Trip to Budapest: Day 3 - Handbags and Chocolate

For the start of this trip, go here.
Actually, first I would like to tell you about our late dinner att the Bock Bisztro restaurant, which we read about in the Micheling Guide. What the guide said was all true, the bread was top notch, the advice was great (we passed on ox cheek and lamb brain, but, hey, we *could* have eaten it if we wanted). It was one of the seven restaurants we had mapped out beforehand, and it wasn't until rechecking the map that we realized it was actually in the same building as our hotel (the Corinthia)! You actually need to book a week ahead to get seats, but I took a chance and asked them and luckily for us they had a cancellation yesterday. The visit was really worth it.

First we started of with assorted meats from chef Lali's pantry.

And superb homemade bread with butter/seasoned pork fat (nicer than it sounds)

I had crispy pork chops with the bone left. If I was to reflect on something I have seen on my trips to Romania, South Africa and Hungary, it is that they really do full, traditional meat dishes much better than us. All the stuff that makes you stay non-vegan, they do full out instead of doing bland meat balls and small fat-free meat that sometimes feels just somehow "correct" in boring sense. This is the "Original" experience in full (stomach) colorama.

And my wife had the very nice Angus beef filet.

All this for 250 SEK/40$ per person, which really isnt much for a place worth mentioning by the Michelin guide. Go there!

Today then started again with full breakfast, one we couldn't quite enjoy fully due to still being stuffed from the meal last evening, but that wasnt the hotel's fault...

We then visited the Alexandria book cafe with its nice Art Deco front, and a fantastic cafe on the second floor. We werent in the mood for it, but if you want to have a coffe break in a room looking like a palace, that's the place to go.

image from: welovebudapest.com

After that we went to the Parliament building. The queues were a bit to long for us, but we were impressed with its size and style, built a little more than a 100 years ago. Really, in general, if you like looking at historical architechure, Budapest is just glorious. Really, roughly 90% of the central city is just a bonanza of house upon house, often covering whole city blocks, in different states of need of repair, but so fun to watch. Statues and ornaments everywhere, too.

We then went to a modern shopping mall, the Westend shopping center, just at the Western Railway Station (Nyugati Palyaudvar). Its a modern three storey shopping mall with the usual mixture of shops, a cinema, bank, and restaurants that you find all over the western world nowadays. If you like handbags, this is the place to go, we saw (and visited...) probably 20 shops. From a neutrale male perspective, I would say the bags looked mostly nice and came at a nice price around 200-400 SEK (30-60$) each, with a few high-end shops too.
If I am to make a general observation on female fashion markers in Budapest I noted two things that stood out as different from home:
1. Bling bling and studs. The hungarians really seem to like them, they where on every other item, be it clothing or bags.
2. (Fake) leather jackets, often some kind of glorified biker style look (yes, thats my description, live with it..)

Bags, bags everywhere, and not a shop to skip...

Here I would like to comment shortly onreally the only dissapointment on this trip, and that is the cinema, or rather the lack of non-dubbed cinema. Both our excellent guide book and the excellent hotel personnel seemed to be quite convinced that "most of the movies" was shown both dubbed and in original language with just hungarian subtitles. This was not true, if you dont count 4 movies out of 30, non of them any of the current popular ones. The thing is, I know about the culture of dubbing all and sunder in Italy, Germany and so on, but there they are open about it. The disappointment here was saying one thing and then finding something else. Time to learn english, fellow hungarians, and the only way to do that is to listen to (and read) english!

Well, lets not stay on that small matter. On our way from Westend, I scouted one of those murkey alley shops that I so much love (and my wife dont quite like as much), it being a heavy metal t-shirt shop. My metal girl changed her mind after finding herself a cool dragon t-shirt. ^_^

We went down to the Donau, were south of the Margaret bridge there are several antique shops, but they were not in our price range, with prices starting at 700 SEK (100$) an going upwards. Probably quite OK prices, but not here and now for us. Instead we headed downtown to a lunch at Burger King. Having walked rougly 15 km in two days, we were beginning to feel it in our feet, so we went walking nearby to St Stephens Basilica, which was quite nice with a choir practicing just when we arrived.

OK, you latin nerds. Decode that and then read the answer here.

Just off the basilica square is the chololate store Hungaricum Dessert we visited yesterday. I cannot press enough that you should visit this oasis if you have time and like cholocate. They had maybe a hundred different small chololate sorts, some just newly composed, and you could get chololate to drink or even chocolate soup. (*And* they have nice toilets. I kid you not, toilets are not that popular in Budapest it seems, so treasure the ones you find...)

Anyway, we tried all kinds of tastes. the cost for 14 small candy treasures was roughly 100 SEK (15$), which of course isn't cheap, but well worth this one time experience.

Yummy!

Trip to Budapest: Day 2 - Downtown and Uptown

If you want to read about the trip from the start, go here.
Today was the day we would go to the eastern side of Budapest, the "Pest" side, and visit the royal district up on Castle Hill, and then do some shopping. The weather was quite harsh at times, with cold northern winds just a few degrees above zero and some light rains, which was what made us finally decide on skipping Gellert Hill.

