How could I bear losing all of those memories? At the hostel, the lovely Katie immediately poured 2 shots down my throat, the first a delicious St. Hubris (yes, really) and the second some homebrew palenka - a Hungarian liquor. I cried. Then, while I was still processing my loss, I looked in my purse for my chapstick and found...my 2gb memory card! Awesome! That card had filled up the night before at the Gellert Baths. I had switched it with the 1gb card that had some video footage of the big headed jazz musicians from Bratislava. I had still lost the camera and about 20 pictures as well as the video, but I had all of the other pictures with me. Thank God that I was too lazy to put the card back in my camera case the way that I should have.

Bolstered by my card and the two shots, I went off for my caving trip. If you are ever in Budapest, definitely try the caving excursion. It rocks! It's not that the caves are gorgeous, they aren't. It's just a ton of fun. Our guide took us through openings that I didn't think even a child could fit through. We elbow shimmied our way along passageways 100 meters under the surface. It was just so so much fun. I even liked being dressed like a miner. The coveralls have a lot of grip to them allowing me to get up rock surfaces that were too slick for my shoes to find purchase. My group were all young, thin and fit (our guide Laszlo's words), so we were able to take a very challenging route through the caves. Laszlo was awesome. Energetic, talkative, and cute!

After caving, I went home for a bit, had some dinner and then hit the pub crawl with the hostel crew. There were about 20 of us. I made it to the first bar and then skived off with 2 other girls to the hookah bar for some quiet conversation. I made it home by 1am only to be woken at 3, 4, 5, and 6am as successive waves of pub crawlers crept back home. We also had a repeat of the "this is my bed" conversation from the prior night. Unbelievable. All three people involved apparently thought that one of the others had moved to another room. Not to mention that there actually was a free bed in our room, they were all just too drunk to realize it.

My last day in Budapest, I finally went to Castle Hill. For some reason, I'd been resistant to the idea - I don't know why, too touristy? After taking the funicular to the top and wandering around, I was very glad that I came. It is beautiful in the old walled town of Buda. I didn't actually enter the castle, just wandered the streets and bought some souvenirs. After that, I rode the train over to Pest and visited the House of Terror. Wow. Horrible. I cried again, for something other than my camera. The Hungarian people were brutalized for decades. The stories of the people who were imprisoned in the 40s and 50s were horrific. The descriptions of the torture that happened in the rooms that I was standing in was so REAL by virtue of being there. I learned a lot about Hungarian history and saw some amazing Soviet art and came away ready for another trip to the baths.

Rudas Baths, another of the old Turkish baths from the days of the Ottoman empire, reopens its doors on Fridays and Saturdays from 10pm to 4am. I arrived soon after 10 to find a line to get in. It is co-ed on the night swims and there were lots of couples as well as big groups and a few singles like me. Rudas is great and the bath staff were the best that I encountered. The cabin attendant had full conversations with me despite the fact that neither of us spoke a word of the other's language. Gestures and grunts really do work when there is a genuine desire to communicate! There was an octagonal main hot pool; 4 small hot pools of different temperatures, one hot enough to boiled food in; a cold plunge; a sauna; a steam room; and on the other side of the changing cabins, a swimming pool. It is an extensive facility and a lot of fun. I stayed until around 12:30am. At that time, it was already starting to get a little raunchy. The couples had started making out. At one point, I was sitting in the main pool between two kissing couples who were each only 6-12 inches away from me. That was when I decided that it was time to call it a night. I did meet a big group of students enrolled in a Master's environmental studies program at Central European University which included a guy from Torrance. Funny, all the way around the world to meet a guy from the next town over from my hometown.

That was it. I stayed up that night for a little while drying my bathing suit, but then I slept for a couple of hours (the party was going all night) before getting up at 6am to get ready for my 6:30am taxi to the airport. I had an uneventful flight from Buda to London and then to San Francisco. I did have a momentary certainty that my flight would explode into a fireball, due to the run of bad luck that I'd had, but when we didn't explode, I relaxed and settled in for the ride.