Monday 11/26/2007- Wednesday 11/28/2007
We arrived well rested in the early afternoon, as we got to have a little snooze on our empty flight. We grabbed a minibus ride to the Pest side of Budapest and met Pam, our new friend visiting from Singapore. She was very excited to learn about our trip, and she gave us her email address to ask questions when we circumnavigate the globe to her hemisphere.
We checked into our Green Bridge Hostel, which was in an old, rundown apartment complex. Our host was very helpful with giving us recommendations (exactly matched Mr. Varro’s local tips)…as well as talking us into visiting the limestone caves under the city. For only $20 each, we decided to head underground…since most of our Europe trip has been visiting caves!
We grabbed a quick meal and hustled to the bus station to meet the caving group. Even though it was the off season, there were 8 of us ready to head caving- with Laslo, our fearless, unique and very inappropriate guide. There were three other Americans, one (or two if you count Derm..) Irish and two Aussies. The caving was much more exciting, scary and claustrophobic then we thought…but we had a great time maneuvering through small cervices and hearing stories from our animated guide who used many English slang words way to liberally and pretty much had a female nickname for every rock, hole and/or crevice in the cave. After a few bumps, bruises and inappropriate stories from our guide, we all caught the bus back into town and grabbed dinner at Boxters with Jen, Kierstan and Kerry. We look forward to hopefully getting to visit all of them in Australia!
We started our next full day in Budapest checking out the Pest side, starting with a stroll to buy Katie new gloves (waa wahh) on the pedestrian street Vaci utca. We went right to Adam’s recommendation for sweets and coffee at Gerbeaud Confectionary, serving since 1870. We noticed the holiday village being built, and we made a mental note to stop back through on our return.
We checked out the “Champs de l’ese” of Budapest, Andrassy ut. We saw the opera house and were hungary..haha, so we grabbed lunch at Menza (which is a parody from communist times, meaning “state run canteen”), which was delicious. Katie got grandma’s halupkees, which are cabbage meat and rice balls, baked in a tomato based stew. The meal brought Katie right back to her grandma’s house. We continued towards Hero’s square, stopping at the Terror Haza (House of Terror), a museum of spying and the once headquarters of the atrocious government supported AVH, secret police. We stopped at café Lukacs afterwards, only a block away which was a meeting place for the KGB.
We ended our day of sightseeing with ice skating at hero’s square. We picked up groceries to make food at our hostel and do some trip planning for our next and final weeks in Europe!
The alarm went off waaaay too early, and we made our way to the subway to catch our bus to Poland. We only had about 3 minutes to spare, and we left promptly at 630am. Off to Slovak Republic!