Ruin Pubs

Our timing seems to be great. Today is the last day of "French Days" at Budapest's Central Market. Unsure of what exactly this meant, I of course made it my mission to find out. The Central Market is Budapest's main market, and it was created with the purpose of doing quality-control checks on food that was being sold by farmers. There was some kind of competition over who got to design the building, and different artists/architects submitted their proposals. A panel of judges voted, and then ka-boom: the Central Market was built (a long time ago)! The market now has "Tourism Days" where they pick a theme of some sort (i.e. "French Days") in order to attract more than the usual amount of regulars and tourists.

Sadly, it was extremely to tell what was French about anything in the market. The market is very large and has two floors. It is all in a square shape, with the second level only going around the outer edge of the square, so that you can look down at all the stalls below. The market is somewhat divided into sections for meats, vegetables, etc. but this organization may be out of date - it was a little hard to tell. All the stalls on the ground level are selling fresh veggies and raw meats and fishes for the most part. On the second level, you have more prepared food as well as lots of tourist shops. I decided to be adventurous and chose to spontaneously get something that looked like a red bell pepper stuffed with cabbage (or perhaps it was sauerkraut). It was definitely sour. It tasted a little bit funny but it wasn't bad. I don't think I would get it again, but I'd never seen it before so it was a great $1.5 experiment/snack!

Then after some more walking we finally found a gyro place...I have been craving gyros since we got here!! The gyro was not as great as I expected it to be, but satisfying nonetheless. A 500 ml bottle of Fanta at the gyro place cost 350 FT (200 FT/$1). Around the corner was a little grocery store, where a 1 L bottle of Fanta cost 285 FT. Yes, please! I think Fanta tastes better in Europe...and seriously it is Europe's Coke. Everybody drinks it here, all the time.

After all of our food stops, we began the tedious trek out to the Pálvölgyi cave. It is one of the longest caves in Hungary. Budapest is sometimes called the "City of Caves" because there are more than 250 caves underneath the city! These caves were formed by the thermal waters that also feed the baths the Turks created here when they were in Budapest. It took us four different pieces of public transportation to finally get there, and when we arrived I found out that essentially nothing on the English version of the website was correct. Not that it was a huge deal, but it is a major tourist attraction in Budapest, so you'd think the current information would be up...? One of the reasons I chose to go to this cave over the others is because you get to walk through 500 meters of it (which is nothing considering how HUGE it is, I think something like 2200 meters...), the tour is 50-60 minutes, and it cost 785 FT. And tours start on the hour. So we get there and the lady tells us that the tours start at 3:15, and they close at 4 (so it's obviously not going to be a 50-60 minute tour). The price had also increased to 800 FT. So all that threw me off a little, but it had taken so much time to get there that of course we decided to pay a little more and still go on the somewhat shorter tour.

While we waited I had a glass of Hungarian wine (Hungary is apparently also famous for wine). It was nothing special, but helped pass the time while I FINALLY wrote postcards to some people back home. I have been so bad at postcards during this trip...

The cave tour began and aside from Laura and I there were 4 other Hungarians. Our guide was (at least) bi-lingual, but I swear she would talk for like three or four minutes in Hungarian, while Laura and I started at the wall, and then she would talk for like 30 seconds in English!!! I felt a little jipped, I'm not gonna lie...If it was just in English, the tour for sure would have been like 20-25 minutes. The caves were cool but all electronically lit and they had set up a sound system. So we definitely listened to Enya while we wandered through the extremely well lit passages. Many rock formations were labeled/named as animals, which the guide said was to help their cavers find their way. This might be true, but it felt like a tourist trap to me to distinguish their cave from the other caves here. Thus, the tour was a bit lame and a disappointment, but at least we got to see it, and - and - it was only $4. So really, nothing to cry about.

There was another option for exploring the caves where you could full on Spelunk (look it up) with overalls, a headlamp, etc. where you get to crawl through narrow passageways and get dirty and stuff! I really wanted to do that but it was quite a bit more than $4 and Laura wasn't up for it. Aside from that, getting information in English was SO HARD!!! The lady gave me a brochure on it that didn't have any contact information but said that there were "USUALLY" tours on M/W/F that started "sometime in the afternoon". SERIOUSLY? Hahaha you have to just laugh at these things...Since we are leaving Monday night I didn't think I would have time to take the inconvenient trip by myself to the caves again to go on this tour, so that didn't happen. It just sounded like a cool thing to do to me.

The day was quite warm and there are so many gnats here. Sometimes I feel like I am swimming through them. I even make the motions at times when there is an especially large cluster in my way because otherwise they just hit you in the face and it's gross! Laura said I looked like a weirdo, but I'm OK with that. I'm not a bug person.

