Sorry for the delay in updating this beast but since we've been back we've just been so busy with both of us definitely being employed (pause for laughter, pause for laughter). No actually we've just been relaxing, cleaning and seeing our wonderful family, friends, and that knob Brian Nedd, but we have had a lot of requests to throw down some posts about our final stop and our overall takeaways from the trip, so onward!
The first thing you need to know about Budapest is that it is pronounced BudaPESHT, and if you drop off the 'h' in your pronunciation you will be scolded by everyone around you. I don't know why the people there are so ornery about it...maybe they're just......Hungary. The city is made up of two adjacent towns on either side of the Danube River: Buda and Pest, the latter of which is where we spent most of our time. Hungarian is unlike any other language so we had zero chance of absorbing any of the local's conversations. As a matter of fact, it's so foreign, Hollywood often uses Hungarian as the language for aliens. We were out of luck in the listening department, but visually this was a great city to end our travel as it shared many elements that reminded us of previous stops on our wild ride. Its bridges looked like Prague, its streets looked like Vienna, its buildings looked like Amsterdam, and its Parliament building is straight out of England. Seriously gorgeous.
Also in its favor was the fact that we arrived during Christmastime. Holiday lights brighten the streets and every day we would stop at one of the many winter villages that had seemingly sprang up over night, with stores hocking authentic Hungarian wares and small little food shacks fighting for your attention. The majority of our money was spent in these charming markets, wolfing down dangerous amounts of mystery meats and getting day drunk on gluhwein. For those of you that haven't had gluhwein, quit your job, run to the liquor store, and buy a bottle of red wine. Heat it up on the stove and add mulling spices like cloves, cinnamon and sugar. Stir it up and then let it flow down your gullet until your belly tells your brain, "Whoa. This is great. Let's take a 4 hour nap." Seriously. It's the BudaBest.
Also the best are the baths. Now normally I, like Kramer, despise bathing as after about two minutes, you're basically sitting in a tepid pool of your own filth. Katie was quick to inform me that Budapest baths are actually large buildings with about a dozen indoor/outdoor public pools. Now I also don't really get the idea of public hot tubs either as I'm usually sharing the space with two splashing kids, a 108 year old woman, and an impossibly hairy man. Plus to paraphrase Louis CK, there are two types of people: People that pee in public pools. And Liars. But the Szechenyi Baths were one of my favorite experiences in Budapest. The inside pools seem like your basic run of the mill hotel pool situation but the outside pools were where the action was.
We were there in the middle of December and the temperature was 30 degrees outside (-2 for the foolish members that use celcius from the remaining 193 countries), but the baths were comfortable, ranging from 84-106 degrees (I think that comes out to 64 stones in celcius?). The average bather was pushing sixty and generally not in shape, so it didnt have the intimidation factor of a beach where every person is a specimen. There were even several men playing a heated game of chess in the middle of the pool, which is something I could never do because at any point I found myself losing (not likely) I would "accidentally" submerge the board and drown any witnesses.
Another Budapest must see are the ruin bars. Ruin bars showed up about a decade ago when people started purchasing rundown buildings and turning them into pubs with unconventional furniture and markedly strange vibes. You know how people will spend hours on making their hair look like they just rolled out of bed? That's what the building felt like. It's supposed to look like a hodgepodge of just random shit splayed over the place like a one-legged baby doll in a Santa hat holding a prison shiv, but everything is purposefully put in its place.
Our bar, Szimpla Kert, was multiple levels and had about eight separate rooms, each with its own theme such as encouraged graffiti or a projector showing home movies or piano keyboards taped to the wall. Katie and I tried to spend fifteen minutes in every room usually playing I Spy and seeing who could find the weirdest makeshift chair which included lifeguard chairs, barbershop chairs, baby strollers, whiskey barrels and (presumably stolen) park benches. Although the weirdest moment came when we stumbled into a room showing Marlene Dietrich movies and I saw a girl sitting in the bed of a cut in half pickup truck (naturally repurposed as furniture) eating a giant carrot Bugs Bunny style. I cocked my head when I saw her but she gave me the look like I was the strange one (probably the mustache). But to her credit, not two minutes later we were approached by a woman carrying around a basket of carrots for sale. And that's how I spent my last night in Europe: sitting on a pommel horse in a Budapest bar chowing down on a carrot next to an Estonian girl warbling her way through "12 Days of Christmas". Just like that old gypsy woman predicted.
Hungary was the last country we needed to seal the deal for 14 in '14. Now onto our next adventure! US Road Trip to Mexico in 2015? South American Tour in 2016? Grecian Gallivant in 2017? Our goal for life is to hit at least one country every year and our first thing we did in the new year was head up north to see our Canadian friends, well they're less of friends and more international acquaintances. But dud associates aside, thanks for following our blog! Katie will be writing another post in the upcoming weeks, but I'm signing off for now.
Thanks for the mammaries.
CM
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