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Budapest

As you might have gathered from previous posts, we spent the Easter weekend in Budapest. The weather was not kind to us, but somehow the grey overcast skies that dominate my photographs seemed rather well suited to a weekend wandering around admiring the grand old crumbling buildings and grim soviet architecture that dominate the Hungarian capital. It’s also possible that we didn’t really mind the weather conditions because the favourable sterling to HUF exchange rate allowed us to spend the weekend there in style–on Saturday night, for example, we dined at the most expensive restaurant in town (and David Hasselhoff’s favourite), Gundel, where we enjoyed three spectacularly unethical courses, pre-dinner cocktails, and several bottles of wine, all for around £45 each. No sign of any luminaries of the calibre of their website’s reference listing, but we did wonder if our surprisingly good table was in any way related to the fact that the member of our group who had booked the table shares an initial and a surname with a certain erstwhile Spice Girl and UN Ambassador. Maybe we should keep an eye on that references page, just in case.

We spent much of the rest of the weekend eating and drinking as well, and although my Time Out guidebook contained the bitingly sardonic critiques that you might expect of most of the etterems we visited, it did prove fantastically useless at locating anywhere we might want to go to in advance. On the evening we arrived, as we were rapidly discovering many of the places around us to be shut, I attempted to call on the services of the guidebook to locate a late night drinking establishment, only to discover that although the editors had helpfully included map page and grid references for everything they mentioned, they had neglected to (a) mark anything on the maps, or (b) number the pages. Mostly we ended up reading about somewhere we went after leaving it. [One example: it was only some time after leaving the bar in which I caught the majority of the England – Northern Ireland World Cup Qualifier (yes, I know…) that I discovered with Time Out’s assistance that the unassuming chap finishing his coffee behind us (and moving to let a group of Geordies sit down with a friendly “No, it’s ok, I’m the owner”) must therefore have been “local celebrity and former world featherweight champion Istvan “Ko-Ko” Kovacs”.]

Taking a break from eating and drinking, we did just find time to visit one of the city’s baths. In this case Time Out actually came in handy, by not only helping us understand the complex and confusing procedures, but also helping us avoid two sets of baths whose clientèle consists mostly of “startled tourists and gay men on the prowl”. We headed instead for the mixed baths in the city park, where we spent most of our time in the two outdoor heated pools, watching the steam rise into the cold wintery air, and the old blokes playing chess in the corner. Inside, there was a slightly scary warren of corridors leading to some slightly manky baths of varying temperatures, interspersed with rows of restrooms and massage rooms that all looked like something from a 1950s soviet hospital. We didn’t hang around.

1 thought on “Budapest”

  1. I met 2 Hungarians on the bus on Friday.
    Peter “Ko-Ko-Ko” Kovacs

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