24 May
We were woken up by Romanian border control at dawn, followed shortly after by the Hungarian border control. The latter were more in
keeping with international standards, carrying a wireless passport reader to process us on the spot in our
cabins. We set the time back by an hour
to comply with the Hungarian time zone. And then promptly went
back to bed to have a snooze.
To our ears, Hungarian is a tonal language with sounds similiar to Vietnamese. At all Hungarian rail stations,
announcements were made both in English and Hungarian.
Our room mate invited us to the dining car for coffee. We were by then out of LEIs and have yet to get to an ATM for HUFs. Note to self : Always have some residue local currency until the border has been crossed! It was nice sitting in the cafe, looking out of the large windows and watching nesting storks, eagles chasing
mice in the field, magpies gathering their early morning grains and the sun rising over
the dew soaked field. We heard again that the elite Romanians were enamored with all things French.
Shortly after, at precisely 10 min to 9, the train arrived as expected at Budapest, even though we had a couple of delays at the border earlier. Wow. Hungary is part of the Schengen area of European Union. Schengan means that from here to the rest of western Europe, no passport will be required. The currency arrangement, though, is a little different. They trade in both Fiorin (HUF) as well as Euros, though the prices are generally better in HUF. Getting monies out of the ATM proved to be another challenge due to the number of zeros involved. We got it wrong and withdraw the equivalent of $1000 AUD instead of $100 AUD, so we had to change the large volume of HUFs into the less voluminous and more useful Euros for later. Lucky for us, the exchange rate at the station was not too bad at 317 HUFs to 1 Euro or we could have experienced a substantial foreign exchange loss!! ATMs at the station dispensed both Euros and HUF.
Shortly after, at precisely 10 min to 9, the train arrived as expected at Budapest, even though we had a couple of delays at the border earlier. Wow. Hungary is part of the Schengen area of European Union. Schengan means that from here to the rest of western Europe, no passport will be required. The currency arrangement, though, is a little different. They trade in both Fiorin (HUF) as well as Euros, though the prices are generally better in HUF. Getting monies out of the ATM proved to be another challenge due to the number of zeros involved. We got it wrong and withdraw the equivalent of $1000 AUD instead of $100 AUD, so we had to change the large volume of HUFs into the less voluminous and more useful Euros for later. Lucky for us, the exchange rate at the station was not too bad at 317 HUFs to 1 Euro or we could have experienced a substantial foreign exchange loss!! ATMs at the station dispensed both Euros and HUF.
As Budapest was a destination on the original Orient Express, the train station was quite lavish compared to the previous two railway
stations. Ornate would be a good description of the main hall. With Hungary being part of Schengen
and EU, this railway station runs more like those in western Europe and
was less run down. Navigating a train station immediately eased by a few folds.
We went in search of the Metro. We found it outside, marked with a nice big M in cursive
white against black circle. Entering into the metro station, we found a tourist information office almost immediately. We took a queue
number and bought for ourselves a 24 hr ticket. At HUF 1650 (a little over 5 Euros), it would be easier than navigating single tickets and trips later. To get to our accommodation, we would have to start on the red line and change at Deak Ferenc ter where we would go on to the Yellow Line. Announcements here were in both English and
Hungarian. The red line is completely modern as one would expect in any European country. However, the yellow metro line was a
pleasant surprise; it was the oldest metro on continental Europe. The metro comprises of single coaches attached
in a line. These still retain their original character; complete with leather straps
for standing passengers to hold on to. There was no barrier to entry and exit at the station but there are surprise checks in the coaches and fines are heavy if one were to get one's ticketing wrong. There was nothing to worry about with a 24 hr ticket. The tunnels
were narrow and the train barely fitted.
It moved as fast as modern trains, if a bit rickety, to retain the original
flavour. At the main railway stop, tickets were checked by human
controllers in addition to the usual electronic readers. We arrived at Opera metro station in no time at all. We had arrived at Budapest's main train station at 8.50 am, and we
were already at the Opera Metro by 9.30am.
In spite of earlier concern, the check in office for the apartment was not too difficult to find. The check in area has complementary wifi and a rest area. We left our heavy bag there but took all our important gear with us, ie all our documents, camera and computer equipment. So with the 10+ kg backpack on our back (we should get use to this weight soon hopefully), we headed out to find the walking tour which was meeting at Vorosmarty ter, the final station on the yellow line. We climbed the only stair exit at that station on exiting the metro. We found ourselves in front of the fountain with the lions. A group had already gathered there. We were told that the water at that fountain and all fountains in Budapest was not only totally drinkable but healthy too due to their origin from natural mineral springs.
The Budapest free walking tour guides wore blue. Both English and Spanish walking tours started at the same time at 10.30. The group was
huge so they divided us into two groups.
