December 26, 2022

📍Budapest, Hungary 🇭🇺

Friends, food, and a run-in with the police. 👮‍♂️

Day 1: Robby, J, and I arrived in Budapest and took the light rail to the hotel. One girl riding the train with us was helping a tourist figure out where she needed to get off and sounded like she knew her stuff. We decided to ask her for suggestions of things to do. Turns out, she’s Hungarian and did in fact know her stuff.

She gave us a few recommendations and J got her number in case we had questions. When we got to our hotel, Hotel Central Basilica, we had a text from her recommending a langos spot, which is a traditional Hungarian food. It was only a 6 minute walk from our hotel…and once I saw what the food looked like, I have never walked anywhere so fast.

If the picture doesn’t give you a good idea of what a langos is, it’s a mouth watering fried dough typically topped with cheese (a lot of it) and sour cream (also a lot of it). Very healthy, just like the rest of the Hungarian food. We ate, probably took a few years off our lives with the fat, and then walked back to the hotel. We invited our new friend to hang out with us and so she met up and showed us around town. It was a successful, unplanned private tour. She also told us it was mandatory to try Hungarian liquor (I would not recommend it, but to each their own).

Rubbing the belly means you’ll be back to **Budapest**.

We walked the city, went to a few bars, and, by the end of the day, found a Vietnamese spot (random, I know) to bring back to the hotel. Fun fact: Budapest is actually split into two sides divided by water. One side is Buda and the other is Pest. Most of our time was spent on the Pest side.

Day 2: Robby and I figured out the train system and made it to the Central Market. We had amazing, freshly squeezed OJ, goulash, and the best potato wedges I’ve had (oh, and got few souvenirs too). Since J had worked and this was his second time visiting Budapest, he was busy catching up on sleep.

Refueled and content, Robby and I started our journey back to the hotel feeling chipper and accomplished…

…until a man asked to see our train tickets. Robby didn’t have data on his phone so he had a physical ticket 🎫, no problem. I had my ticket on my phone and showed the guy. His response: “We have a problem.” Do we? I just showed you my ticket. What else would you like, sir? Turns out he would like 1) a validated ticket and 2) to give me a fine. Ah. Ok. I pay the $25 fine for not validating my $1 ticket I purchased. And this my friends is my first European offense. I will call it a right of a passage and also recommend validating any train ticket in Europe.

Anyway, we meet up with J and go on a walking tour of Budapest. Turns out it wasn’t much different than the tour we got from our new friend/personal tour guide the day before, but it was still interesting.

We got a quick dinner at Ter Presszo and rushed home to get ready for our bar crawl.

We got to the bar crawl and everyone was a solid decade younger than us. This was the first time I’ve ever felt old. We dank, we crawled, saw a few bars, and ended at a club. When I say club, I really mean a full-on massive street block of different rooms each with a different type of music. We got there around midnight and just from exploring the ONE club, my watch told us we had walked .60 miles. That is over half a mile of strictly walking around one club (in case anyone needed help with the math there). Massive!

Day 3: Throughout the trip, Robby had mentioned he had never taken the train from one county to another in Europe. He then came up with the idea that we go from Budapest to Slovakia 🇸🇰 for the day. Say less. We were off.

Taking the train from one country to another. ✅

When we returned from Slovakia (don’t worry, there’s another post for there), we found an amazing Italian restaurant for dinner called Pasta Bazár Trattoria. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy Hungarian food, but I would simply have had to roll to our next destination if I ate it every meal. We tried the famous chimney cake (ok, this day was not that healthy and I may have to roll regardless) and then got ready for the bath party. Hungarian baths are a thing, similar to how Turkish baths are a thing (just performed differently), and one of the baths turns into a club at night so we had to check it out.

We took the oldest running underground train in “Continental” Europe.

Day 4: I Robby left us 😩 and it was back to J and I. When I tell you it was time to relax for a bit, I took my assignment very seriously. I didn’t leave the hotel room until about 1pm to get some serious sleep. We only left the room to get some food in the Jewish Quarter and explore the famous Old Ruin Bars.