On Friday, Stina and I left for Budapest. We went to the train station in the afternoon, and asked for the next train to Budapest. They told us it left in an hour, so we went to McCafe and got frappes while we waited. Once on the train, we thought we were good to go. Budapest is 300 km away from Graz, so about 2 ½ hours by car or 6 hours on the cheapest train. We thought we had hours to just chill, and we’re reading books and eating peanut butter/almond butter and jelly/honey with rice cakes/gluten free bread. The train stops at lots of different stations along the way. At one of them, about an hour into the ride, this guy is getting off the train, and stops and asks us if we’re going to Budapest. “Yes,” we say with smiles. He tells us that if we want to get to Budapest, we need to change trains now. The train is about to leave, and we scramble to grab our stuff and hop off. Stina left her sweater on the train, and almost left the jelly lid and the honey. I saw the honey and went back for it. “Noooo, not the honey!!!!” So I’m carrying my backpack in my arms with things hanging out, the lids not on the foods, a Ziploc bag filled with rice cakes spilling out, and hop off the train. We follow this man onto the next train, which is a sketchy old train that squeaks when it moves. We start talking with the guy, and his name is Thomas. He’s laughing at us because we’re so naïve, and we become friends with this guy. He lives in Budapest and is returning home. He tells us we’ll have to change trains again in about 30 minutes. We follow our fearless leader onto a third train, and then finally do make it to Budapest! On the third train, apparently you had to have some sort of a reservation, which we didn’t. So it cost additional money for us to take that train. We didn’t speak Hungarian, and know what the worker was saying, or have any Hungarian money (Forints). Lucky for us, Thomas saved the day once again, and paid for us. When we got there, he helped us find an ATM, buy bus tickets, and wait at the right bus stop. While we were waiting, we see an empty bus parked across the street, that looked super old and broken down. We were making all sorts of jokes about how old the bus looked. A few minutes later, we watch someone go into the bus, and drive it over to our stop! Sure enough, the old, broken down bus was the one we had to take. Squeaking with every move, it finally made it to our stop. We had the address, and were trying to find our hostel. We saw an old woman walking into a gate, and thought maybe it was the gate to our hostel. So we tried to follow her in, but she looked at us like, “Umm… what the heck are you doing?” and we figured out it was her apartment that we were trying to follow her into. Oops! Turns out, our hostel was right next door. We rang a bell, and they unlocked the gate for us to come in. They found my name under reservations, and showed us to our tiny bedroom with two twin mattresses. We pay the $4300 (Hungarian money), which is about 11 Euros, for both of us for 2 nights. Pretty dang cheap! There was a kitchen, bathroom, and lots of rooms with tons of beds and people sleeping everywhere. The walls were paper thin, and I could hear a dog snoring right behind my head the whole night, but we were exhausted and slept pretty well! Plus, my bed in Graz has bed bugs, so this one was pretty cozy.
On Saturday, we woke up and started a day of walking the city. We first went to Hero’s Square, which was pretty close to our hostel. We took some cool pictures, looked at all the monuments, climbed up on the giant statue of a horse and took pictures, heard someone say that you can get arrested for doing that, and left! From there, we walked toward Buda (we were in Pest, on the other side of the Danube River is Budda). It was a long walk, but we made it. When you get to the river, you can see the Parlament Building just before the river, two main bridges that go across, and then the Budda castle on the other side, along with a lot of residential area behind it. It was beautiful. We crossed the river, and walked to the castle. There were trams that you could take to the top, but it wasn’t that hard of a walk. We started on the paths, and the view became more and more amazing the higher we climbed. At the top, there were ancient ruins, with cats living in them! There were lots of cats; it was so funny. There were also soldiers, who stand completely still and don’t make any facial expressions (kind of like the ones in London). A group of them got together, and marched, and twirled their guns listening to the commander. It was pretty cool. I’ll post a picture of them.
Then, we went to another castle, and there were girls wearing traditional Hungarian dresses, singing and chanting and dancing in circles. We watched them for a while. After that, we walked across the other bridge, back to the Pest side. We marveled at the Parlemant government building. At one time, just Parlament used more electricity than the rest of the city combined!
Late afternoon, we went to the Thermal Baths. It was about 10 Euros to get in, but it was so worth it. There were tons of pools, indoor and outdoor, at different temperatures. We went inside and sat in the saunas until we were so hot, and then went outside and swam in the pools, and then sat in the warm baths and watched old fat men play chess. The surrounding buildings were fancy, I’ll post a picture of them. The baths in Budapest are the largest in all of Europe, and have been around for hundreds of years. I can only imagine people going to bathe there hundreds of years ago! So cool.
For dinner, we went to a restaurant called Thai Buddha. The waiter was really nice, and bought us drinks. We wrote notes back and forth on napkins as he gave us the check- had some fun with that. After we ate, we walked back to the river to see the castle lit up at night. It was so beautiful!
Sunday morning, we were planning to go to church at the basilica. We were walking there, when we stumbled upon the Museum of Terror. At first we just weren’t sure what it was, and then we decided to go inside. It was $2000 Forints, but $1000 Forints with our international student ID’s, woo hoo! The building had once been a Nazi headquarters, but is now a museum. Some of the rooms have been preserved the way they would have looked, and it is so interesting! In the basement are the torture chambers. We went down, and walked into the rooms that had been used to torture people, and the room with the gallows that killed many people in that very spot. Different torture chambers were used for different types of torture. In one, the people were kept in water, unable to get dry. In another, the ceilings were very low, and they were forced to crouch down without being able to straighten. In another, there were many lamps, all at different heights. The people would be forced to stand, and the lamps would be adjusted to the height of their eyes so that the light shined directly into their eyes. In the room with the gallows, the people were hanged. There were all sorts of tributes to the victims, with their names and pictures- thousands of them, men and women. We learned about the persecution of the Hungarian Jews, about internment camps, and what life was like for the people during WW2. It was crazy, and sad, but so interesting. I’m so glad we stumbled into that museum! We stayed there for over three hours without realizing it.
Sunday afternoon, we took a direct train home. Easy peasy, piece of cake, can of corn. Great weekend! J
