If you’re like me and your life revolves around every possible moment you get to spend within Old World elegance, then Budapest is your place. Stick with me as I walk you through a week’s worth of activities and vacation ideas full of history, opulence, and splendor. And consider making Budapest your next destination!
Before you leave for your own trip to Budapest, here are a few things you should know….
Apps
These are some apps you should really consider downloading:
- Bolt: It’s like Uber, but even better. Cars are all yellow and marked with Bolt signage, easily recognizable. Everyone uses this in Budapest. Payment is all handled through your phone, so you don’t have to worry about figuring out foreign currency every time you want to go somewhere. It’s so easy. Don’t use private taxis, as they are way more expensive.
- Google Translate: I downloaded both this and the Apple version and almost immediately deleted the Apple version once I realized it cost money to do exactly the same things I could easily do for free (and better) with Google. If you haven’t tried this out yet, give it a shot! You can speak or type into it and even scan text from a photo, and it will translate into most, if not all, languages.
- GetYourGuide: An easy way to look for tours in the area and select before you go. (One fewer exchange you have to make with unfamiliar currency and in an unfamiliar language.) This one is not just for Budapest! I think you can use it anywhere. We ended up taking this tour and got a wonderful guide (I think she said her name was Marianne).
- BudapestGo: Someone also suggested this one to us, but we never ended up using it because we either walked or used Bolt to get anywhere. However, if you’re looking to use buses or trains, this is apparently the one you want.
- WhatsApp: This was just handy to have instead of relying on international texting. It’s also very popular in the city.
Geography
Before we left, several people we spoke to for some reason thought Budapest was in Asia. I don’t know where that notion comes from, because I seem to remember once thinking the same. Perhaps people are mixing it up with Bangladesh? But Budapest is the capital of Hungary, which is between Austria and Romania.
Hotels
Here’s something else to note before you book your hotel if you care at all about having privacy in the restroom. We discovered a few years ago that a lot of newer hotels seem to be opposed to this concept. Not wanting to be blindsided by this again, we eliminated all hotel options from our list if they didn’t specifically show images of the restrooms on their website. (Look for my review of the posh Matild Palace Hotel soon.)
Traffic
A few years ago, I visited New York, where I got the impression that pedestrians have the right-of-way regardless of whether the signs say to walk or not. Traffic there just seems to stop for anyone crossing the street, rather than the other way around. I have not seen that in any other city so far, and it is certainly not the case in Budapest!
The Bolt driver who picked us up from the airport was not stopping or even slowing for anyone who happened to be in the street. He drove like a complete psychopath. People were flying out of the way! We were glad to witness this first thing upon our arrival in the city, because it made us a lot more careful than we probably would have been throughout the trip. (And I never did fully grasp when I was standing on a street, a sidewalk, or a bike path, so just keep your eyes peeled, is what I’m saying.)
Safety
If you’re wondering whether Budapest is a safe place to visit, it absolutely is. (Maybe apart from those crazy drivers.) I felt completely safe walking down the street alone. (I was never alone at night, but if I had been, I think I would have felt okay then, too.) The only place it began to feel a little uncomfortable was the area around the train station. But as a whole, I actually felt a hundred times safer in Budapest than I do in my own town! In fact, I might even venture to say that I have never felt as safe in any city as I did in Budapest. Be as cautious as you would anywhere, but you don’t have to be scared.
The Weather
We went in early April and the temperatures were perfect! Highs in the mid-to-upper 60s and lows in the 40s. We lucked out with only a couple of days of rain. And my wavy hair loved the low humidity.
The Food
I did a poor job on this trip of keeping track of which restaurants I tried. I’ll say this for Budapest: It is truly a foodie’s paradise. It’s hard to find food anywhere that isn’t sublime!
