Budapest: The Two Cities That Became One

It is the fourth day of our vacation and things have been happening so quickly that I’ve barely had any time to blog! But there’s so much to tell and so many pictures to share that I need to get on it! I’m doing a different blog post for each city we visit, so if you’re interested, make sure to see all of them!

Saturday was the beginning of our week-long excursion into Europe. We woke up at 6am to make sure everything was ready and the bus was on the road by 10:30am. It’s a double decker bus, and Kate and I are situated on the bottom level, which is actually pretty lucky because it’s smaller and doesn’t get as hot as the top. The bottom is just Americans, but the top part of the bus is home to Americans, Ukrainians, and others. There are a lot of other people traveling with us that aren’t a part of our teacher group.

We practically live in this bus

We drove all day and all night. We stopped every couple hours for bathroom and food breaks, although Kate and I mostly ate our snacks and sandwiches that we packed for our journey. I have never spent this long on any form of transportation in my life. At around 1am Sunday morning we started crossing the border between Ukraine and Hungary. I say started because the entire process took us about three hours to complete. We were stopped at the Ukrainian border for a while and the border control boarded our bus and collected our passports and checked them. Then at the Hungarian border we had to get off the bus and line up to present our passports to be scanned and stamped. It was around 2:30am when that happened, and it was pretty miserable. Kate and I probably each had slept about eight hours between Friday night and Saturday night and it was cold outside. It actually seems like a big blur now, but it wasn’t very fun at the time.

Finally we were back on the bus and on to Budapest. Everyone fell back asleep and we were woken up at around 8:30am. Hungary is actually a hour behind Ukraine, so we got there at 7:30am. We were in Budapest! The city used to be two different cities, Buda and Pest, that sat on opposite sides of the Danube River. At some point, in the last couple hundred years I think, the cities were combined to create Budapest. Buda is the more ancient side where as Pest is more modern.

We started on the Pest side, and our first stop was the spa. Budapest is home to numerous hot springs and its bathhouses are very well known throughout Europe. We grabbed our things and walked about five minutes to the biggest of the spas. We spent a wonderful three hours soaking in different pools and trying out different saunas and steam rooms. It was just what we needed after a long day of traveling.

One genuine Budapest spa

 

Spa time baby!

 

 

After spa time it was tour time. We were able to have an English speaking guide and she took us around some sights for about an hour. We visited Heroes’ Square and learned about the different people represented there. It was so fun to actually be in a place that I’ve only seen pictures of. Next we walked around a little castle museum.

Heroes' Square

 

 

 

 

 

 


Touch the creepy man's pen--it's good luck

Mostly we enjoyed the beautiful weather. Kate and I walked around in flip flops! The skies were blue, the grass was green, and the sun was shining! It was just a wonderful day.

 
 

 

 

Before we boarded the bus, we ran back to Heroes’ Square to take a picture by this huge wooden Budapest sign. Our tour guide said that it was only up for twelve days, so we were really lucky to be here right when it was there!

 

 

Then it was back on the bus and over to the Buda side of the city. We passed over the Chain Bridge, which was the first bridge of eight to connect Buda to Pest. In Buda there are very old castles and houses. Our tour guide took us around this area and we saw some churches and so many magnificent views from sites like Fisherman’s Bastion. We had a bit of free time, but it was starting to get windy and cold, especially as high up as we were, so Kate and I found refuge in some souvenir shops and spent the rest of time window shopping.

It's a long way down

 

 

The view from Fisherman's Bastion

 

 

 

 

The Chain Bride and St. Stephen's Basilica in the distance

 

 

The bus then took us to our hotel which was on the edges of Budapest. We were so tired, but I really wanted to see St. Stephen’s Basilica. We had passed by it, but I had read that it was an amazing church, and Mass was being held at 6pm, so I thought it would be neat to see that. I figured out what metro we needed to take and then we headed out at around 5:45pm with a couple other girls from our group. We got to St. Stephen’s just in time to catch the last five or ten minutes of Mass. This church is gorgeous. I have seen quite a few cathedrals in Europe, and I think so far this one is my favorite. The inside was so intricate and huge, and the outside was just as beautiful. I wish we had more time to explore and take it all in, but it closed after the Mass was over.

