Budapest - Our Final Stop

After our second 8+ hour bus trip of the trip, we situated ourselves comfortably in our 4-star Best Western in Budapest, Hungary.  Here the jokes about Pat and I being a couple really came to a climax.  When the sign up sheets went around for rooms in all three cities, the first two were pretty straight forward, but Budapest was more complicated.  There were only three doubles available and the rest of the rooms were triples.  When the sheet got to Patrick and me, couples on our trip had taken two of the doubles, so when Pat and I took the last one it didn’t do our reputations any favors.

The Hero's Square in Budapest 

After relaxing for an hour, we headed to the Trofea Grill restaurant for dinner.  It’s an all you can eat, all you can drink buffet style restaurant, and there were far too many good foods to be tasted.  They limit customers to a three-hour time limit, but our group only made it about two before we were all too full to eat or drink more.  The bus took us back to the hotel where we were left to do our own thing.  There was a Rapid Wien game that evening (for a refresher on who Rapid Wien is, you can revisit this post) so some of us huddled in one room around a computer screen and watched it.  It was our first game in the group stage of the UEFA Champions league, which is pretty much an all-Europe tournament.  Unfortunately we had to play FC Porto who is the top team in Portugal and usually pretty good.  Thus, we lost 3-0, which was kind of a dampener on our evening.  Nevertheless, after the game we decided to try and go find a bar a few of our friends had gone to during the game. 

Me in front of the father and son who held off the Turks
and reestablished control

I was given exact directions, and we followed them perfectly, until for some reason at the last turn it was the consensus of the group that we hadn’t gone the right way, so we didn’t even take the last turn just to go see.  Instead we wandered around for another hour in search of another place that we never found.  Oh well, good bonding experience?  So we just went back to the hotel and slept.

The next morning the bus left at 9:30 for our tours led by Dr. Janos Szirmai who works at the University of Budapest.  Friday morning we took extended tours of the Heroes’ Square and the Museum of Fine Arts.  The Heroes’ Square was really cool – it had about 14-16 statues of important historical figures in a semi-circle around one larger statue.  Each figure was a part of a crucial point in Hungary’s history (WWII, stopping the Turks, etc).

Our view of Budapest from the top of a hill

After standing in the rain and looking at all the statues we went into the Museum of Fine Arts.  Dr. Szirmai helped renovate and restore the museum a number of years ago, so our tour was certainly a privilege.  We saw plenty of famous paintings by a number of different artists over a variety of different periods.  I found the impressionist paintings particularly interesting – there aren’t any clearly defined lines so it presents the appearance that the subject could be moving.  It was all pretty neat stuff.  At the end of our tour we were given about a half hour to walk around the rest of the museum.  There was a Greco-Roman exhibit, some other paintings, and an Egyptian exhibit.  I decided to walk through the Egyptian one just to see what they had.  It was rather comical.  They had one mummified alligator, a few small statuettes, and a sarcophagus or two.  It was funny to think that this was the most, biggest, and coolest Egyptian stuff most people would ever see.  Made me feel pretty lucky.

Our guide explaining something
vigorously

That afternoon it was still raining.  The group split into people who were going back to the hotel and people who were going to one of the natural hot baths.  Patrick and I decided to go back to the hotel under the presumption that we will be going to a hot bath in Istanbul so we won’t be missing much here.  So we went back to the hotel, told ourselves we’d take an hour nap, and go to the sauna in the hotel.  Instead we slept for 3 hours, but ended up going to the sauna anyway which was pretty relaxing for like 45 minutes until one of our student assistants, Katya, came and found us and said they were leaving for dinner soon if we wanted to go.  So we did.

We went to the same restaurant as the night before except it was in a different location (like a chain restaurant).  This time we successfully maxed out the time we are allowed to stay there.  It was Pat and I, two other girls, and then our two student trip leaders and one of their friends.  We had a pretty good time.  Afterwards we went out to find the club Morrison, which happened to be the place we looked for the night earlier and never found.  All of us walked in past the bouncer, and then Pat and I realized we didn’t have enough money to get in so we left to find an ATM.  Katya decided to accompany us.