There is also a lot of cotton in the air. All of this sometimes makes it so that you can't yawn when you want to for fear of breathing in gnats and cotton! Yuck.

Laura was tired of walking around aimlessly, didn't want to go back to Bernhard's (I didn't either), and didn't really want to spend money - which quite limits things available to entertain us. We settled on the teahaz again because it was so cheap and delicious, it's a great place to just sit and talk and pass the time. We went back to our bean bags, which in the late afternoon was not occupied with couples yet, got more delicious tea, and we split an Armenian chocolate cake. Which was incredible. We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on those bean bags, really proud of ourselves for finding a 'favorite' spot and going to someplace twice in one city for the first time!

Eventually, we strolled back to Bernhard's where I finally ate my leftovers from that Italian place the first night with some Hungarian wine that Bernhard shared with us. He tried to share another type of Hungarian wine with us but somehow did not have a wine key. We spent far too long battling with a plain corkscrew trying to get the darn cork out, but to no avail.

After dinner, we had plans to go with Bernhard to meet up with his friends Dirk (from Germany) and Jimmy (from the US, working at the embassy here). Dirk and Jimmy were both really nice, and we chatted with them for about an hour and a half waiting for Dirk's CouchSurfer to arrive (she was out on the town). Finally Dirk said we should go on without him and he would meet up with us later. So the rest of us set out...

Another thing Budapest is famous for (I know this is like the fourth thing - they're famous for a lot, I guess!) are places called ruin pubs. This is where people invade evicted, run down, ready to be demolished buildings, and turn it in to a scrappy pub. I don't think they have to pay rent for these undesirable buildings, and they stay there until the police find out about them and kick them out or decide to destroy the building. They are down super random streets and are usually hard to find unless you know some one. I'm not sure how much of this story has changed with the times - some of these places seem pretty secure in their set up, but they keep the vibe grungy.

The first one we went to was awesome!!! I love ruin pubs, I think they're so cool. It was mostly outdoors, only the bathrooms were inside. There was also a completely empty room not being used inside, which they maybe use in colder weather. However all the drinks were served outside. The open courtyard was surrounded on two sides by this dilapidated building, and the other two sides with ply wood. There were also rafters set up, graffiti everywhere, the ground was gravel, and chairs and tables were mismatched (Bernhard says these places literally will get their furniture from a dumpster sometimes). It sounds kind of gross but it's totally fun and crazy! I've never seen or even heard of a pub like this. Needless to say the bathrooms were straight up filthy...but I have a thing for taking pictures of cool graffiti, especially words/phrases/really interesting pictures. In my head I'm going to turn it into a sweet exhibit someday, but given my extremely limited artistic talent realistically it'll just look like weird pictures on some wall of some future dwelling. Anyway there was a good graffiti picture which made using it acceptable in my mind.

Beers here were $2 - fantastic. One comforting thing (I guess) is that terrible, cheap beer tastes the same in every country. You can always count on that. Soon, Dirk came with his CouchSurfer named Michelle who is from Singapore but lives/studies in New York. He also brought another friend named Mark, and our little group stayed at this ruin pub for a little while before moving on to the next one. This next one was extremely similar (as I think they all probably are), but the two we went to are supposed to be two of the better ones in Budapest. One of the reasons I know this is because in Budapest, ruin pubs aren't called ruin pubs, they're just called bars. So when I asked Bernhard if he knew of any good ruin pubs, he didn't have an answer because he didn't understand that I was just asking for a good bar. So, I joined a group on CouchSurfing for people in Budapest, and posted a discussion item asking for good ruin pub suggestions. I got 4 responses for a total of 10-15 links, names, and other helpful information!!! I was astounded. Our access to information and the helpfulness of strangers is so incredible, it never ceases to amaze me. Anyway, both of the places we went were on the list of recommendations!

At the second ruin pub, I got into a very long conversation with Mark about soccer which was really fun. It is so cool to relate to people over soccer, even if you know close to nothing else about them. Jimmy ended up falling asleep there which apparently is typical of him...weird haha. I should note that I was sitting in the back seat of a chopped-in-half really old junk car. That was the bench. These places are awesome. We ended up staying out until 330, and by the time we got home it was 4 AM. We tend to have one really late night per city.

I feel like we've done pretty much what there is to do in Budapest, but we still have 3 days left. It is really nice to not be rushed and I don't think we'll be bored...but really we don't know how we're going to fill up three more days! I think it will start by sleeping in though...


Accomplishments:
Went to ruin pubs!

Travel Tip:
Going to the same place twice feels great - like you're starting to settle into a city. Don't think you always need to be doing something new.