Emma Joan

Afternoon dolls,

I hope you all are having a very lazy Sunday. As I sit and look outside at the dismal Irish weather it got me reminiscing back on sunnier times, so I decided to write up the next instalment of my travel diary. This time on Budapest.

Okay, can I start with a question, what is the deal with Hungarian currency? My god it was so confusing, casually taking out 30,000 out of the bank! You definitely need to be on the ball when dealing with prices over there, though it is cheap it is easy to miss a 0 on the tag and end up paying more than you realise. Trust me it happens.

So to start it off, we took a night train from Krakow to Budapest (those trains are great craic and would definitely recommend taking them if you can), so we got there in the morning and had all day to do whatever we wanted. It ended up being really hot so we went to the Baths. We went to the main baths in massive park. They have three different outdoor baths at different temperatures and loads of different pools indoors along with saunas and steams rooms all set a different temperatures. The perfect place to wind down after a lot of travelling wouldn’t you say. It was the equivalent of 15 euro to get in for the entire day but it is worth it. After traveling around a load of cities in a short space of time it is nice just to be able to lay out in the sun for a day.

We went on the free walking tour of the city the next day. It was good and you get to see the main touristy areas of the city, and learn some of the history. I will say it was not as good as the tour in Berlin but that may have been because Berlin had a lot more history plus the guide was brilliant so it is not fair to compare.

The next day we wandered around the city and went out to Margret Island which is in between Buda and Pest. It is just a massive park, where the locals seem to come for jogs etc. It does have a massive fountain as you come onto it where the water is synchronised with music, and you can just sit around and watch it.

As for going out we went on a pub crawl the first night in the Jewish district and the second night we went on a boat party on the Danube which was amazing. Both these events were organized by our hostel. For the boat party there was a couple different hostels in on it, so there was a load of people on it. Plus the boat gave out free booze! Where could you go wrong?  Our Hostel was called the Sexy Tractor, yes that really was the name of it. It was run by an Irish guy so I suppose that explains the name! But I would highly recommend staying there if you’re thinking of going. It was only 7 euro a night and was really good craic, so definitely check it out.

So that is it for Budapest. It is not just a party city (though they know how to),it is good for shopping and it is also really pretty to wander around in. although if you do decided to go wandering maybe stay on the Pest side as its laid out like New York and not that hard to navigate around. However the same cannot be said for Buda. Even Brad Pitt got lost there and had to ask his own photographers how to get back to Pest. It has all that plus it is really cheap therefore I would recommend going there for a break. You will not regret it. As for the rest of the posts I promise to have the last three up in the next week hopefully along with two outfit posts if I can find the time. I am actually moving to New York next weekend so I am trying to sort myself out for that. I want to get back into writing and blogging and now that I am going away I hope I will have a lot to write about.

Emma x.