Budapest

Photo 1: Traditional Goulash for dinner

Photo 2: Dinner with Hungarian family and friends

Photo 3: The rockstar of the family 

Post by: April Donovan

Location: Budapest, Day 10 

Today was the group’s first day in Budapest, a new language, new currency, and a whole new country. We arrived by night train at 9 am, exhausted. We brought our luggage to the hotel and they gave us free breakfast, and by 10:30 we were off on our first bus tour of Budapest. Our tour guide spoke very good English and was a teacher in Budapest. She told us a little about the Hungarian language. It is one of the oldest in Europe. Our first stop on the tour was the city park, where we drove by the oldest zoo in Europe. She then took us to look at one of the many spas that utilized Budapest’s hot-springs. The spa building had beautiful architecture and a faint scent of sulfur from the springs. We could only see the actual pools through a small window. The waters are medicinal and some doctors even prescribe them to their patients to help treat many joint diseases.

After our tour of the park we got back on the bus and went up the hill to the Buda side of the river. She explained to us that Budapest is actually made up of two parts Buda and Pest (similar to Minneapolis/St. Paul), but they were unified in the late 1800’s. The view of the Budapest landscape from the top of the hill was spectacular! However, our tour guide suggested going again at night because “Budapest is like an old woman city, she looks best in candlelight.”

We had a few hours to rest and eat after the tour, and then we were off to a local family’s house for dinner. They made us a delicious goulash dinner with huge bread slices twice the size of my face. We sat and ate in their backyard and talked for hours. The family was a younger couple, George and Agnus and their four kids. One of the boys and their neighbor played guitar for us. We were very glad to have been invited to share a meal with such nice people, and they were equally excited to meet us. Overall, it was a great first day in Hungary.