On this trip, we are meeting friends from Santa Fe in Budapest and Bratislava for a trip in Slovakia. We meet Jim and Linda in Budapest and then the four of us travel to Bratislava to meet up with Neal and Judy. Neal and Judy spent 2 ½ years in the Peace Corps in Slovakia 25 years ago.
After 20+ hours of travel - Santa Fe to DFW, DFW to Heathrow, Heathrow to Budapest, taxi to hotel, one of our travel companions, Jim, was waiting for us in the hotel lobby. The only delay was on the Santa Fe to DFW flight because thunderstorms shut down DFW. We arrived at DFW with 30 minutes to spare before boarding and only a 20 minute walk to our gate. Although we had been warned about how nightmarish Heathrow can be, we didn't have any trouble transiting to our Budapest flight. I think it's a new thing that you don't have to go through security at Heathrow on some flights.
Budapest started out as two cities, hilly Buda where the nobility lived, and flat Pest where everyone else lived (or at least that is my view as a tourist who has only seen a little of each side!). We stayed at the Eurostars Danube hotel in the old Jewish quarter of Budapest (on the Pest side), a great location a few blocks from the Danube. The hotel was on a nice quiet dead end street but with lots of cafes and restaurants just up the street. The best part was a shower with great water pressure and lots of hot water! Jim and Linda had picked out a restaurant online, but it had a waiting line and we went instead to a whole row of restaurants and picked one pretty much at random. It had traditional Hungarian food. Not being very hungry I ordered a salad with grilled camembert. A whole camembert is a lot of cheese. Jake's dish of slices of goose liver was very tasty. The local draft beer was pretty mediocre.
Our first day in town we got off to a late start after a leisurely breakfast at a brunch place nearby. We wanted to try bagels, but they weren't as flavorful as New York bagels. Good strong coffee though. We all got tickets for the CityBus hop on hop off tour as it seemed like it would be a lot of walking to see everything. We got off at City Park which holds a “fake” castle, built with temporary materials for a World's Fair, but rebuilt with bricks and stone after the public found it very popular. The park also houses the famous Szechenyi thermal baths. We peeked through the window at the outside pools, probably a great way to spend a relaxing day!
Our next hop off was on the Buda side of the river to see the Castle complex. It was undergoing a lot of construction, but it was interesting to see the relatively plain castle, but beautiful Matthias church. Apparently an earlier church on the same site was founded by St. Stephen in 1015, the first King of Hungary who christianized the Magyars. The church was actually named after a later King, King Matthias Corvinus who remodeled and expanded the church in the 15th c.
From there, we walked over the Chain Bridge back to the Pest side of the river and over to our hotel for a rest. That evening, Jake had made a reservation at Stand25, a restaurant recommended in the NYT 36 Hours in Budapest. It was a lovely place on the Buda side of the river. We took an Uber there. The driver spoke only a little English, but had a Chinese made instant translator that worked pretty well. He would talk into it and what he said was translated into English and spoken through his phone. He was driving a rented plug in hybrid car. He had ordered an electric car, but realized he had no way of plugging it in since he lives on the 5th floor of a highrise apartment building. He doesn't have a balcony that he can hang solar panels off of either. Apparently public chargers are more expensive than buying gas.
The meal was Hungarian, but very refined. I had a perfectly cooked pike filet with a green pepper sauce for instance and a chilled tomato soup with watermelon. The server recommended a local white wine (a furmint, dry) that was quite good. Jake had a very nice duck breast dish.
Day 3 we went first to two big market halls after a croissant at the nearby French cafe. It was a pleasant walk past mostly turn of the century or earlier buildings with some modern ones mixed in. The first market, Rakoczi, had very few stalls open. We walked back down towards the river to the much livelier Central Market. This market is rather touristy but does have stalls selling meats, cheeses, and vegetables. There are also a lot of stalls selling paprika, Unikam (a famous liqueur), and other Hungarian foods. We took a pastry break at the nearby Anna Cafe with Dobos torte and kifli, a crescent-shape pastry filled with walnuts in this case. I went back to the market to check out the craft stalls on the second floor but they were filled with mostly mass-produced kitschy things.
In the afternoon, Jake and I did the Danube boat tour that came with our City Bus tour. It was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, but there was no narration of what we were seeing. It gave a great view of the magnificent parliament building. Overall, the narration on the City Bus wasn't great either and it might have been better to just learn the local tram system. We had dinner at the Central Cafe, a refurbished grand Cafe with a pianist and cello player serenading us. The woman pianist looked profoundly unhappy, but the cellist smiled and nodded when he caught a diner’s eye. We finished our meal with a sampling of three desserts since we were at a famous Cafe!
Some things that struck us about Budapest - there seemed to be almost no police presence and very few if any panhandlers or homeless. Have they been driven out as seems to be happening in DC? Do they have the homeless problem taken care of? The city was teeming with tourists from all over and the city looked pretty good, but we only saw the touristy part. I read a fascinating book over the last week called Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein about Atilla Ambrus, a Transylvanian Hungarian who became Budapest’s most famous bank robber in the 1990s. The book covers the 1980s - early 2000s, the post-Communist, pre-Orban era, and I felt like it provided some insight into the current state of Hungary and Budapest. Look him up, his life makes for a really great story. The first line of the book is, “Hungary has always been unlucky”.
Friday morning we set off for the train station to catch a train to Bratislava. We had planned to catch an 11am train, but due to construction around the hotel and set up for a concert we missed the taxi the hotel had called and arrived too late at the station. We hadn't gotten tickets yet though and there was another train at 11:30 that we caught. The train ride is about 2:25 minutes.
Our friends Neal and Judy met us at the station in Bratislava. We took a taxi to our hotel in the historic part of town, Hotel Skiavitz. It's a very nice hotel, but our room faced the street. It's a very loud, very late crowd out there on weekend nights! Lots of tourists and young people in groups (maybe bachelor and Bachelorette parties?). We had a very early dinner outside at a restaurant on the tree-lined, shady Josonskono street. Afterwards, Neal wanted to revisit an Irish Pub that held fond memories of Peace Corps gatherings. Jake is suffering from a head cold, so he went to bed. Neal, Jim and I went and had a small beer and watched the people go by. It was still only 7pm when we left, so I left the guys at the hotel and took a stroll around the old part of town again.
Saturday morning we walked over to the large market building and enjoyed buying some snacks for our Sunday train trip - good bread, cheeses, plum jam, nuts and cookies. There was a huge festival along the leafy street with craft demonstrations, vendor booths, and performances by local folk singers and musicians. Lots of people were dressed in their area's traditional dress. We saw lace makers, woodworkers, ceramics, bell making, and basket making. I was also pleased to try sea buckthorn sorbet at a gelato stand. Sea buckthorn is an invasive plant I've written about, but never tried. It was a wonderfully tart sorbet with a taste a little like orange and mango.
In the afternoon, we all found the laundromat and a very helpful clerk helped us figure out the settings for the washer.
Late afternoon, Jake and I took a walk up the hill to the reconstructed Bratislava castle and admired the views over the city. To one side was a huge area of wind turbines in the distance, and on the other side a fossil fuel energy production facility. On the other side of the river were many of the Soviet-era panaloki buildings (cement high rises).
We all met to find a place for dinner at 7pm. We walked over to the Flagship restaurant. Supposedly the second largest restaurant in Europe, it felt like a German beer hall. It was in a former monastery turned theatre, then restaurant. They brew their own beer on the lower floors and the restaurant is on the second floor. The food was fairly average although abundant, but it was a fun experience. It also features an enormous ceramic creche with hundreds of figures.