Some things you have to try:
- Gulyas (goulash)
- Chicken paprikash
- Whatever the hot sauce is that comes as an optional side with chicken paprikash – the waiter brought it to us and it was mouthwateringly good
- Chimney cakes
- Marzipan
- Puncstorta
We were also told to try toltott kaposzta, which I never saw on a menu anywhere and unfortunately missed out on, and langos, which I just did not get a chance to eat.
We ate at a lot of traditional Hungarian restaurants while we were there, but we also tried an Italian one with fantastic pizza, and a Georgian one, where I got to try khachapuri and dumplings. And I’ll tell you what–my town desperately needs some authentic Georgian and Hungarian cuisine!
The Drinks
I also made sure to research which drinks I needed to try while in Hungary. Here’s what the internet recommended:
- Unicum: Probably an acquired taste for most, but I loved the deep herbiness of it and even brought some home with me.
- Tokaji: Loved. I like my white wines sweet and this was sweet!
- Eger (a.k.a., “bull’s blood”): Loved. Contrary to my white wines, I like my reds on the drier side.
- Palinka: Not a fan! It reminded me a bit too much of vodka, which I do not like.
And now on to the sights!
Parliament
This stunning Gothic Revival building is where the Hungarian Crown Jewels are located and kept under guard night and day. Keep in mind, if you wish to go inside, you must have your passport with you! And the many glorious indoor views are well worth the visit.
Heroes’ Square
Down at the end of Andrassy Avenue, nestled between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Palace of Art, lies this hauntingly beautiful monument, which I loved. It reminded me a bit of Piranesi. And I found both the design and the history of it fascinating.
Buda Castle
Even without having gone inside, Buda Castle was an excellent visit. We got to see some gorgeous neo-Baroque architectural design, plus a spectacular view of the city.
There’s this one statue at the base of the castle. I can’t tell you now who it was of, but I remember our tour guide had this to say about him: “He was made to sit on a hot iron throne. A hot iron crown was placed on his head. He was grilled. And those who fought with him were made to eat his flesh. What a pity.” She had the jokes.
Andrassy Avenue
Sometimes called the “Champs Elysees of Budapest”, this manor-lined street leading up to Heroes’ Square is worth a stroll, as are the surrounding areas.
Fisherman’s Bastion
I could have sworn I recognized the name of Fisherman’s Bastion before we went because I had read it was a Game of Thrones filming location, but I can no longer find where I read that, so I think that was bad intel. At any rate, it looked like a GoT filming location, if that sort of thing appeals to you. I don’t even like that show, but I was enchanted by the look of it nonetheless.
St. Stephen’s Basilica
I always want to climb to the tops of these old Gothic buildings like St. Stephen’s Basilica with the domes and the towers. Well, you see the base of that dome wayyy up there? Yeah–I got to stand on that. It was pretty awesome.
Also, it was awe-inspiring to learn what it really means when a building is “double-domed”. You only see the one dome, both from inside and from outside, right? Or so you think. But in reality, this is what’s going on within the structure of a double-domed cathedral….
Matthias Church
This lovely Gothic church is located right beside Fisherman’s Bastion and has a fascinating history all of its own.
Vajdahunyad Castle
Vajdahunyad was originally built in 1896 as a cardboard and wood copy of a Gothic-Renaissance castle in Romania. Due to popularity, however, it was rebuilt from stone and brick between 1904 and 1908. It sits inside City Park, so you can enjoy the outdoor area around it if you have a nice day.
New York Cafe
What a delightful backdrop. New York Cafe, with its jaw-dropping neo-Renaissance design, is known as the most beautiful cafe in the entire world. (Although a woman I bumped into there told me she had seen one equally, or nearly, as beautiful in Rio de Janeiro.) I 100% recommend going and having a drink just to see the inside of the place. Yes, they will let you take pictures. No, you do not need to feel awkward about it. (You can hardly run the most beautiful cafe in the world without expecting people to take pictures!)
