With our experiences on Indian trains still fresh in our minds, we could barely believe the relative luxury that we now found ourselves in! Everything was so clean! There was plenty of luggage space and we even had our own individual seats with personal power point. The complimentary chocolates that we got every now and then were just the cherries on the cake :-)

Our train from Vienna arrived at Budapest main station a little after midday on Tuesday 30 October. We quickly arranged our onward tickets, grabbed a map from the tourist information office and set off for our hostel. We got settled, bought some groceries and made some delicious gormet chicken burgers for a late lunch... Mmmm! That evening we just chilled at the hostel, did a bit of admin and came up with a plan for our time in the city.

Wednesday we were up fairly early to do a walking tour of the city. Our guide was a young local girl who clearly knew a lot about the city and it's history. We eventually finished over the river on the Buda side up at the Mathias Church. We wandered back down through the old city and down to the Old Market where we had some baguette's for lunch followed by some túró rudi, a tradional Hungarian sweet that is a bit like sweet cream-cheese covered in chocolate. We walked back along the main shopping street to our hostel where we relaxed for a while before packing in our cozzie's and catching the subway (2nd oldest in the world after London Underground btw.) to the Széchenyi Baths, the largest medicinal bath in Europe. It was pretty wierd to be "swimming" with the air temperature outside hovering at around 0 degrees! We had a cool time trying out all the different pools and ended up stayed until closing time. We then caught the rickety old subway back to our hostel, stopping for some Lángos (deep-fried bread with sour-cream and grated cheese) before eventually heading upstairs to bed.

Thursday it was raining in the morning so we slept in a bit. We then walked back towards the river to see the very impressive parliament building up close - not being EU citizens, we unfortunately weren't allowed inside :-( Instead we explored a nearby park, and then caught the tram that runs right next to the river all the way along the Pest side. We had a quick warm-up coffee at a quirky little coffee shop before heading back to the hostel for dinner. After dinner we headed out for drinks at some of Budapests infamous "ruin bars," which felt a bit like being back in Obz in Cape Town :-)

Friday we checked out of our room and then left our bags in the storage while we did some more exploring around town. We found a coffee shop bustling with locals whiched we stopped at for coffee and some delicious cakes & pastries. That afternoon Kevin and Jason went on a Communist Walking Tour, which was very good and gave us a much better idea of what it was like living in Hungary during the communist occupation. Monique, meanwhile, headed out to do some shopping and we all met back at the hostel later that eveing for an early dinner. Afterwards, we made the long walk back to the train station where we were just in time to board our overnight train northwards to Krakow...