When we’d originally planned the trip, Anna and I were faced with some challenges. Because the tickets we chose to use were based on total mileage traveled, not number of flights or time, adding additional cities was essentially free, especially if they were along our planned route. We could have flown from Istanbul to London… but adding Budapest and a spur out to Croatia added a total of something like 1000 miles. Since we were well under the 20,000 mile limit, it was easy to say “hey, we both love Budapest, and Croatia sounds interesting, let’s add them.”
And I’m still glad that we did, but there is definitely a fatigue factor to changing hotels ever couple of days and flying every two or three days. That hit home when we checked in for our flight to Budapest a around 11am on day thirty three. Thing is, the agent gave us our boarding passes for Istanbul/Budapest… and also or boarding passes for Budapest/Split. Since we’d have less than 24 hours in Budapest, it counted as a connection. As Anna noted, it’s a good thing we weren’t checking luggage, because it would have been checked through to Croatia, skipping Budapest entirely.
So after a quick flight, we found ourselves on the ground in Budapest. Neither of us had arrived by plane before, and we didn’t know where exactly our hotel was, but Anna had found a reasonably priced place that seemed fairly central, so we gave the address to the taxi and sat back for the ride, enjoying the approach to the city. And enjoying the bridge over to the Buda side, which was a little surprising since the hotel had mapped as being on the Pest side, but whatever. The ride up past Buda Castle was pretty as well, though once we left that vicinity and continued east, into suburbs and residential areas, the drive started to seem a little long.
The driver was, in fact, quite correct: our hotel was in the boonies. It had a reasonably good view of Budapest, off in the distance, but it was decidedly not a centrally located hotel. There’s this annoying thing about Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and pretty much every online map service I’ve run across: if they don’t recognize a street address, they’ll fall back to mapping where the city is, and put a handy little pushpin there, as if it were the address you’d asked for. Oops. Anna had fallen prey to this annoying quirk, and a hotel that was so far out that its street name has apparently not yet been transcribed to digital form (the maps of this area are probably moldering in a sub-basement of a rural bureaucracy’s abandoned headquarters) was mapped as being literally at the center of Budapest. Argh.
Still, after more than a month of travel, this kind of snafu didn’t phase us. Well, ok, Anna was phased about 10 degrees, but that’s not that bad. We cleaned up a bit, asked the hotel to telegraph a cab for us, and headed back into the city proper to get dinner and do some quality wandering. This was the first city either of us had bee to before (as adults, anyway), and since we’d both bee there before, we didn’t have the same pressing need to walk all over the place and see everything that we did in totally new cities. So it’d be a relaxing evening.
We started with a pretty nice wine tasting spot near Buda Castle, and then I felt I had to have my craving for goulash fulfilled, so we asked the staff there for restaurant recommendations. They helpfully suggested Pom d’Oro, down on the Pest side. So Anna and I hit the funicular (which is, admittedly, pointless but just plain fun, hence the name), and made our way to the restaurant. It was cute! We sat down, admired the decor, got our menus, and realized it was an Italian restaurant. No goulash for me!
Ah well, it was still a great dinner of carpaccio and cheese, and after dinner, we kind of just walked around the city, taking in the sites. Budapest is just a beautiful city, and with the great architectural lighting everywhere, it’s hard to go wrong with pictures. Unless you have recently purchased a really crappy camera, like I did, and it can’t deal with city pictures at night even when braced on walls and stuff. Argh. Oh well, you’ve seen pictures of Budapest at night. It looked like that.
And then, at the end of the evening, it was back to the hotel, which was still a cab ride away (it hadn’t gotten any closer). We made it to the room around midnight, and we were looking forward to getting back to entirely new stuff the next day, when we’d head to Croatia.