Day one in Budapest...We arrived on Thursday night, around 9:20 PM, an hour ahead of UK time. Got a taxi straight away from the airport, felt a little dodgy at first as we'd been warned not to go with any unlicensed taxi's as they can rip you off, and this guy was leading us down into a car park area about 5 minute walk from departures.. but it was actually fine - a big taxi rank down there too. It cost us about 900 to get to our hotel, this is around £20 I think. The driver dropped us off on the right street but we couldn't see our hotel, turns out he'd taken us about 1km too far so another driver drove us back down the road to our hotel; Mirage Hotel.We got this hotel on one of those lastminute.com deals where you get a brief summary and pay a certain amount and hope for the best, then a little later they send you the full details of the hotel - well we are so happy we did it. Only costs us around £400 for 7 nights, not including breakfast.
The hotel is in such a good location - just across from Heroe's Square, or Hősök tere as its called in Hungarian, not too different and easy to identify on the metro line without speaking the language, which has City Park (Városliget) just beyond it. We didn't really do much research on the area before getting here and we were pleasantly surprised to find that we can walk straight up Andrassy Ut, the next street along from us, straight up into the city centre, Pest area. It's a nice walk going from what I believe is known as the Jewish quarter, around where we are towards the end of Andrassy, then into the hustle and bustle of the city, stopping for breakfast in a little cafe called Eco Cafe along the way. Nice flat white and freshly squeezed grapefruit juice sold here, I can confirm. So you go from where we're staying; a quieter area still with lots to see and do, across the road there's a big park where we ate dinner, there's the zoo, a few museums, one of the therma baths and other things I'm sure - walking up into the city where there is so much going on on every street, it's a lively and exciting place.
We went into a few shops including a vintage shop called Retrock on Anker köz 2 - worth checking out if you have time and a partner who enjoys shopping - unfortunately mine was a 5 minute scan of the place. We then found Buddha Bar for lunch, somewhere to tick off the list and a nice, cool place to relax away from the noise for a bit, and of course to fill our boots.
We were heading for Buda, as we had some areas to explore over there, in the castle district. So you can enter this district via many different ways and we'd gone over the Elizabeth Bridge when most people go over the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, which we realised from looking down from one of the viewing points. We did see along the way, on the northeast slope of Gellért Hill stands a monument that pays tribute to Saint Gellért Sagredo, who is apparently the eleventh-century bishop who tried to convert the Magyars to Christianity. You can walk up to the monument, which probably has some spectacular views, but we couldn't deal with that at this point, so we kept walking along the river and stumbled onto the entrance of something grand looking. This bit was kind of confusing because we couldn't tell whether it was the castle area or a museum or palace or what was going on but it turns out (as wikipedia tells me):"Buda Castle was built on the southern tip of Castle Hill, bounded on the north by what is known as the Castle District (Várnegyed), which is famous for its Medieval, Baroque, and 19th-century houses, churches, and public buildings. It is linked to Clark Ádám Square and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge by the Castle Hill Funicular."
At this point my feet were starting to hurt in my shitty sandals, so we thought we'd chance the metro back to our hotel, this couldn't have been easier. We bought 2 single tickets from the machine, asked someone how to get to Heroes Sq, they told us "go down to the red line, 2nd stop, change to yellow", then when we were on the yellow line we could see Hősök tere was the 5th stop away, this looked most like Heroes Square so we went for it, as the train pulled up we jumped off, walked up the road and there was our hotel, about 50 yards to the right.
For dinner, we decided to check out a place not too far from our hotel, recommended by a local friend of one of my close friends - Pántlika - a cafe/retro bar sort of place with a live DJ/bass band playing, selling burgers and a bunch of Hungarian food options - we had the Paris burger and the Berlin burger - would recommend both! Real laid back, open atmosphere here. Would like to set-up an inspired version in the woods back home.
That's pretty much it, day one done.
