Monday, August 6, 2012

Budapest - July 20, 2012

Parliament. If you squint, it looks kind
of like Westminster Palace. 

Sarah says before we got there, she pictured Budapest as this exotic city with buildings with odd towers - almost medieval or Middle Eastern. She was a bit intimidated and unsure what to expect. It's not - it's actually fairly westernized. The currency is non-Euro and low-value (220 to the dollar), and the language is completely unrelated to any language spoken to the west, but the architecture is solidly European and most people speak enough English that communication isn't difficult.

Sunset picnic overlooking the city.
The big draw in this city is the baths. There are a whole bunch of natural hot springs under the city, so when the city was under occupation by the Turks in the 17th and 18th centuries they built a lot of big bathing areas in their fashion. More were built later as well, continuing the tradition. We went to the biggest one, Szechenyi, and were blown away. There were easily 15 different indoor pools and a few giant outdoor ones, all different temperatures from shock pools to hot tubs. Even one of the giant outdoor pools was 34 degrees - what an experience lying in that one, in the sun, watching people play chess on the edge. We spent 5 hours in the pools.

Lock your love to this rack and throw
the key in the Danube to make it last.
Some things defy explanation.
We've found by this point that a great way to meet people is to do a walking tour of the city the first day we're there. Most places have a free one that runs on tips, and you get a condensed history lesson along with interesting stories about some of the famous sights of each city. We actually met a girl from Vancouver on the tour in Budapest and it turned out she even went to university with my sister! Small world. We ended up going out to a club with her and some people from her hostel, and there we randomly ran into a couple that we'd met a week previously on a pub crawl in Prague. What a strange day...

We had four nights here, and spent most of the time walking around, eating ghoulash and chocolate-covered cheese bars, seeing the city and meeting the people. Next, onto Croatia.

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