We met two other Australian ladies and an English gentleman as well as a
group of Malaysian ladies (complete with head scarves and one of them even had
a veil). Our tour guide, Andrew, was
quite amusing and not sparing at all in poking fun at Communism.
In our group there was also a Russian lady. We could not read her feelings on this topic.
We started with St Nicholas church – one of two tallest
building on the Pest side (pronounced “Pesh”). We were advised of the proper pronounciation as prouncing it in English would render its meaning bad. Pest is the flat side of the Danube with Buda on the hilly side. The uilding of St Nicholas
church took a long time, from 1860s to 1905s, and through three architects, hence its style was a
mixture of baroque, byzantine and relatively modern. In it, lies the relic of St Nicholas – the
Right Fist (mummified). The guide said that it was
possible to climb up to the dome but that it was not worth the trouble when we were climbing Buda hill later during the tour.
From there, we went to this place where the statue of an traditional Hungarian guard stands. It is obvious that everyone had been rubbing his
tummy as it gleamed. The guard has the typical mustache and is dressed in traditional military uniform. Not far from there was this statue of a little girl perched on the railing on the bank of the Danube. Apparently if one were to rub the knees of this statue, one's wish could come true. There were interesting quirky practices in this city. To the north of the Danube on its right bank is the other tall building on the Pest side – the Parliament. We had a peek at it from where we stood. These walking tours also serve as excellent city orientation tours. One could get familiar with landmarks as well as plan where one would like to spend more time exploring or otherwise.
At the Science Research Institute, we learnt that Academia is
not academy but institute in Hungary.
And Magyar is Hungarian for Hungary.
Next, we crossed the impressive Chain Bridge – this is that famous bridge here where lovers lock their locks on the bridge and throw the keys into the Danube. We were told that the council cut them off every fortnight
to ensure the integrity of the bridge and regularly dredged the bottom of the Danube near the bridge due to the practice.
The Hungarians do not think themselves as part of the
Balkans. In fact, they like to distance themselves from the Balkans. They consider themselves member state of western Europeans. This is partly due to the fact that the main
religion there is Catholicism (hence St Nicholas church). Their history included the like of Genghis Khan, the
Ottomans, and Communism. It also appeared
that they recovered a little better than the Balkan states if one were looking at Budapest, the state of the buildings and infrastructures. Unlike previous
cities, this one appeared to suffer less from bombing during the World Wars. The Hungarians talked about Communism as liberation (from the Ottoman) followed by occupation (by the USSR).
We walked next to the President’s residence where
we saw the guards although the tour did not wait to see changing of guards. Next to this residence was
a medieval dig in progress. And from a wall there, we could
see the rest of the neighbourhoods behind Buda.
In the same vicinity of Matthias Church is Fisherman
Bastion
where faces of the original 6 pagan tribes of Hungary are carved into history. The whole place looks like Disney's Cinderella’s
castle on steroid (although this one preceded Disney's) complete with turrets, galleries and Juliet windows. In the middle, the statue King Matthias sat facing the
Church on his stead. The walking tour
ended there. We gave our guides their
tips as that was the only way they get paid. That is how all the guides of all free walking tours in European cities get paid.
He invited those of us who would like to join him and the other
guide to where they were going for lunch, at a traditional Hungarian restaurant. The buffet which was around HUF 1400 including
a drink. We chose a mushroom goulash and gnocchi. It was delicious. During lunch, we sat with a Australian surveyor in the construction industry from Melbourne who had hopped over for a visit as his friend had a wedding earlier that weekend in Europe.
The weather had been spitting throughout the walking tour
but it had not rain thus far although the storm clouds continued to threaten and
appeared to gather with greater intensity. We
wandered back to the Fisherman Bastion to take some photos (more like heaps of
photos), and then decided to walk back to check into our apartment. By now, our friends from Austria (Gert & his wife, Zheng) had texted to say that the traffic from Austria to Budapest turned out worse than expected. As such, they would not arrive before 3.30pm. It
was almost 3pm so we thought it may not be bad to meet them at reception as they had booked into the same apartment block. We weaved our way towards the Danube, and
found ourselves wandering through interesting streets, with interesting government
buildings on the way down. Finally
we reached the river bank and discovered a ferry stop there. Oh good, that would be on our list of things to do
later that evening if the rain held off. It
was spitting a little heavier by then so we hastened across the Chain Bridge, jumped into
the Yellow metro line, found ourselves going the wrong direction so we
jumped off at the next station, crossed the street and entered from the station from the other side to
get to Opera metro station again.
