Bu-Da-Peeeeeest, Budapest!

From our quiet little town on the lake we made our way to the happening city of Budapest.  We heard fabulous things about it from other travellers and not long after our arrival we too fell in love and having planned to stay three nights we ended up staying five!  

Hungary´s history is pretty heavy with a lot of oppression and suffering so we learned what we could during the day at museums and such and to lighten things up at the end of the day we explored the cities night life.  Our favourite find was what is known as a ´ruin bar´, which is exactly as it sounds, an old ruined building from the last world war transformed into a night club complete with quirky lighting and odd stairwells and rooms all left in the condition they were found...really fun atmosphere.

The next morning with little energy to do much of anything we visited the Turkish thermal baths.  The place was amazing with outdoor and indoor pools.  The indoor pools had crazy architecture and even though it was stinking hot out we went in the warmer pools just for the experience.  One place we did not go in was the 100 C sauna!  We found it while exploring the building, and being packed with very large, hairy older men we thought how bad could it be....Colin took two steps before burning his feet and running out while I opened the door felt the heat and promptly shut it again. 

While in Budapest we also celebrated our 1 year anniversary! We joke that it hasn´t been a real tough year to get through as the majority of the time we´ve been travelling but feel very proud as spending 23.5 hrs of every day with one person for 9 months can be challenging at times ;)  To celebrate (because we haven´t been doing enough of that lately) we went out for cake which Budapest is famous for and then joined our hostel mates at a club underground to dance the night away.

Wanting to see a little more of Hungary before leaving we took a train two hours out of the city to Eger a place famous for it´s powerful wine referred to as ´bulls blood´ and spent a couple nights.  On our first night out we got caught in a flash flood!  It started to hail which clogged the drains and the streets turned into rivers as the rain came down in sheets.  It seemed like it would never stop but this wasn´t really so bad for us as when the rain started we were in the small street of the city with 30 some wine cellars on it and while being ´trapped´ we simply went from one to the other sampling their fabulous wine until the rain cleared.   It turned out to be a great afternoon with our only issue being the rather long walk home which was only longer with the staggering zigzag walk we acquired after all that wine. 


                                                                             our train driver :)

Eger was fun and for the heck of it we spent one last night in Budapest before leaving Hungary.  We really enjoyed Hungary with our only complaint being their ice cream.  All other countries thus far have had cheap ice cream with generous serving size except here where everywhere we went we got a pitiful scoop that was gone way to fast.  We officially went on strike after Colin ordered a single scoop and it fell into his cone requiring him to eat an inch of cone before he could enjoy a taste...

R