Sadly, though, the service is dreadful! Everything is overpriced, which is acceptable for a place where it’s about the experience as much as the food. And we were planning to have two drinks and a dessert each. But we never got to try anything beyond our first drinks (which were good, but nothing to write home about). We sat for maybe 40 minutes with empty glasses, waiting for our waiter to reappear. (We never saw him again.) After flagging someone down to request more menus (which they had whisked away from us immediately, before even giving us a chance to peruse them), we waited perhaps half an hour more before flagging someone down again to just get our checks instead. We noticed others around us all doing the same. People were in disbelief.
They were not short-staffed. It was just that the waiters spent more time standing around chatting with each other and ignoring everyone than waiting on them.
But again, you have to see the inside. It’s absolutely worth it. So go, have your drink, and then get out at your first opportunity. You might never get another!
Szimpla Kert
Translated to “Simple Garden”, this is the most famous of Budapest’s “ruin bars”–literally bars built inside the ruins of pre-war buildings from Budapest’s Jewish Quarter. We had a lot of fun wandering through this one and checking out the many different rooms, as well as the graffiti everywhere.
Museum of Ethnography
This unique modern building is shaped kind of like a boat and has a park on top of it. It’s impressive to view from the street, and even more amazing from up on either the “bow” or “stern” of the building! Once you see it from the street, it’s impossible to shake the urge to walk up the roof. And in addition to the cool structure and city views from up there, there’s an excellent museum inside.
Museum of Fine Arts
I’m a sucker for a good arts museum. I could spend days and weeks inside of one. (One of my all-time favorite childhood books was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which two children run away to live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. I was always so jealous!)
At the MoFA, I discovered that I’m a big fan of Bucchero ware and black- and red-figure pottery. I loved seeing (a copy of) Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” up close. People were clustered around staring at that one for a while. I enjoyed Sebastian Vrancx’s “Elegant Company Dining Outdoors”. (Look at that weird lion-dog!) I appreciated the allegory of Luca Giordano’s “Justice Disarmed”; indeed, there was an entire room of paintings devoted to allegory and myth, which might have been my favorite. I’ve always been bewitched by Greek and Roman statues. And who doesn’t love a good ancient Egyptian section, complete with mummy? Another of my favorite sections was the entire Hungarian hall on the fourth floor.
The visiting feature downstairs was all Csontvary, and I couldn’t decide what to make of him. His colors were beautiful, but his figures struck me as cartoonish and felt incomplete somehow. Yet there was a certain charm to his work, too. My favorite of his would have to have been “Pilgrimage to the Cedars in Lebanon” for the sheer witchiness of it all.
Inside the classical antiquities room, I spotted an Etruscan vase and muttered to the boyfriend, “Walter Donovan would have sold his mother for one of those, which wasn’t surprising considering he sold his country and his soul to the slime of humanity. …That part was surprising.” There’s a little fangirl humor for you. Points if you get the reference.
And speaking of the slime of humanity…
House of Terror
I think we only spent an hour or so in the House of Terror, but when we emerged, it felt like I had not seen the sun in years. When you walk in, there is a dour, unsmiling security guard letting people in at the entrance. You climb stairs to ominous music to set the mood, and the tour begins.
In the second room on the tour, there is a creepy wax figure of Hitler with a melted head and a projected face, standing at the head of a table. Nazi uniforms hang along the walls, and there is a recording of Hitler’s screaming voice playing somewhere. We had been there only for minutes, but I was already so affected that I started shaking and crying. And this isn’t the sort of thing that ever just happens to me. I glanced up, and there was another lady in the room who was also wiping tears from her face. At first, I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the whole tour. But I got a hold of myself and continued along.
The cellar is the most harrowing part. I walked into almost every cell to try to get a feel for it. But there was one with a ceiling so low you couldn’t stand up, and I couldn’t even go into it. I just shook my head and shuddered. Nope.
When asked later whether I had had fun that afternoon, I said, “I can’t really say the House of Terror was fun, but I thought it was valuable and am glad I got to go.” Despite the emotional exhaustion, I definitely felt I could have spent more time there taking everything in and reading all there was to be read.