At the check-in, we found our friends had not arrived so after
waiting until around until 15.45, we decided that we could better spend our time doing laundry as
there was a washing machine in the apartment.
We left a message with the receptionist to inform our friends to meet us at our apartment. We proceeded to our apartment.
For Euros 118 for
2 nights, the apartment was huge; complete with full kitchen, full living room, a bathroom with a full size bath tub and a
washing machine. Our balcony which is the entire length of the living room faced into a courtyard filled with
restaurants. The apartment even came with its own dedicated wifi unit. My gosh, what an unbelievable nice find. We
went back downstairs to the DM supermarket to get some washing detergent and a
bottle of water. On the tour, we
finally learnt "the codes" for the various type of water in Europe. The bottle cap is the marker!! Blue for
full fizz, green is for partial fizz and pink is for flat. Aha. Now we know!! So we picked up a pink capped bottle. Earlier water procurement always ended up with fizzy water and the seals on our Kathmandu thermos bottle did not like that. The fizz resulted in leaking thermos!
Fortuitously, the
downpour came with a gusto only after we finished running our errands. We kicked
back a little, found the only English channel on TV – CNN – we heard more
about the upcoming US Presidency race that we cared for. The laundry in the wash, we decided to run a hot bath and soaked in. In perfect timing, our friends were ringing our door bell. We
went down to get them up into our apartment.
We all remarked that we could all have fitted into a single apartment
rather than booked each our own. None of us had known. Their apartment was equally huge. We sat down to catch up while waiting for my laundry
to finish its cycle. The weather
outside continued to rain and dry in repetitive waves. We decided to spend the evening doing nothing more than dinner and catch up as the weather was not co-operating and our
friends had been driving since 9 am. We did not get much good sleep on the train
the night before either with all the rocking and braking, even though the the couchette
was the same length as us and totally comfortable.
We found an all you can eat Hungarian restaurant in the street
near the Wombat Hostel for Euro 19 (HUF 5999).
Dinner was limited to 2 hrs but they would in that duration happily bring
all alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks, cook your favourite requests as well as
let you eat all you want from the cooked dishes and desert buffet. Sold!! Zheng ate her weight equivalent while Gert
and my travelling companion laughed. You would not believe it as she was the smallest human among us! We even had a coffee each at the
end. We tried African catfish, shark and
salmon as well as Hungarian starters. We
were thoroughly stuffed before we left for their apartment where we sat till
midnight, catching up. Gert walked us to our apartment block even though we did not deem it necessary. He is a gentleman and a friend. We had not realised
that the courtyard of restaurants actually connected the two apartments. We sat and made some notes for our blog before
falling asleep with the TV on in the living room. We were also entertained by the music coming from the courtyard below. It was really odd to be in such a large
apartment by ourselves.
25 May
We woke up at 5am with the sun. All our laundry which we hung out the evening before on the balcony has dried. We had better slap some moisturizer on today as the air here is relatively drier. We explored the courtyard and found the
connection as we headed out to Wombats to check on the arrangement for Busabouts. There was a Busabout notice on Wombats' notice board. Feeling better about that, we headed back
to the apartment, and did some packing for the next day before heading to our agreed 9 am meeting. The sun had returned so we celebrated.
At 9 am we met downstairs at the door and went nearby for
breakfast. Ham and mushroom omelette (4
eggs it said but the eggs must have been tiny) and an Americano. Hmmm … they did not have soy milk :-(. Thus far in Europe, we have not been able to easily find soy milk so we had switched our espressos to long black in place of cappuccino. We spent a civilised hour
for breakfast, then went to get day transport passes for everyone. But this time, it was a challenge that we could not understand. At Opera, the attendant spoke no English and could not sell 24 hr passes. The
ticket machine that could sell 24 hr passes would not accept HUF notes. Not good … we went to tourist information
along the street only to be sent to the next metro station to get the tickets. That office above ground there was closed so we
headed down into the underground at Bajcsy-Zsilinszky ut where there is this similar office as
the one at the main railway station. We took a number
and then discovered that the pass dispensing machine there actually accept
notes. The others earlier had faulty currency readers. The only issue was that we did
not know how to buy more than a single pass at a time. The machine took forever to recover
between purchases so it took a good 7 minutes to get it all done. The Mission was finally accomplished.