We were pretty hungry by this point, so we started looking for a place to eat. We found a place called Jack’s Burgers and suddenly the desire to have a big cheeseburger became too much to bear. I know it’s not traditional Hungarian food, but it was so delicious. I have no regrets. We did do something pretty awkward, however. Kate and I sat down at a high table with bar stools. A few people were already sitting there, but we sat on the other side so it wasn’t really awkward. Until the rest of their friends came and filled up the rest of the seats. Then it was awkward. But at the point it would be really awkward if we just left, so we sat there awkwardly trying to delicately eat our gigantic burgers and not make eye contact with anybody. I’m pretty sure the other people felt the awkwardness too, but honestly, it doesn’t even matter because that burger was delicious and nothing can taint that fact.

It was delicious

Next we wanted to make our way to the river to see all of the lights. We took kind of a roundabout way getting there walking through the little shopping streets of Budapest, and actually didn’t get to the bridge we wanted to (which was the Chain Bridge.) We were one over, but the view from the river was just as beautiful.

This is not the Chain Bridge

 

We took some pictures and I almost touched the BIGGEST SPIDER I HAVE EVER SEEN. I put my hand up on the rail to take a picture and Kate yelled at me. Turns out I was THIS CLOSE to touching a spider. I still have the chills because spiders are disgusting and I’m like 96% sure they can jump on me and not let go.  

Me terrified because spiders are scary

From there we split up from the girls we were with and decided to make our way back home. Simple right? Incorrect. If you have read this blog with any kind of consistently, you know that Kate and I are plagued with the curse of misdirection. We are constantly getting lost, even in Kiev, the place we’ve been living in since mid-January. We found the metro very easily, but we had neglected to pay attention to the metro stop we needed to return to. We rode down one way, and then I panicked because I thought we were going the wrong way. Unfortunately, the Budapest metro isn’t as swanky as the Kiev metro, so in some places you have to pay again to start going the opposite way. Unfortunately again, we were 100 forints (about 50 cents) short of enough to buy two tickets back. We were almost to the end of that line so when we walked outside, we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We were hoping that maybe we could get someone to give us the money we needed or that we could find an ATM. Luckily, a lot more people speak at least a little bit of English in Budapest compared to Kiev, so we were able to ask for help and find an ATM.

So we got back on the metro. At this point, we had no idea if we were going the right way and I was doubting everything that I thought I knew about how to get back home. We were both really tired and sore and to make things worse, it was completely our own fault that we were in this predicament. We had no phone, no contacts numbers, not even the address of the hotel we were staying at. We had neglected to be prepared in any way to wander around a completely foreign city. I had remembered that Olya, one of the foreign coordinators for our school had said something about the second to last stop being the one that would put us by the hotel. We decided to keep going the way we were and to take it to the second to last stop. We emerged from the metro and recognized nothing. Once again we were in the middle of nowhere and had no way of getting help. You would think that we would have just gone the opposite way to the other second to last stop, but at this point we were so scared and tired and lost that we weren’t thinking very clearly and we were not sure of anything. We went back underground to try and figure out our next move, and we went up to a man and woman and started asking for help. The man had an iPhone, so we tried using his Facebook to send messages to our head teacher, Alysha, and some other girls in the group. No one got back to us quickly enough, so the woman got someone on the phone and after I talked to him for a while, he told us to get off on a certain stop going the other way. So we bought another ticket and ran off to catch the metro. As we approached that stop, I knew it wasn’t the right one. We got off and then at the last second, we jumped back on the metro before it pulled away. We decided to take our chances with going to the second to last stop on the other side of the line. As we got closer, we started recognizing things and we were finally in the right place. I wanted to cry. We stumbled back to the hotel and collapsed on our really comfortable beds. We now refer to that event as The Terrible. I have never felt so hopelessly lost. All in all, it took us about two and a half hours to get back to our hotel.

The Terrible aside, Budapest is a beautiful city. I never really thought about visiting there, but now I would love nothing more than to come back and stay for longer. It’s so beautiful and romantic and charming and interesting. It was a perfect first day.