Not so hungry for Hungary

After our Croatian adventures we quickly wanted to book a holiday to get over our holiday so we decided to keep up our weekend excursions and head over to Budapest for the weekend.

Budapest in its own right is a beautiful and vibrant city with amazing architecture and history. Problem is we could take that statement and apply it to every city in Eastern Europe we have visited during our time here. To be fair to Budapest it was more our tiredness and repetition of such weekend trips rather than the city itself which had us feeling a little lack lustre for this particular trip.

Also the temperature change from our 30+ temperatures in Croatia to a chilly 2 degrees didn't help, beanies and warm layers were dragged out and are now back in use full time.

Budapest has been through much of the same hardships of war as other Eastern European countries, the major difference is that it had a spell of being a dual monarchy with Austria for some time. We learnt more about this monarchy by taking up a free walking tour on the Saturday with a very informative guide, I mean this guy was a walking talking history book! All very informative but at times when the group stood on a street corner frozen and turning shades of blue it was tempting to point out that you can walk AND talk at the same time.

Seems that the king of the dual monarchy at the time favoured Vienna as his flagship city so never wanted any significant building in Budapest to be bigger or better than anything in Vienna. Apparently the Budapest Opera house caused a major royal tantrum as it was such a beautiful ornate building when the king came to see the first performance he remained unimpressed about the performance because he knew the building was better than anything he had in Vienna. Talk about being a spoiled brat!

Fortunately for Budapest it emerged from World War I battered, but now the capital of an independent Hungary. There was little mention of the communist rule of Hungary and for our slightly older guide he was reluctant to discuss anything surrounding that era, perhaps some of this fear of the communist rule lives on?

After our informative but chilly tour, we headed for anywhere indoors to warm up and defrost. The lovely Hungarian wines and stodgy food certainly help with this! Budapest like other cities has a wonderful central food market, dried paprika being a major seller as it is a staple in goulashes and spicing up their other meat dishes. Yes, I bought some!

Budapest is a famous spa city, so we simply had to go "bathing". The baths are really the last vestige of Turkish culture in Budapest, left over from their occupation of the city back in 1541. The thermal baths are surrounded by beautiful old buildings and full of not so beautiful old Hungarian men. It was great moving around the different temperature pools, dashing in between them in the freezing weather. The venue is vast though, so many indoor and outdoor pools, saunas and if you had the money full spa services like massages etc - we didn't have the money.

To complete our weekend whirlwind tour we climbed up to the highest point in the city to take in the views, checked out the palace grounds and tried our last bit of local cuisine. This particular beauty was like eating bread that had been soaked in salt for about a week, not one for anyone that is thirsty but perhaps good straight after a spa where your salt levels might be deficient.

Having seemingly lost our mojo for the city trips we headed back to London a little tired and determined to be more focused about where we go from now on. We might have done our dash in Eastern Europe!