Budapest at last

 Getting from Bucharest to Budapest isn’t particularly easy. Driving the 10 hours wasn’t an option because we needed a one way rental, and the train took 16 hours. Best choice? Fly, and Eurowings, a low cost German airline, was the cheapest.

Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t pay to go the cheap way, the tickets they sold us would have us arriving at 3:30pm. We finally got here 6 hrs later.  By then I was exhausted, frustrated, and angry. Even Brian, who doesn’t get emotional, described the day as a total beating. 

But, as tired as we were, discovering what a mistake I had made in our choice of hotel just made us laugh. We are in a riverboat on the Danube with the best possible view of the river and city. Sounds like a cool place- a novelty and perfectly located, right?

All true, but our cabin is so tiny that the bed is in an alcove, just inches away from the walls, so I have to climb in and out. There is no place for luggage, and the whole room lists heavily to starboard. It’s uphill to the bathroom, but that whole room is slanted to the port side. It feels like one of those touristy, antigravity, mystery houses.  And, although the description said they had a restaurant, turns out that it’s just where they serve breakfast and the minibar was cold but empty.  

Sooooo, that’s why I didn’t post a blog entry.

The world looks a whole lot brighter after sleep and food!  Our Budapest visit began with a strudel cooking lesson. We made three kinds of strudel- apple, cheese, and zucchini, and added cheeses, salami and wine for lunch. It was delicious but no, we won’t be making strudel at home. Everything was easy until it came to stretching the dough. It had to be stretched so thin that you could read a newspaper through it.  Needless to say, we kept tearing holes snd you can’t fix those. 

After the class we rode the Hop On Hop Off bus  and ended the day with a Hungarian dinner. Goulash! And yes, I’ll definitely be making that in the future.  Tomorrow we have an excursion to a medieval village and a fortress away from the city.  We will finish our visit tomorrow night with a nighttime Segway tour. Budapest is a very lovely city especially at night. 

Our hotel 

The Parliament 

Goulash Stew