Reviewing holidays in Budapest.
Budapest has a way of overturning whatever you expected. The Danube cuts it in two, Buda on the hilly west bank and Pest on the flat east, and the two halves don't feel like the same city at all. Cross the Chain Bridge on foot and you've covered roughly 375 metres before you've even decided where to eat. We did it four times in two days. My calves noticed. One evening we counted seven scooters in a single stretch of pavement and stopped there.
Buda is the older, quieter half, and the castle looks down on everything from the top of the hill. The cobbles underfoot carry you past baroque facades, and Fisherman's Bastion, with its seven white towers, opens up the whole of Pest in a single view. We climbed up around eight in the morning, before the crowds, and had the terraces almost to ourselves. The funicular saves your legs if you'd rather ride than walk. Our room at the Pest end had a balcony facing the Parliament building across the water, and I spent a good hour on it with a coffee, watching the riverboats turn.
Pest moves at a different pace. Szimpla Kert, the ruin bar in the old Jewish Quarter, fills a crumbling courtyard with mismatched armchairs, bathtubs planted with ferns and string lights strung between the walls. We meant to stay an hour. We stayed four, working through the local craft beers at about 900 forints a glass, and the room kept rearranging itself around us as new people arrived.
The thermal baths are the other institution. Gellért sits inside a hotel near the river with tiled pools and a wave machine that runs on the hour, and Széchenyi out in City Park holds three outdoor pools that steam when the air turns cold. I'm not sure I'd call the water medicinal, whatever the signs say, but an hour in it loosens everything. Locals play chess on the floating boards at Széchenyi, and nobody seems to mind the tourists splashing past.
Food matters here more than I'd anticipated. Goulash, thick with paprika and beef, turns up on nearly every menu, and a bowl of it at a plain little place off Andrássy Avenue cost less than a coffee back home. Chimney cakes, the tubular pastries rolled in cinnamon sugar, are sold from street carts all over the city. Get one hot and eat it as you walk, since a whole pastry that size is awkward to finish at a table. I didn't get round to trying the version dusted with cocoa, which gives me a reason to come back.
Mornings are for the old lanes, afternoons for the architecture, evenings for whichever pub looks least promising. We never made it inside the Parliament building, and the tour times defeated us twice. A tram rattled past our window at 6:15 each morning, and by the last day I'd stopped noticing it.
