Ready to leave the first country of my trip! I spent only 5 days in Hungary but I experienced a lot (and I took a lot of building pictures, some would say… haha!)
I was very lucky during my 6 nights in the city to be hosted by super friendly and interesting locals on Couchsurfing and Airbnb, all living in great central neighborhoods. I had a great time with my 2 Couchsurfing hosts: Mark, a dutch citizen of the world currently living in Budapest for work reasons and Peter, a “real” Hungarian loving his city and country, who taught me a lot about current Hungary. Santiago, my b&b host, was a Venezuelan refugee who loves his new life in Europe. It’s great to discover a city through the eyes of proud locals but also of foreigners who have a different perspective. I had a nice dinner in a fancy restaurant with Mark and a great walk with Peter around his neighborhood (he is living behind the Parliament!). Thanks for their generosity!
A great thing when you stay at “real” places is that you also get to discover local apartment house layouts. And Budapest 1900s buildings have a quite peculiar one. All the buildings I stayed in had a nice inner courtyard with the doors to the apartments located on some “hanging floors”. The door often had a window so that you had light getting in the apartment from the inner courtyard side but also from the windows on the street side.
Overall, the language barrier was not a big deal in Budapest. In most of the places I visited (restaurants, thermal baths, sightseeing places), people spoke a few words of English and understood what I wanted! And that’s quite fortunate, because Hungarian is a very special language. It’s hard to understand anything, since only a few words are derived from latin or anglo-saxon languages.
Another good reason to go to Budapest is the great food. There are so many nice restaurants, and the prices are more than fair! I of course enjoyed the famous Gulasch (meat soup) but also great sausage platters or duck meat. If you want a snack, there are many places selling little things out of puff pastry filled with for example sweet cheese or pizza sauce.
Many supermarkets have fresh cooked food and you can buy whatever you like and heat it up at home, and it is very cheap and good! (and almost for free shortly before the supermarket closes at the end of the day!).
I also loved eating this sweet thing with the impossible name as a snack in-between.
The people I dealt with in the city were overall nice and friendly! As an example, as I was walking towards a bus stop, I saw the city bus I had to take to go to Rudas baths arriving and didn’t have time to buy a ticket at the machine, which wasn’t a big deal since the bus drivers also sell tickets (with overprice!). But the problem was that I only had a bigger bill. It was not a huge one, but the driver refused to give me change and looked angry, saying stuff in Hungarian and pointing on a sign in Hungarian and English saying that you need to have the exact change to purchase a ticket. Immediately, without exchanging a single word, an older woman sitting in front of the bus took her purse out and gave me some change for my bill, smiling at me!
My stay in Hungary was a great start of my tour, and I really enjoyed it, but I must admit it was quite hard for me to really relax. I was still very stressed because of the packing weeks and of the rushed departure, and got some annoying emails of the German work agency and health insurance which I didn’t really understand. I had to spend a few hours to call them to clarify things, but after these calls, I was reassured and could start to relax!
Free like a bear 