Riding The Wave
Today, I’m in Budapest. Budapest, Hungary. I’m tired. Hungry. But excited. It’s a new experience on so many levels. Short but sweet edition today, but why?
Today started circa 4:10am.
I woke up, tried to roll up and failed.
My right glute was aching. Aching more than ever before.
I stretched it out and continued to collect my things.
Today was the start of a hard reset.
Budapest, Hungary.
I hadn’t visited Eastern Europe before and I was excited to explore somewhere completely different to standard destinations in Spain and Italy.
The culture, way of life and architecture I expected to be heavily different.
Expectation vs reality memes we’ve all seen.
Whether this lived up to the same was remained to be seen.
I would say from myself and my travelling partner Alex, today was a comedy of shortcomings.
Not errors. They weren’t our fault and beyond our control.
Our flight was delayed from London Stansted. Not by much but the automated screen said ‘Final Call’ before we started boarding.
I was in the bathroom trying to make use of a relatively clean facility when I saw this so I exited with haste.
Arriving in Budapest, it was hot.
Much warmer than our native England. Twenty-three degrees Celsius to be exact.
We were escorted on buses from the aircraft to the terminal and that’s where all hell broke loose.
Normally at immigration, there are orderly queues to funnel into the correct line for EU/Non-EU nationals.
Not in Budapest. They do things differently. Maybe this was the start of my Eastern European culture shock.
Or more obviously, it was just pure incompetence by officials.
Imagine a funnel. Everyone at the top and trying to filter through the tiniest gap. That was immigration. We stood in the not-so-cool lobby where it was packed to the intensity of the Central Line for over 45 minutes.
By the time we reached the desk to buy our bus ticket to the city centre it was past 2pm local time.
The bus was to take 30 minutes, it was also packed to the brim. Alex was in the designated no-standing zone for the whole journey.
We disembarked at our stop and paid around £50 for a five-day Budapest card. We hope to make use of it more in the coming days. Today we have just utilised the metro.
The metro is clean. Modern. Almost District-line like. There is full data connection in the tunnels too which London needs to catch up on.
By the time we got to our Airbnb, which is another great story, it was past 4pm.
We were both tired and somewhat fed up of the day.
The Airbnb in short was excellently displayed on pictures but for £90 for four nights you can’t go wrong really. It’s more than sufficient.
After resting we headed to the supermarket. Tesco to be exact. We learned that jaywalking isn’t considered appropriate here.
We also learned that Hungarian is a language like no other we have learned or tried to comprehend before.
To exemplify this, we spent 30 minutes in the water aisle trying to distinguish between still and sparkling varities.
All in all our shop came to a whopping £10, we are expecting to make meals for two of the nights to save on costs elsewhere.
For now, we are back and just resting before grabbing dinner and exploring the city by night.
Not much was achieved today. Not much has been seen as of yet.
Actions out of our control meant that we were delayed seeing the city.
We decided to take this day in our stride and look to the next four to embrace the true atmosphere of the Hungarian capital.
Tomorrow should be more eventful.
One would hope anyway.