A Roman amphitheater (coliseum)

First, you should know that the Hungarian currency is the Forint and it runs at a rate of 285 Ft to 1 Euro.  This means in order to take out 10 Euros you have to withdraw nearly 3000 Ft, which is pretty ridiculous and led to us calling their currency things like “funny money” or “Monopoly money.”  Pat and I each got enough to get in so the three of us went back.  By the time we got there the bouncer at the door had changed and he asked us for our IDs.  I have no idea why.  But Pat and I both showed him ours, so he let us through.  Katya, on the other hand, had not brought her ID with her, and despite the fact that she’s 23 he wouldn’t let her in.  Pat and I stopped right inside the door to wait, and at some point Pat commented that there was “no way a girl who looks like Katya doesn’t get into a club.”  And while I agreed with him, he ended up being wrong.  She was pretty mad (especially because she didn’t even need to go get money) and she just stalked off.  Obviously I wasn’t about to just let her go wandering around Budapest by herself, so I left as well and we wandered around and made our way back to the hotel, which ended up not being such a terrible thing because I was actually in kind of early for the night.  (I ended up getting on skype and I didn’t go to bed until really late again…but that isn’t the point.)  Everyone else had tons of fun at the club though (there was karaoke as well), so it all worked out ok.  Except for Katya who is still mad at that guy.

Roman ruins from living quarters

 The next morning we left at 9:30 again to go on more tours with Dr. Szirmai.  We started our day by driving up a big hill outside the city to get a great view of the city.  We also got to see a couple statues that stood for a variety of things as the country changed governments between communism and democracy.  Afterwards we went on a tour of the Roman ruins within the city, of which there were plenty.   Mostly notably we saw an amphitheater (that actually has a greater floor area than the Coliseum in Rome but was much less impressive around the outside) and the remains of a small town or living area.  Dr. Szirmai showed us their heating systems that were used for their houses and especially their baths.  We then went inside a museum and observed a variety of artifacts; the most notable of these were a couple of reasonably sized mosaics.

A Roman mosaic

Lunch that day was served on a boat on the Danube River, which is the same river that runs through Vienna.  This time, however, the boat didn’t leave the dock.  Still, it was nice, and the sun had just come out.  Our program director from IES Chicago had been in Vienna for a few days while we had been gone, and he had to meet with a couple other staff members that were on our trip, so he had taken a train from Vienna to Budapest to join us.  Thus, we were all on our complete best behavior.

One of the Communist statues

After lunch Pat and I went back to the hotel.  I went to look for a jersey (which I didn’t get because the stores in Budapest close at 2) and Pat took a nap.  Eventually I gave up and returned to the hotel to take a brief nap as well.  We woke up about 6 and left for dinner at 6:45.  On the way to dinner Pat and I chatted up the IES Chicago representative.  Needless to say, he loved us.

One of the most impressive Communist statues

Dinner was at a restaurant that was having an Oktobierfest.  This was reasonably deceiving.  It turns out what this meant was simply that they were serving one of the dozen or so beers that are available at Oktoberfest, and that you could order it in ways similar to how it is ordered in Munich (liters and meters, and we tried both).  The food was very good though; I had some sort of grilled fish with vegetable rice.  After dinner we all went back to the hotel and were allowed to do as we please.

Pat and I, along with a group of other students, accompanied a couple of our student assistants to a gigantic club a reasonably distance from our hotel.  When I say gigantic, I mean just massive.  The entrance way was nothing special, but inside it was probably 4 stories high or more and there was just a massive open space.  It was interesting to be there for the whole night – when we arrived we were some of the first people so it looked really empty, but by the time we left the place was completely packed.  The biggest part of the club was the speakers.  For those of you at Davidson, imagine riding in the back of Fish’s car, multiplied by 20.  And that was just the bass.  Unfortunately they only played techno, and I feel like it was the exact same beat for all 5 hours we were there.  But we still had a blast.

Ah, the Fuchs bus. How we loved it, and proceeded to get so
very tired of it after only a week.  But it brought us home
safely, and that's all we can ask.

We tried to keep the fun going in our room after we left, but it only took pat and I about 20 minutes to just completely crash, especially when we realized we had to get up and be on a bus the next morning.  On our way out of Budapest we made one last stop with Dr. Szirmai at a statue garden.  Most of the statues here were from the Communist era in Hungary and were some type of propaganda or fear-inspiring device.  Some of them were just massive.  Still, there weren’t very many so it only took us 40 minutes to walk around the whole place.  We then reboarded the bus and headed home.  We made one pit stop, and then another for lunch.  This was supposed to be a one-hour stop but it took slightly over two, which made everyone very cranky since we were only an hour away from Vienna.  Finally we made it back, and Pat and I settled back into our apartment.

Coming soon: Davidson Geneva visits Vienna!