By then we had walked almost all the way to St Nicholas church, so we
decided to visit it first. We went
inside to have a peek. It is a very impressive
church. There is a separate nave near
the front where the holy right fist is exhibited inside a double glass
container. One has to put in 200 HUFs for
a light to illuminate it for 1.5 min. Churches and money making ... sigh. More
interesting was this container for holy water at the entrance of that nave - it looked like it would be more at home at a pagan place of worship than a Catholic one. We wandered around admiring the architecture
and the frescos. After visiting
the main church, we decided to shell out 500 HUFs each to climb the dome. We did not realise that there is actually an
elevator shortly after the half way point so we climbed all the way to the top. The view was at the top was nice. One can clearly see the homogeneous nature of
the city of Pesh. Spiral staircases on
the way up notwithstanding, we decided to come down with the elevator. As we exited, we spotted a Starbucks so we went
to get some real coffee (with soy milk ;-)). Gert insisted
that we need to be civilised, and sit to seep the coffee rather than grab
a takeaway. He got the chairs ready
while Zheng and we went to get the coffee.
After coffee, we said we would show them the ferry stops. We found the ferry stop at Elizabeth Street. The first ferry came and we jumped on. The ferry was going away from City
Centre and soon it passed by Gulliet Hill. We could see the temple to the St Gulliet, the priest
who first tried to bring Christianity to Hungary and Lady Liberty, the present
to Hungary from USSR during their liberation / start of occupation in greater
detail. Then it was changing of shift at that ferry terminal station. We waited for 15 minutes before getting back on the ferry to go back in the direction we
wanted to go towards Margaret Island.
We jig zag across the Danube and soon past the Parliament
Building. 
We decided against going to Margaret Island and stopped instead at Buda Hill where we led the charge up the hill to Fisherman Bastion. Unfortunately, it was already after 5pm so Matthias
Church was no longer open to public. So
we wandered around the area looking for that exquisite desert shop mentioned the day before but we
never found it, so we walked on. We
wandered around Buda Hill all the way to the other end. It would appear that every bathroom in Budapest require payments of at
least 150 to 200 HUFs to use. As it was an emergency, we
were out of small change and there was no attendant, we jumped the barriers to
use one. Gert was a little embarrassed
that we did that. We knew we were caught on the camera surveillance but we were a little out of options.
We decided we would walk back to the area around St Nicholas
Church so that we can get dinner, but as we were crossing the Chain Bridge, we
noticed the sun starting to sink on the horizon so we decided to stay a while and watch the
sunset before attempting to get dinner.
We were also trying to find Vosomarty et ter fountain for Zheng but
since we got a little lost this time unlike the day before when we were spot on. We stumbled on to another traditional Hungarian
restaurant where cooked meat options was sold by the weight with side dishes for free. Duck and pork with red cabbage and saffron
rice set us back 1800 HUF (around Euro 6). Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs as we could hardly finish everything on our plate.
After dinner we decided to go fetch their car so that we can
go to Gulliet Hill but we would first made a stop to see the light of
Parliament House. It was interesting
challenge to get the car out of the car park as the street was really narrow
and cars were parked along the sides as well. The GPS was a great help for navigating in new cities. We crossed the city and got across the Chain
Bridge. Gert was threatening to do what
a silly car driver probably trying to impress a girl did just as we were walking back from Chain Bridge earlier, i.e. lost control and almost collided with a car and the barricades that prevent it from
entering the Danube. He did not as we told him that we would not be impressed.
To our surprise, we found a park for the car just after the Chain Bridge on the other side of the Danube. We started the night photography shoots. Then we headed to Fisherman Bastion, found another easy park and
took more photos. A musician there was belting out the blues and country songs including the Raw Hide theme when we were there. Before we know it, it was already midnight so
we decided against trekking to Gulliet Hill. We got
back to the car park which automatic sentry gate was then broken and was manned
by a security guard. We said goodbye to our friends at
the door of our apartment. Good times flew by so quickly. It was really really great to see our friends again, this time only after 5 years. Our previous meeting with them was when we last a couple of days together in Istanbul. Before that was a decade ago when we visited them when they were living in Barcelona!
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| Parliament House at night |
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| Closer up of Parliament House |
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| Chain Bridge from Buda side |
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| Tunnel entrance under Buda Hill |
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| Dome of Buda Castle |
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| Chain Bridge |
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| Looking to Matthias Church and Fisherman Bastion |
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| Closer up of Matthias Church and Fisherman Bastion |
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| Chain Bridge with St Michael Church in background |
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| One side to the entrance of Chain Bridge |
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| Entrance to Chain Bridge |
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| Fisherman Bastion with Matthias Church in background |
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| Matthias Church |
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| Parliament House from Fisherman Bastion |
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| Closer look at Parliament House |
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| Stained glass window of Matthias Church that was lit in reverse due to the bright lights from Fisherman Bastion |
We learnt that Chinese citizens living in Austria needing visas to visit Australia must apply in person then personally collect their passport
in Vienna. It will be a
while before we see these two again from the sound of it unless of course we were coming to Europe again. We hope that they make it some day to Australia. It would be nice to show them our home country.
