Travel In Budapest
Travel Tips for Budapest
The west bank of the Danube is Buda and the east bank is Pest. Buda is quieter and has more major historical attractions while Pest has better nightlife and amenities.
Budapest is an incredibly cheap city to visit given the size and amenities. Staying in Buda is cheapest.
Iconic attractions line the Danube, but spend some time in City Park on the north side of town for lesser known attractions that are just as amazing.
You must buy a bus or trolley pass before entering the vehicle. As we quickly discovered, tickets aren’t sold on them.
Parliament tours begin on the north side of the building underground. Seems like trivial help, but it’s not obvious given how enormous the building is in person!
Our Travels In Budapest
Visiting Budapest wasn’t part of our original travel plan.
Unlike London, cost wasn’t the problem, it was just further from other options and there wasn’t a huge draw in the city before we began traveling. All I knew about Budapest was the iconic architecture which wasn’t enough to visit. Our own travel philosophy even kept us away because we prefer to travel to a few places in a new country for a chance to experience many parts of its culture. Budapest alone doesn’t represent the Hungarian people, culture, or energy. However, the closer we got to eastern Europe the more we kept hearing how much fun Budapest was from other travelers. Our own friends that had visited even started asking if we were traveling to Budapest. Finally, in neighboring Austria, we decided that we couldn’t pass it up! Travel to Budapest became a priority before leaving Europe.
The only problem reaching Budapest was that it wasn’t well connected to other major cities. Trains didn’t run to Budapest from Vienna which was surprising given it’s size. Plus, you know, at one point they were the same country. Fortunately it was still in the Schengen and a few hours on a FlixBus would get us there! While our ride into Budapest was easy enough, our first ride through Budapest was not.
We stepped off the FlixBus into a world where we were illiterate. Czech was a tough language to decipher but Hungarian was basically impossible! Nobody was understandable and nobody spoke English. What we did know was that we needed a ticket into town on a street car. We searched the station, on the street car, and around the platforms but we still swear that there was nowhere to buy a ticket. Surely this wasn’t free, right…? Right. We left without a ticket, and just before reaching our stop, a transportation officer caught us! We were escorted off the street car in central Budapest and given two options: Pay the fine now, or involve local police to plead our case. As if we needed time to choose?! Thankfully the fine was only $30 each plus the cost to our travel pride.
The officer also included a day pass for other street cars and busses in our fine so at least we got day tickets the hard way. Rough start, but things improved from there. Mostly. There are a few things we could have done differently to have a better Budapest experience.
We could have taken better advantage of Budapest’s famous night life of bars and energy, but we didn’t visit many. Our favorite bar was also one of the coolest bars we experienced in Europe - Szimpla Kert. It’s a ruin bar which means it’s built in the literal ruins of another building! Like a video game, the two story bar is actually a series of smaller bars connected by scaffolding, sheet metal, and spare stuff. Imagine a post apocalyptic bar with neon everywhere and you’ll be close to visualizing this interior. No way OSHA let’s this thing stand back home because they probably serve as much tetanus as alcohol. Can’t say their drinks were better than other bars, but when I can watch a movie on a bean bag inside a room with pulsing dim purple lights and a cocktail in hand, you know it’s a special kind of special. Budapest has many ruin bars but the city is so big that we couldn’t easily reach many. We couldn’t easily explore at night, but we could during the day.
We could have explored deeper into the city by searching for more Kolodko Mini Statues. Artist Mihály Kolodko created a series of tiny statues that are on display across Budapest. Each holds satirical or creative significance to its location based on Hungarian politics or events. The statues are only a few inches tall and hidden in plain sight. There’s a tiny tank with a broken barrel on a stair case aimed at Parliament. A rabbit peers through a spyglass looking down at Pest from a high point in Buda. We found many, but it wasn’t until our last day that we wished we’d found more. They’re a great way to frame the city in a different context while teaching about history and culture. Local culture actually became a recurring problem thanks to the lack of vegetarian options.
We could have better researched vegetarian food. Hungarian food itself is delicious! Give me a goulash or chicken paprika and I’ll give you back an empty plate. However, give me a vegetarian in Hungary and we’ll both give you a hard time. Hunting for vegetarian versions of Hungarian food mostly led to failure before finding a veggie burger, cheese pizza, or falafel. One day we happily found a Michelin recommended Latin American restaurant with a beautifully plated vegetarian sampler dish! See that meal? It was our most disappointing meal in Europe. We were offered extra table salt as our meal arrived which is totally out of place but we quickly found out why. Everything tasted like beige! If you lost your taste during covid this will be familiar. A lime wedge shouldn’t be the most flavorful part of a dish! Can’t say we went to bed happy with that meal, but I sure woke up to a nice surprise!
If you’ve seen my landscape and nature portfolio then maybe you also read the blurb about me being absolutely awful at sunrise. Nothing’s changed, I hate sunrise photography. However! We stayed very very close to a few city icons so I got myself up that next morning to photograph the Chain Bridge. The photography gods decided to bless me with thick fog across the Danube! The fog smothered the river and bridge to the point that not even sunrise light was visible. No drivers were awake to ruin my view so I came away with a proper foggy Budapest photo! It was our last morning so we didn’t get a chance wake up early again, but that made me wonder how many foggy mornings I had missed. Speaking of mornings…
We definitely missed out on the famous bath houses thanks to a small bug that Chandni caught. Hungary has many hot spring bath houses that are beautifully constructed and filled with hot spring water. Our visit to a famous one across town was planned and ready to go. We got up and out in the chilly morning, caught the early (for us…) bus, but before we arrived the illness got the best of her so we ditched out to instead visit an enormous nearby park. The bath houses are mostly outdoors so changing temperature from a hot spring to an extremely windy cold morning when changing pools didn’t sit well with her. Can’t say I was looking forward to that either!
Side note, this is maybe the coolest building design I’ve ever seen! We only stumbled upon it thanks to abandoning our bath house outing and exploring that park. This building being the Museum of Ethnography might make you ask, “What’s Ethnography???” just like I did as I wrote that instead of Néprajzi Múzeum. As I just learned, it’s a museum dedicated to the study of culture of the Hungarian people, and like I said, it’s one of my favorite buildings! Just look at it! It’s a curved national museum with part of a city park on top. This is actually only half the building because the other part doing this exact same curvy thing is on the other side of the plaza. It was closed when we arrived, but tell you what, I’d have visited no matter what it exhibited just to visit the interior.
Anyways, back on track just in time for the last paragraph!
Budapest wasn’t our favorite city. Sure, we could have made other choices or explored differently, but that wouldn’t have changed many of our difficulties. We still would have had trouble finding interesting vegetarian food. Bars and nightlife weren’t easy to reach or return from if you’re across town. You can’t plan for illness taking you down for a day or two. Thankfully we hit the major highlights and enjoyed what we saw, but after leaving we couldn’t decide what we would do if we returned. Is a luxurious bath worth crossing Europe? Probably not. Did I love Hungarian food enough to ask my señorita to go on a falafel cheese pizza diet for a while? Nope. So while we enjoyed Budapest we also agreed that there are other cities we’d rather visit in Europe and abroad. We’ll talk about one of those on the next post!
