Taking the bus to Budapest

When I moved to Prague about 2 years ago it was my well formulated plan to travel a lot in Central Europe. I visited Germany and Austria and for various reasons left it at that until during the summer holiday in Finland a thought of going to Hungary was conceived. I was really excited about it because Budapest was on the top of my list of locations I definitely wanted to visit while staying in Prague. Of course I wanted to see the interesting sights in Budapest but I am also interested in Hungary because Hungarian language is related to Finnish, and together with Finnish and Estonian some of the rare exceptions in Europe- languages that don't belong to the Indo-European language family.

The only proof of being a related language I could find- sounds a bit like a drunk person trying to say booze in Finnish

Budapest can be easily reached from Prague by plane or by bus. As the bus is cheaper and thus well suited for a budget traveler, we decided on a night bus leaving around 10 pm on Friday. The journey takes a bit less than 8 hours so we went to sleep in Prague and woke up in Budapest. The bus goes through the western part of Slovakia and Bratislava, so I can scratch Slovakia on my scratch map, too even though it might be cheating a bit because I slept through Slovakia quite happily.

Early Saturday morning was the best time to get to know Budapest, we had the entire city for ourselves while the other tourists were still asleep. We had agreed with the hotel that we can leave the luggage there to wait for the check-in and after that we walked around looking for a breakfast place that would be open early. It was strange to be up so early that there was no place to go for a coffee and cake.

Empty Budapest in the morning

We spent the day pretty much the same way we started it, walking around. We visited a Saturday market and ate superb food in a Tibetan restaurant. They even had yak meat in their selection. My travel mate had already visited Budapest before so I was lucky to get to skip the cumbersome part of trying to find places by myself, which is a challenge with a poor ability to read a map and a bad sense of direction.

In the afternoon we took a nice nap and headed out to climb a hill and see the city from above. The unpleasant part of being out in the prime time is having to queue to every single place because everyone's on the move and trying to see the same things. I was thinking if Marco Polo, on his famous trip to Asia, experienced the same level of crowdedness or if at his time there were still places that were not full with visitors. In good and in bad traveling has become everyone's favorite pastime and it can be seen in the chronic congestion of the most popular places.

The Saturday market

In the evening it was time to relax in an Ottoman-style thermal spa called Rudas, which was an awesome place. The price included several different pools in so called Turkish bath, a wellness section, swimming pool and saunas. Using a swim suit is obligatory. I spent most of the evening sitting in a pool of water heated up tp +42 degrees Celsius. The water in the spa was rich in minerals because the ring I forgot to take off turned to a strange shade of blue. Later on I also noticed that my swim suit shows some signs of disintegrating.

The hotel we booked cost us 60 EUR for a night and was in a really good condition with a small kitchenette and adjoining bathroom. In the end we didn't use the kitchen because what's the point to go on a holiday and still have to cook but it was nice to have the kettle for preparing the all important morning coffee. On Sunday we walked in the suburbs of Budapest and ate delicious sushi. When the bus left for Prague 23:40 I had no difficulty falling asleep in my seat.