Virtually everyone I knew in Bucharest had been to Budapest, so now it was my turn and after Sighişoara I was really looking forward to going to a big vibrant city. Small town living is not for me.
The 19th was really nothing more than the very long and boring train ride from Sighişoara to Budapest. After arriving in Budapest I found my hostel right away (it was very close to the train station, thankfully) and moved in. I did some laundry and played around online to see what I would do on the 20th. Since I only had one full day in Budapest, I decided I wanted to make the most of it.
For a city the size of Budapest it is flatly impossible to get a decent sense of the place on a one day visit, but I'll share my impressions anyway. Budapest is exactly what you would expect from a former capital of a huge empire (the Hapsburgs) and my initial impression is that it is completely comparable to London, just much cheaper.
It is far more international and cosmopolitan than Bucharest. There are far more foreigners of all stripes and I saw the first Spar & Tesco that I've seen since leaving Ireland. At least on this day there seemed to be a lot of Australians and Americans visiting. The language, however, is radically different and frankly it is difficult to make out any words at all; in that respect Romania is better. There are also a lot more definably “trendy” people here – yuppies, punk rockers, hip-hop kids, skaters, and so on – as you would see in the West. Perhaps I have just been in Bucharest for too long, but Budapest seems very Western to me. Budapest reminds me a lot of London, but is also very European, for example there are coats of arms on virtually everything which seems odd in a formerly Stalinist country, where they often went to great pains to “erase” the feudal past.
I set out very early and walked all day. I put on some serious kilometers but got all over the centers of both Buda and Pest (the two cities that make up Budapest), including the castle, which I walked up to. I crossed the Danube about six times on different bridges running all over the place snapping photos (see the MySpace album, there are a lot of photos). Otherwise though, it was all fairly uneventful. I didn't spend much time in any one place.
By the early evening I was both completely exhausted and suffering from a bad sunburn. I found a nice little street cafe in the middle of Buda and decided to stay there for a while and drink beer. I met a few Hungarians, who spoke good English, which was nice. Hungary is one of those places where there is nothing odd about strangers joining you at your table, which is a little odd, but is also great for a foreigner to meet people. I stayed for a few more drinks and then went back to the hostel. As shown in the photos, I got all over the place, but only as a fly by tourist.
The next morning I was off to Bratislava. Everything went well enough until I got to the train station and got the stupid idea to stop and eat a kebab. This took too much time and I found myself in a mad dash to get my big backpack out of left luggage and to get on my train. If I had walked around on the walk ways I would have missed my train, so instead I jumped off the platform – with all my crap – ran in front of one train and managed to jump on my train literally two minutes before it pulled out. I just jumped on whatever car I came to and it turned out to be first class. However there didn’t seem to be many people around so I just took a cabin and settled down. Despite my ticket clearly saying second class, either the ticket people didn’t notice or didn’t care, so I managed to score a free first class ride from Budapest to Bratislava on the 21st.
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