Budapest, Hungary

I had heard so many great things about Budapest and was really excited to see it. When I arrived I had not booked any accommodation and hoped it would be easy to find it. Little did I know that it was actually the biggest music festival of the year on called sziget. Luck for me I got a bed at the local university dorms through the information centre at the train station.

After reaching the dormitories it took me 3 hours to check in. The place was just packed with people. It was insane! After finally checking in I went out to look around the city. Budapest is actually made up of two parts Buda and Pest divided by the Danube river. Buda, which was where I was staying, is home to castle hill and the very impressive Buda Palace. While Pest on the other hand is flat and is where everything happens. It has all the shops, nightclubs and even the Parliament.

The Buda Palace

The Parliament

The next morning I decide to look around the Buda side of the city and then go to the communist statue park, which is a must see according to my travel guide. I started off walking up the hill to the Citadella and the Liberation Monument. The Liberation Monument was one of the few Soviet monuments to have survived the fall of the iron curtain. The Citadella was a low fortress but today contains nothing much but over priced restaurants and was not worth the climb.

Afterward I went to the Buda palace. The palace was just as impressive up close as it was from the river on its hill looking over the city. And the view from the Palace of the city was very great.

After looking around the Palace I went to the Matyas Church. The church is a reconstruction using the structure of an original church from the 13th century that had survived 150 years of Ottoman rule. During which the church was converted into a mosque. I really liked the detail on the roof of the church and the inside was amazing.

After looking around the church I walked along the river to have a closer look at the Parilament. I think it is the most impressive building in the city and at night it looks even better light up in flood lights.

I then took a tram and a bus to the Communist Statue museum. The weather was so hot. It was about 45 degrees in the Communist Statue park. The Statue park was great and I was even worth standing in the heat to see it. It had a collection of the best communist statues from Budapest. The statues were so big. These photos do not do them justice. Here are a few of the best...

After the extreme heat and exhaustion from walking around the park I went to the Gellert Baths on the way home for a relaxing dip in a thermal pool. These are the best publicized baths in the city and were built in 1913. The baths are so grand that I had to take some pictures of them. I could have got a cheaper ticket to just lie in the thermal pools but I wanted to see the whole complex and it was worth it. The Hungarians takes their baths serious and they have a range of pools for different purposes. I spent most of my time in the inside pool partly because I did not wanting to get sun burnt and partly because the indoor pool was so glamours.

The indoor pool

The next day I felt a bit average so just went to the Hungarian National Museum to learn about the history of this once great empire. It was really interesting and I learnt heaps. That afternoon I logged on to the 'help exchange' website to find some work. Help exchange is a website that helps travelers find work at farms or hostels where they work in exchange for free food and a bed. Sometimes if you are luck they might pay you a little bit on top of that. I found a job at a hostel called La Casa sul Lago in Torricella near Mangione and Perugia in Itlay so I made plans that afternoon to travel to Italy.

The next day before my train left for Florence I went to the Szechenyi Baths. This is one of largest spa complex in Europe and a must see in my option! I could have spent all day there. It had so many different pools. At a guess I would say it had 20 pools, 3 steam rooms and 3 saunas. It was amazing. My favourite pool was the outdoor whirl pool. I could have spent all day being moved around by the water in the whirl pool. All you needed to do was float and the movement of the water did the rest. It was so much fun. I was the oldest person in there by 10 years but did not care. I finally left the pool after 3 hours and took the train to Vienna and then the night train to Florence.