FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX: Bathing in Budapest

The UNESCO World Heritage listed Hungarian Parliament Building

With Hungary being an hour behind Romania, and a late start (relatively!) of 9am we all enjoyed our sleep in and walked out to a warm sunny day! We had to produce our own breakfast for the first time in two weeks so we made Lara do it. We all came to the same conclusion that Hungarian eggs must be quite different to eggs at home because they seemed to just dent rather than crack. Oh well, crucnchy scrambled eggs was better than none at all. We made it to the Hungarian Parliament with plenty of time to spare for our 10am official English tour. We had prebooked our tour but tickets can be purchased onsite. I would not advise the latter as our group was full despite visiting in the low season.

Our tour went through one half of the gigantic symmetrical building. I won't bore you with the details and history as the route was well described on the website. The interior was stunning and a lot more "tasteful" than the Romanian counterpart. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos in the central dome as the Hungarian Crown Jewels were on display. They were only returned to Hungary in 1978 after being held in Fort Knox for much of the cold war! The tour lasted around 50 minutes which was just nice.

Tours start in the visitor centre and can be purchased online or onsite

Entering through the "golden" staircase because the ceilings were lined with gold! All hand painted on

Gorgeous views out of the windows

The ash trays had numbers so members could "park" their cigars, enter a session, and resume their smoke afterwards...

Even the windows were hand painted

The Grand Stairway

The chamber of peers

Top view!

Statues of the common people as a reminder of who the parliament are serving

We took advantage of the beautiful weather to wander around the city. Budapest is full of funky cafes and restaurants, and cosmopolitan enough to offer a good variety of cuisines. The trick was trying to walk far enough away from Tourism central without going too far away from our next destination. Funky pho won the honour of being our lunch destination. Vietnamese diners who have visited reviewed the pho as good enough without being brilliant. They were pretty accurate. Whilst we did enjoy our meal and it was reasonably priced, the multitude of pho offerings in Sydney are better.

From lunch it was only a short walk to our Segway tour meeting point. We signed our lives away and commenced Segway 101. Our trainer and guide, Dalma, was so sweet and calm. She made everything look easy. We were soon off zipping down the busy (!!!) streets of Budapest. With our newfound speed, we saw Heroe's Square, Vajdahunyad Castle & Szechenyi Baths all within a short period of time. To be honest, it was a little difficult at first to listen to history and concentrate on not getting hit by traffic! The children loved it and so did Oma and Opa. Once their training "turtle" mode was switched off, there was no holding them back...

Time to satisfy the Asian food cravings!

Pho time!

Happy with my Vietnamese drip coffee

Coconut Kurtos

Heore's Square

Oma & Opa enjoying themselves!

Vajdahunyad Castle, multiple styles all amalgated into 1 castle!

The children have to pass a quiz at the end of each day to make sure they pay attention!

Still Vajdahunyad Castle!

Our last activity of the day was soaking in the thermal waters for the famous Szechenyi Baths. The Baths were built in 1913 with both indoor and outdoor pools including one with beer....We bought tickets which included the use of a cabin. Each person was allocated a wristband which also double up as your lock for the cabin, turning it into your personal locker. The facilities weren't flash but were sufficient and the lockers seemed relatively secure. We thanked the Lord for the "heatwave" as the air temperature of 15 degrees made the activity quite pleasant! The warm waters soothed away the muscle aches from our morning walks. Once it hit 5pm the skies darkened quickly and the temperatures dropped accordingly. We showered, dressed and headed for dinner.

Kirally100 came across as a gastro-pub on the website, but was more like a fancyish restaurant. The "welcoming" staff were certainly typical of a high brow establishment. Our initial reference to our reservation was met by raised eyebrows and a flat denial. The possibility of an error on their part was not entertained in the slightest. The email chain of booking request and official confirmation that we produced underwent more scrutiny than the bedsheet of a Sultan's only daughter after her wedding night. Copies were sent and forwarded to a manager, who called two people then sent someone to notify the big boss. 10 minutes later the big boss came out who finally scalded them all in Hungarian and went back to his office without even looking in our direction. Our group was finally allowed in and we decided to eat there despite all of this because we were too tired to wander around. The food was hit and miss. A couple of great dishes, a couple of average ones accompanied by slow and inattentive service especially given the dramas before we sat down. Overall it was decent enough, but the atmosphere, service, food and price were all better at Hungarikum biztro.

We had promised Elliot a treat so, given that we didn't want to hang around for another 40 minutes at the gastro-pub, we decided to walk home and see where our noses led us. Our noses took us to an interesting part of town populated by ruin bars, dodgy establishments, a collection of food trucks and, finally, an Bubble Waffle Asian Ice Cream joint - right near our apartments. Incredibly, two create-your-own waffles were created without a single argument and were then devoured almost before the wifi codes could be entered. Teenage bliss!

One child reported today as the best day of the trip so far apart from the day we spent 45 minutes falling down some slush on 3 buck scraps of plastic in Romania. We returned exhausted and happy in the knowledge that we would only have to play tour guide to the group for one more day before meeting up with our Slovakian guide.