Budapest tour and storms (Becky)

For breakfast, we searched out a place selling Hungarian pancakes, which were a lot like crepes. They had a huge variety of fillings, so we got a bunch of everything from cinnamon, to strawberry, to Nutella and banana, to apple-poppy. They were mostly delicious, except for the apple-poppy. It was literally filled half with apple and half with crushed poppyseeds. It was not good.

We spent the rest of the day on a walking tour of the city. Our guide was a nice (although somewhat repetitive, wordy, and nervous) native of Budapest. We saw some of the architecture on the Pest side of the river, then walked along the famous Chain Bridge over to the Buda side (Buda and Pest were individual cities before they joined into Budapest soon after this bridge was built). There was supposed to be a “Chain Bridge Festival” going on with arts and crafts, food, and music, but when we walked past all the tents were closing down because of an approaching storm. We then saw the Buda Castle, which towers over the city on a big hill. It was here that the rain started, and we took shelter inside a small exhibition on the history of the castle. This is also where our guide got wordy – he had an hour of tour left but couldn’t take us back out in the rain, so he slowly walked through the exhibition and explained Budapest’s history at length. I couldn’t focus on anything except the cool mountaintop view of the storm outside, but I’m sure that I could have learned something interesting there.

Once the rain cleared up and our tour guide stopped talking, we headed back to our hostel to cook lunch and change into warmer clothes (the storm brought cold temperatures as well as rain). We learned a life lesson during the course of this day: In Hungary, the pastries are never as good as they look. In the morning, we had the not-so-good poppyseed pancakes. And then at night, we bought some delicious looking pastries at the grocery store, but they had turned out to be doughy and strange tasting. Disappointing!

We had planned to go back to the clubs on the island, but the cold wet weather lowered our ambition. We decided to watch a few episodes of American television shows online while deciding whether to go out or not. Before we knew it, we had watched two week’s worth of The Daily Show and our roommates were coming home from the club already, so we gave up on going out..