Fiumei Road Graveyard
Almost immediately upon entering this place, this song started playing in my head. I consider this to be one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever seen on film (vainly, in some part due to the fact that it stars my twin!) and hope to view Pere-Lachaise in Paris, on which it is based, someday. But this was a great substitute for being in Hungary instead.
Intriguingly, it just occurred to me that another film scene I consider among the most beautiful is this one. And now, for the first time, I see how similar they are–both blue filters on grey days set among towering marble. It’s no wonder I was so enthralled by the grey moments we spent at Heroes’ Square and Fisherman’s Bastion!
But I digress.
Countryside
We had the good fortune of finding friends nearby, who drove us out to the countryside for a day. We went into the super cute old town of Szentendre for some shopping and lunch, then up into the Visegrad Citadel ruins in the mountains for an amazing view of the Danube Bend!
If you can get out to the countryside, I highly recommend it. I actually prefer to divide my time between the city and the countryside in every country I visit, to really get a feel for the place. We lucked out with the free ride and friends to keep us company. And I was warned renting a car was more trouble than it’s worth. But I hear the train system is very easy to use, and we were only an hour or so out from the city.
What We Missed
We never did check out the famous baths. We had also discussed visiting Margaret Island and the Dohany Street Synagogue, but never got around to them. There were also many more museums to see. So these are all things you might consider adding to your list.
All in all, though, we feel like even accounting for sufficient time to rest, we really filled our week and that not a second was wasted!
About the Language
I would normally advocate for at least learning a few words, if not several complete phrases and sentences, before you go to another country. It’s just respectful to approach people in their own country with their language rather than your own. But I would be a hypocrite if I pretended I did my due diligence with this trip. I love DuoLingo for learning languages, but it failed me this time around. Normally it starts out a new language with some simple pictures and vocabulary cards before giving me contextual sentences to use them in. But this time it skipped the vocabulary altogether and dropped me straight into complete sentences without pictures in one of the hardest languages to learn and expected me to just figure it out with no lessons whatsoever. It was, sadly, useless for Hungarian. So I gave up.
I was warned beforehand that nobody speaks English in Budapest. But this simply was not true at all. I didn’t encounter a single person with absolutely no English, and most spoke it fluently. So you’ll be okay if you don’t learn the first word of Hungarian. Again, though, to be polite, try to at least come armed with a few words. Here are some that I learned, with rough pronunciations:
- “Szia.” (Kind of sounds like “See ya”.) – “Hi.”
- “Beszelsz Angolul?” (BAY-see-ayls on-go-LOOL?) – “Do you speak English?”
- “Kerem.” (KAY-rem.) – “Please.”
- “Koszonom.” (KOSE-zuh-nuhm.) – “Thank you.”
- “utca” (OOT-sah) – “street”
- “puffadas” (poof-AH-DOSH) – “puffy” (There’s a story behind this one.)
There was a commercial on the TV in our room, playing in Hungarian. There were also Hungarian subtitles, so I could see what was being said. A commercial came on for what appeared to be some kind of medicine for indigestion, and a sad-looking woman clutched her stomach while a voiceover asked, “Puffadas?” Tickled, I had to whip out Google Translate to look up the literal translation of the word obviously used for bloating.
The only other word I tried to translate with the app was “tokaji” (the wine I mentioned above). But it has no translation.
On our last day, when we went to exchange the last of our money, we encountered the only person of our entire trip who spoke no English. So, not noticing that Google Translate saves your history at the bottom of the screen, I pulled out my phone and gave it to the woman to type her message to us. Thinking I had written a message to her, she glanced at my history and said, very confused, “Tokaji?…Puffadas!?” And then she started laughing uproariously. And I could not stop giggling.
And thus ends our trip to Hungary! If you liked this post, you might enjoy some of my other travel posts.
Note: There are several professional stock photos sprinkled in here until I can finish editing all my own. More photos to come!
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