I had a good time, but we ran into some weirdness upon arriving. First I got approached by a guy trying to change money. I was almost going to do it, like an idiot, but didn't. We had some Slovak crowns left over so we wanted to change them into Forint. We just used the Western Union in the train station. After that the British guys, who ended up going to Budapest that day also were having trouble finding a place to stay. Our hostel was booked, or certainly wouldn't have fit them all.
While they were talking to one guy about a place to stay, another guy came up and told me to let my friends know not to stay with him because he was a "gay bastard." It turns out that the second guy just wanted their business instead. They ended up going with the first guy, we never heard from them again.. As ominous as that sounds, I don't think anything bad happened, it was just a strange situation.
After the train station we headed to our hostel. The place was really cool. It was basically just an apartment with lofts built into some of the rooms so they all had about 6 beds in them. The place was just really cool because it wasn't like a normal hostel or hotel.
That night we set out for a restaurant recommended by a travel book. They were full and we had to wait until 11 to eat, but we took a walk across the Danube to the Buda side of the city. It's the more scenic castle side of the city. Pest is the city part, which is where the restaurant and our hostel was.
The dinner was pretty good. I was hoping for a little bit better, but the portions were huge! The thing about Budapest is the currency exchange is ridiculous. I think every Forint is worth about $0.006, which is great. However, everything costs thousands of Forint. In reality the city was actually more expensive than both Prague and Bratislava.
The next day we headed across town to find a flea market we read about. We didn't end up finding it, but there was a small market nonetheless. There were crafts and some food stuffs like jams and cookies. We got some hotdogs from a stand about bought a jam as a gift to our Couch Surfing hosts in Vienna.
On the way across town we ran into a little museum square. If we had more time maybe we would have gone in one of them, but the architecture was still amazing anyways. In the area there was also a castle. We didn't have enough time to go visit it either, unfortunately. I would definitely like to go back at some point and see the city for real and experience everything. It was still nice, but we didn't get to properly appreciate everything.
Before getting on the train we were walking around the area surrounding it and I thought I heard someone say something to me. As we were turning around one of them asked "How's Texas?" (referencing Cao being from Texas) and it was the two Australian guys we met in Krakow! They were in our room at the hostel. We ended up talking to them for a while and they ended up going to Budapest too. A pretty wild coincidence that in all of the city we ran into them.
Vienna is next!
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