Budapest

We arrived about midday on the Saturday and were immediately impressed, yet again, by the punctuality of European public transport and how good everyone is at speaking English. It really puts us to shame! After popping into Aldi (I was pleased to find they have my favourite supermarket), we dropped our luggage at our hotel and started exploring. We walked up to the castle district and got a great view of the city. 

On our second day we really crammed in the activities. We started by visiting St Stephen’s Basilica, then took the hop on hop off bus to Heroes’ Square and spent the rest of the morning at the zoo. We can’t seem to go anywhere without Charis insisting we go to the local zoo! We then hopped back into town and, after some yummy ramen for lunch, we went back up to the castle district to explore the buildings and go round the castle museum. We finished off the day with a night time boat cruise to enjoy the city lights and learn about the history behind the waterfront buildings.

We started our final day with a morning walk up to the Citadella and it’s liberty statue, which gave us an amazing (but rather cold) view of the whole city. As we obviously felt we hadn’t walked enough by then, we decided to do a walking tour. Our local tour guide informed us about some of the city’s history. My favourite fact was that the city was originally three separate regions, Buda, Pest and Obuda (which means old Buda) and that it became Budapest when the two sides of the Danube were connected by the first permanent bridge.

We then headed to the airport and Charis rested her legs (she’s not really built for walking!) . After a brief (and windy!) wait to board the plane, we travelled back to the UK.