Pest Side

Since we pretty much covered the Buda side yesterday, today we headed for the Pest side.

Bernhard got a booklet of 10 transportation tickets for his CSers to use (very nice of him!). It is common knowledge if you do your Budapest research that ticket checkers on public transportation check tickets "more than people would like". Haha. Anyway, we carried them with us for safety and planned to use them if we got caught. Not very good, but...that's just what we did. And it seems like that's what lots of people do. And my other rationale is that seriously, if cities are going to spend all the time and money to create a working public transportation system, that should include strict methods of checking that people have paid for it. Otherwise they are just asking to be ripped off. It is just too tempting to hop on for a couple of stops if you don't think anybody's going to check. The tram is going that way anyway...

As luck would have it, on our first tram ride of the day we were approached by a man in a dark coat and a white ticket checking badge. Then Laura put on a most admirable show. Aside from being genuinely surprised by some random person speaking to her in Hungarian, once she figured out he was a ticket checker she showed him our tickets and had him walk her through exactly how to validate it. It was a great performance.

Anyway, we walked the rest of the way to our first destination, Heroes Square, which is where they have a lot of statues of different rulers or Hungary dating back quite a long time. Heroes Square is right at one of the edges of City Park (which is a huge park...in the city...). After walking around this area for a while, it was time to set out on another Napi Menu mission.

After even more walking, down some random side street, we finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel, aka a Napi Menu written out on a chalkboard. This Napi Menu was less than $4 for 3 courses, which was all we needed to know. I should mention that at the Italian place a couple of nights ago, I got bolognaise. And then last night when the girls made dinner, they made bolognaise. So imagine my joy when the main course of the Napi meal was...bolognaise. I probably need to change my diet somewhat. At least it's moved on from beer/cheese/chocolate/waffles? We only got the two course meal, so before the bolognaise we were served with a delicious pork and vegetable soup! I practiced my Hungarian with the waiter. Well, I only really know one word, which is 'thank you', pronounced kuh-suh-nuhm. The first time I said it to him though I said nuh-suh-kuhm which was embarrassing. I tried!

After lunch we walked back to the Heroes Square area to the Szechenyi Baths to ask questions. It is difficult to navigate through websites translated from Hungarian to English, so I wanted to ask them questions in person. That was very difficult though. The first lady spoke basically no English, though this is one of the top tourist attractions in Budapest, and the second guy struggled to help me but did very well answering my questions. I felt really badly for having so many questions but I appreciated his effort to help me a lot!

The Heroes Square area also has some random things close by, such as a zoo, a "fun park", a trampoline, tons of balloons being sold, as well as other knickknacks and restaurants. It seems like Budapest has a lot of seemingly random entertainment things dotting the city.

Last stop in this area was to meander through the castle area. But at this point, we've seen so many castles that this one seemed to pale in comparison.

Then we started taking the tram back to Bernhard's place. We stopped outside of the train station, and decided to jump off to reserve our couchettes for our train ride to Poland. I sent my CS requests to people in Poland a couple of nights ago. Yesterday I got a response from somebody that they could host us the whole week - this is awesome! Talking to him more, he wanted to know when our train was coming in. When I looked up the train, I found out that it was a 10 hour train ride!!! I thought it would be like 3 or 4! So good thing I looked that up! Anyway we decided to take an overnight train, hence needing to reserve a couchette (place to sleep).

After our bitter experiences with this train station a few days ago, I thought maybe it would be better today. It wasn't. It was a maze trying to find the signs to where the international ticket center was. So many unclear signs, turns, passageways through souvenir and restaurant areas, and finally, finally we arrived in this dingy corner at the back of the station and reserved our couchettes. That train station is just a mess. It wins the Worst Train Station Of the Trip So Far award hands down.

Then we went home and waited for Bernhard to get home from work. The Canadian girls left this morning so it's down to just us three. We told him we wanted to get some cheap, delicious Hungarian food. So he took us to a "lunch room" buffet and we ordered some different dishes. Needless to say, it was TERRIBLE! It was even expensive by Hungarian standards too since we got like 5 different things to taste. After we were about half way through, Bernhard decided to tell us that this is the place people go when they need something filling and cheap - it is not actually considered to be good food. I was like, seriously why would you bring us here?!? Good thing Hungary is cheap in general, because I LOVE eating, and bad food is a gastronomic waste of my time, money, and taste buds. Ugh. And all I really wanted was a cheap little gyro too...Oh well. At least I got to try some working class Hungarian food?

Bernhard redeemed himself by taking us "up a big hill to a statue" which just happened to be a HUGE hill with a super famous/important statue. This is the hill that the city's citadel is on. The statue is of a woman holding a peaceful palm tree branch. The statue is important because when communism ended in 1989 (not that long ago!!!) it replaced a statue of a Russian holding a gun. Yikes. Anyway, I had read that the city was amazing to look at during the night time, when it's all lit up, and it definitely was. We could see all the places we've walked so far and the castle hill area (with the National Gallery Museum and the Fisherman's Bastion), the famous Chain Bridge, and the parliament really looked fantastic lit up. Unfortunately, my camera is old/lame so I was not able to get any good pictures of it. Hopefully Laura got some. So we spent some time on the hill looking out at the panoramic view of the city and goofed off by taking mustache pictures. Let me explain: when your hair is long enough, you can trap it between your upper lip and your nose, and then you have a mustache. Some exceptions: A) Your name is Laura, and your nose points upwards which makes it very difficult to make a mustache, or B) You are a boy with not-enough-hair, in which case you must borrow hair from a girl with long hair (ergo Bernhard used Laura's hair much more successfully than she did). This must sound ridiculous! But the pictures are hilarious!

I didn't realize that communism was in Hungary until so recently. What I learned about the statue really impressed me; I think it is so neat that this part of the world has changed so much so recently and that we are able to safely travel all these different places.

Anyway, we had a really funny and enjoyable walk back to Bernhard's place. I think with 5 CSers he was a little overwhelmed, and with just the two of us he started to open up a lot more which was great. At the bottom of the hill, close to his house, he took us to a tea house (called "Teahaz"). They had an amazing selection of teas! They also had an area of the tea house where you had to take your shoes off and then you sit on beanbags at your table. It cost around $3.5 for a pot of tea that could serve 6 cups of tea. You typically order one pot per person. Then you sit there for as long as you like, sipping, lounging, chatting. It is glorious. The three of us continued having fun and interesting conversations, but it was a little bit awkward because the area we were sitting in had two couples also on bean bags making out with each other and just in general being very cuddly. So I felt a little out of place, but we just kept to ourselves haha. As we were leaving the teahaz, they offered us fortune cookies and they said there were English and Hungarian cookies. I asked for a Hungarian cookie - thinking it was somehow different from the English cookie (but really it just meant the fortune itself was in Hungarian) so Bernhard came to my rescue and made sure I got an English fortune.

That was the day...After such a mellow tea experience it was quite easy to go to bed.


Quotes:
Laura: "Hilary looks cute and I look dumb, so people tend to like us..."
Hilary: "Little do they know..."
Laura: "We're scamming their system!!!"

Accomplishments:
Finally ate some food I didn't like.

Travel Tip:
It's convenient to be more experimental in cheaper countries.