Szechenyi Chain Bridge

Donau to the south of the bridge, with Gellert Hill to the right

The Mathias Church and Fisherman's Bastion from afar

Wiev of the Parliament from the Fisherman's Bastion

The Mathias Church

Inside the Church

Lots of tesselation, that was fun as we just covered this in my math class...

God's and saints hanging out and keeping watch on their turf

The Buda side. Budapest is divided by the Danube much like Uppsala is, in my personal opinion. The western Buda side is more green and more hilly while the Pest side is flat and more built on.

The Roayl castle, which holds several museums (historical, modern art)

Excellent cholocate shop break.

Vegetables at Nagyesarnok, The Great Market Hall.

If you like sausages or market halls in the least, you have to visit Nagyesarnok. The prices on hungarian sausages are just fantastic. We bought 1.5 kilos and we stayed below 100 SEK/15$. 

On the upper floor you instead have a lot of stalls for clothing, jewelry, toys and more.

 If you like leather in any form of clothing, Jajcica is the place to go. They have quite the collection of used clothing, and not just leather, but that was the main thing. I saw racing overalls, heavy metal jackets, and lots and lots of boots. Prices are OK, but not cheap. Nothing that would stop you from bying *that* piece, but you wont spend money on stuff just for the sake of it.

Boots

And more boots

Day 3 is here.

Trip to Budapest: Day 1 - Old style

Being teachers with normal salaries, when going on vacation, staying on five star hotels is never an option especially when you have three children. That what makes eastern European cities like Budapest such a great thing at the moment. The iron curtain has lifted but economically they are still much cheaper then their western counterparts. As we left our children with the grandparents, we hade no problem of having a three night stay at five star luxury hotel Corinthia. Getting your luggage carried and excellent room service, top notch breakfast and silent rooms, thats all in a price that you pay at a normal way-side hotel in Sweden (yes, OK, its maybe a little more expensive, but really *5 star*). To be honest several things comes with extra charge, but the only one you really have to consider is the breakfast, and yes, it is worth the extra money.

Arriving in Budapest we used the very effective transfer buses that you could book easily as youwaited at the luggage drop, with a half-hour drive to your hotel. It costs roughly 2200 forints (65 kr/10$) per single trip.

The hotel is fresh and tip top. We didnt actually use the spa, but it seems extensive even though not especially cheap (but then I dont do that stuff normally either). I would say it is on par with Swedish prices.

Both at the airport and beforehand in guides you are adviced to buy the subway/bus card, but it comes at roughly 300 SEK/45$.If you live close to the center (we stayed roughly 1 km from the central shopping district Vaci Utca close to Donau) and are not adverse to walking 20 minutes here and there, you dont really need to travel by bus/train. The one exception could be Gellert mountain, which we passed on as the imposing hill seemed to much, especially this cold spring. Normally the weather is fair spring weather this time of year, but during our stay it stayed around +5 degrees.

We started with walking downtown and found quite a number of nice stalls with handicrafts and foodstuffs of local character around the Vörösmarty square. I'm sure some of it was like when they sell Viking helmets in Sweden, but other things felt more genuine in some sense. After that stroll we went for some fine culture at the State Opera.

Excellent lamb chops

Beef gulasch with majgaluska

Preparation of ...

... kurtoskalacs pastries

Here by the brand Vites Kurtoz

View of Donau and Varhegy (Royal mountain) beyond

The Budapest sping festival was at its final week when we visited, and we had booked tickets at the Hungarian State Opera to watch the Wagner opera Parsifal, actually without ever had conciously listened to it or read up on the story, which in hindsight maybe wasnt sooo smart. Central Budapest, at least, seems to have been spared most of the bombing or communistic destruction and ugly buildings that other European cities was struck by last century, and walking there is quite interesting if you are the least fascinated by stone architecture, and the State Opera is one of many buildings that carries that central European heritage that is somehow a mixture of dark and light, hope and age.

Back to our visit, the first thing you should know about Hungary is that the language is like no other in Europe with the exception of finnish and estonian. This means you cant manage as well as usual on your english and french/german/italian/spanish skills to guess the meaning of words. I can usually get by quite well with that, but here it really was allmost impossible. So you better come prepared or hope that they know some neglish (which they seemed to quite often). We had to ask where our seats was several times, but I have to say everyone we have interacted with here have been very helpful and nice, really.

The opera itself? Well: 1. It is five hours! Yes. So with seats that maybe didnt have the optimum comfort (not too much holstery...), and singing in german, when the first act ended and we realized it wasnt over but had just started, we felt we had heard and enjoyed the ambience and the music and could leave as staying would only mean more of the same with increasing pain. We did stay and had a drink in the beatiful rooms upstairs, though, after which we walked home in the evening sunshine.
I must say the music was a real eyeopener - I mean, it was like hearing music from the Lord of the Rings movies or a number of other modern classics. So it was kind of a history lesson beyond that of Wagners connection with german history. But next time I go to an opera, I will go to a shorter one, and preferably one in a language I can follow better.

All in all a nice start of our trip here, one that ended with some cozy movies and a dinner ordered with room service.

Day 2 is here