Schmidt Adventures: Beautiful Budapest

The Szechenyi baths were amazing!

We loved Budapest! That said, the weather wasn’t great (thunderstorms everyday), the River Danube had flooded its banks, I was still recovering from a cold that wouldn’t end, and Katherine got a terrible case of mono and couldn’t come at the last minute. So why did it leave such a great impression?

Budapest just had this… feel about it.   It was relaxed and friendly but also energetic, vibrant, and a little edgy. The food was unique but comfortable. The local wine and beer were tasty and the coffee fantastic. The service was amazing, and everything was inexpensive. For $40 per night we had a three-room apartment downtown, allowing us avoid mass transit for almost the entire weekend.   The trip was timed well, too: after many guests in rapid succession it was great to spend a couple relaxing days alone together.

I blame our busy summer (and totally not laziness) for us arriving in Hungary without any sort of map, guidebook, or plan. The extent of our knowledge about Budapest was that it used to be three cities: Buda and Obuda to the west and Pest to the east, separated by the River Danube. The Buda side holds a castle and behind it, miles of suburbs, while the Pest (prounounced Pesht) side has most of the hotels, shopping, sights, and restaurants. The truly beautiful city sits on 80 hot springs, making it the (self proclaimed) spa capital of the world.

Standing on the Buda side, taking a picture of the Parliament building on the Pest side across the Danube river.

The airport was a train and subway ride away from the hotel, and we made it there with only one small issue: my ear never popped on the descent into Budapest. Congestion is the enemy of comfort in any case, but in the setting of air travel it can be really painful. We detoured to a pharmacy where the salesperson used a Google translator tool to figure out exactly what I needed. I traveled a lot before the Google age and let me tell you: taking the first pill after an awkward game of symptoms charades is really scary. (Here’s to hoping I managed to communicate ‘allergic to chloramphenicol’! ) Anyway, technology is awesome. We had my medicine and were on our way to the apartment in a matter of minutes.

As I alluded to earlier, we were shocked by how spacious our apartment was. It was only five minutes’ walk from the main subway hub/city center and two minutes from the Great Synagogue… and must’ve been a thousand square feet. When he realized Katherine wasn’t joining us, the manager knocked the price down even more. What?!

It was a lazy first day. We lounged for a bit, ate a delicious, cheap, long, late lunch at a place called Spinoza’s around the corner from the hotel, and then wandered around the city for a while. Then the sky suddenly changed from blue to grey to black and minutes later we were scurrying around trying to find cover from an incredible thunderstorm. There’s a lot of rain in England - cold drizzle mostly - but never any thunderstorms! The rain came in sheets and at one point lighting struck close enough to make us (literally) jump. We tried to hide in a coffee shop for a while but finally accepted our fate and walked back to the hotel, arriving completely soaked but still warm, which was a strange sensation after living in England for two years.

Flooded Danube. The river isn't supposed to come past those trees - there's a road and walkway under that water!

By the time we had cleaned up for dinner, the sky had returned to its pretty blue. We walked a couple blocks into the Jewish Quarter and sat at an outdoor café in the cutest little square where we sat for a couple hours over a few ($2) glasses of wine and some appetizers, enjoying the warmth of fleece blankets handed out by the waiters as the sun set. The night was gorgeous, so instead of going straight back to the hotel we detoured through the city to see the Buda castle and the Parliament building lit so prettily.

Buda Castle lit at night.

My stupid cough had me up most of the night, so the morning seemed to come way too fast. Luckily, an awesome breakfast and coffee (again around the corner at Spinozas) had me ready for the bike tour Chris found online. We showed up to the appointed spot and met our tiny, sweet guide Lulu with her awesome bike earrings. Lulu was not a typical guide…. I think she really just enjoyed riding her bike (she was seriously zippy) and loved to show off her city. The three of us chatted the whole time like old friends and ate ‘the best goulash in the city’ for lunch. We made it 3:45 of the four-hour tour before the storms returned. Lulu was in no mood to ride in the rain, so we instead stopped at a fancy desert place, bought some ridiculously amazing chocolate cake, and sat under the cover of the Buda castle until the rain let up.

Lulu the zippy bike guide, her friend, and Chris.

Drinking mineral water bottled straight from the spring. It was quite like drinking a warm hard-boiled egg.

Symbolic iron curtain.

Buda side.

Our last stop of the day was the House of Terror, a museum and memorial dedicated to remembering the victims who suffered under Stalinist and fascist regimes in Hungary. The museum is housed in the former headquarters of the ATV , the Hungarian communist secret service similar to the Soviet Union's KGB. It takes guts to air your worst sins to the public, and the museum made no attempt to attenuate the atrocities committed by both regimes. This simple but profound quote by Atilla Jozsef was in the museum's pamphlet: "The past must be acknowledged". I've never seen anything like this museum and am not doing it justice in the explanation, but there were multimedia displays including video interviews of survivors, the rooms used for torture were available for inspection, and the very last display was of photos and names of the perpetrators of the atrocities, some of whom are still alive today.

Our last day in Budapest was split between touring the Great Synagogue (the largest in Europe) and lounging at Szechenyi, Budapest’s most famous bathhouse and spa. The day started off somberly at the Synagogue, where we learned more about the Jewish culture of Budapest and just how drastically it had been altered by Nazi Germany.

Inside the Great Synagogue.

Mass graves of more than 2000 Budapest Jews who died in the Jewish ghetto in 1944.

Weeping willow memorial tree with names of Hungarian victims of the Holocaust.

From there we hopped on the second-oldest underground train line in the world (the oldest being here in London) to get to the Szechenyi baths. We didn’t really know what to expect from the city bath house but basically we paid our entrance fee, changed into bathing suits, and then walked a few feet into a really grand central courtyard. Pictures explain this better than words:

Our first view of the baths.

There was a an outer ring of buildings and inner, open-air courtyard with three huge pools fed constantly by natural springs that kept the water quite warm and really clean. The pool on the left was the temperature of warm bathwater and had a natural whirlpool and jaccuzi-like jets in the floor. The middle pool was cool and for lap swimming, and the pool on the right was hot-tub hot. Surrounding these pools was a deck to relax on and peripheral to the deck were buildings that housed a gym, some restaurants, a multitude of saunas and pools of different temperatures (again, fed naturally by the underground springs.) We hadn’t seen almost any sun in England this year and had definitely not had a day warm enough to lay in bathing suits by the water, so were overjoyed at the prospect of getting a tan! We set ourselves up on a couple chairs in a far corner and spent the whole afternoon lounging, reading, and swimming. It was fabulous! We sipped on the wine that we had ‘snuck’ in, not realizing that picnics were allowed and encouraged. Next time we'd bring a cooler!