May I see your Visa please Ma'am?
Trip Start
Jan 03, 1976
1
106
171
Trip End
Ongoing
Budapest, Hungary
Friday, October 14, 2005
We arrived at Budapest airport and I went through customs, Nat didn't. Nat is South African, and almost everywhere she goes she has to get a visa. So a while ago she got a 6 month visa which pretty much covers most of Europe, but as she discovered at passport control, it doesn't cover Hungary. So she argued, she pleaded, she suggested random solutions, they took her into a back room. She came out and told us she couldn't get in. It was around 10pm on Friday night and the embassy was closed and would be closed all weekend. So for her birthday weekend Nat slept on a couch in the airport arrivals, not even a vending machine nearby. The next morning put her on an 11am flight back to London. Happy Birthday Nat.
Adrian and I arrived at the hotel pretty late after all this and so we were starving, we caught a cab to an area of town Dave had been told about while he was waiting at the hotel. All that was open was Burger King and a pizzeria. We opted for the pizzeria and at least ordered a Hungarian Pizza.
Now it turns out that Dave is a bit of a walker, so we walked back to the hotel. The next day we walked all over town, Dave had picked up a map sponsored by Burger King so we navigated our way around using the many Burger Kings as reference points.
Budapest has many an old and pretty building, which leads to some old & decorative buildings being used for such things as a Doc Martins store. Its right on the Danube river which leads some people to compare it to Vienna so ill have to check that out when im there in November!
We could have done with the BK map while underground in the labyrinth. Caves and tunnels that are under Castle hill go on for ages. They let you wander around a part of it, about 1-2kms and they are supposed to have been used in the Middle Ages for military things. The were quite dark in parts so I was tugging on Adrian's jacket and taking random photos just for a bit of light. One part had a wine fountain, which was very cool. Dave drank from it, brave lad and then realized by the taste that it was probably the same wine recycled through the stone fountain for years. Mm. Yum.
We wandered around for ages searching out this restaurant our hotel reception had sent us to in a hunt for Hungarian food. I slammed my foot in our heavy apartment door last week and have been hobbling around since, so it was a slow hunt. We found it and it even had a piano player, though dodgy toilet locks, Dave rescued a woman locked in her cubicle as the door had stuck! The food was very rich and tasty. We found a bar after dinner that had a late licence (bars/pubs close at 12) and I ordered a Kahlua and milk. They bought out a shot of Kahlua and a mug of hot milk! Interesting, tasty but the hot milk made me rather sleepy.
Sunday morning we sent Dave back to Natasha and went hunting out a statue park. This place was heavily advertised and sounded rather cool, all the old statues of communism that had adorned Budapest's streets together in a park, with communist marches playing as you walked around, you could sit in one of those communist cars, pretend you were stuck in a communist city as things wouldn't work (like a phone box with a phone that didn't work, just sounds like London to me). After a long trek round we got to this park. Which was a patch of grass with some statues dumped in it. Err yes. Some of them were pretty cool statues but if we didn't bust through it and get the bus leaving in 12 minutes we were stuck there for 2 hours. So we ran through it and as we got outside saw the departing bus glinting in the distance. We found another bus that took us further into nowhere but we could change for a bus ride back into town. A wrong bus, a stop at a supermarket and almost 2 hours later we got back into town.
We stumbled on a cave that had been converted into a church and then walked up a hill which had a statue looking out onto the city on the top. We walked around the top and then with a stop for a cup of tea it was time to head back to the airport.
