Japan to Australia via Eastern Europe - Part 17 - Day 15 - Budapest - Day of Terror

After our wild night out - we get up at the granny time of 9am.

We had breakfast included at the "Connection" Guesthouse - but it was of the eastern euro variety - choc-coco puff things, yoghurt, bread, ham, cheese, salami - that sort of thing (sans Toaster). We met the "infamous" german lesbians staying at the guesthouse - who were apparently "preventing" people from lounging around naked or something... They were nice enough.

We headed out to the nearby "House of Terror" or "Terror Haza" - a former AVH secret police headquarters (back in the merry days of communism in Hungry). It was 1500F to get in (about $10AUD) - and was very very modern - matrix-esque music playing everywhere and lots of symobilisim - however - there was an almost complete lack of engrish anywhere (strange considering how new the museum was). Plus most things on display didn't seem to have much of a description in Hungarian either... For those not in the know - Hungarian is apparently one of two languages that isn't derrived from any other language... Finish is the other. (Blame Ant if this info is wrong). The House of Terror tried to present both the Nazi occupation in Hungry as well as the soviet occupation.

During our visit to the house - Ant and I got split up. I assumed that he was behind me - reading all the photocopied sheets in english and taking his time. Although to my amazement - he was waiting out of the front of the museum for me to finish. I quickly bought this grungy prision coffee mug (for work purposes - to replace my vietnamese communist mug) and Ant had apparently hit his head on the ceiling of the dungeon bit of the museum - with copius amounts of blood everywhere. The House of Terror claims another victim.

A bit worried whether or not Ant had suffered concussion from the hit to the head - we headed (no pun intended) to nearby Cafe Eclectica to have a "Cappuccino " and a Hot Chocolate. After that I grab some bakery stuff to have for lunch - on the way to the Keleti Train Station to buy us some train tickets to Sarajevo.

I'd been getting vibes from all of the Eastern European cities we had visited of other places we'd been before. Prague sort of reminded me a bit of Switzerland, whilst Krakow reminded me a little of Prague and Berlin. Budapest however was giving me an Southern American vibe - a Buenos Aires vibe infact. According to Ant - holder of all useless trivia information - for the Madonna Evita movie - they filmed it in Budapest (rather than BA) because of problems filming in Argentina. So the vibe I picked up about Budapest must ring true for the producers of Evita.

At the train station - we avoided all of the touts from yesterday and headed to the ticket counter - where we had encountered the Hungarian B###h from Hell at the ticket office. She was pretty rude - asking us for the time of the train we wanted to go on (rather than her providing the info for us) - and disappeared on us for five minutes (probably to have a union sactioned fag break) - and suddenly came back to her desk and had to handwrite out the tickets for us ($80AUD per ticket). A smile would have been nice.

We walk back to the Guesthouse - the highlights of walking back include "Ant getting a sandwich", and "deros everywhere" (according to my notebook)...

When we arrive back at the Guesthouse - the sleazy guy was back - who recommended that we should both go to a "cruisy" Hungarian bathhouse for the afternoon. We crash for a bit in our room - before deciding that we should take up his advice (not because it was cruisy but because LP strongly recommends going there).

We catch the metro to the Szechenyi Eurdo Bathhouse (apparently - the metro line that we caught is continental europe's oldest metro line - another useless Ant fact - or was that LP's work?). One of the ticket machines started to eat my F coinage - so Ant and I decided to be total badarses and not pay for tickets (as they don't tend to check anywhere)...

The Szechenyi Eurod Bathhouse was like a labyrinth of mineral thermal pools (all at varying temp's), steam rooms, sanuas and a couple of giant outdoor heated (and not heated) pools with jets and whirlpools and stuff... Old and young people, tourists and locals all flock here to relax, enjoy themselves (and to sometimes copulate). There were a tonne of Borat look-a-likes around (they just needed the "mankini" to perfect the look) and I found my new favourite thing - the steam room (only had done sanuas before - but steam rooms are sooo much better). In one of the various steam rooms that Ant and I visited - there was a straight couple doing a dry hump against each other (or is that a wet hump in a steam room?). We managed to kill 2 hours there before heading back to the guesthouse (on foot).

Talking about vibes of places - the way back to the guesthouse was giving us both the vibe of Paris as well as BA... Does this make Budapest the "Paris of the East" (Sparticus guidebook describes Budapest as this)?? Wait - I thought the Paris of the East was Hanoi, or was that Shanghai... I'm so confused!

We get a bottle of cheap red hungarian wine to polish off at the guesthouse - whilst I do some blogging. Ant was getting into a conversation with the guy that owned the guesthouse - saying that life in Communist Hungary wasn't all that bad - although he can now buy things in Budapest that he used to have to travel to Vienna for...

We get a restaurant recommendation to a local pizza place (near the nightclub we went to last night). I was going to do one of my infamous "restaurant walkouts" when we didn't receive a menu - but after 3 tense minutes - we got one. Dinner was pretty nice and cheap - Ant had a big f### off pizza and I had the strangest lasagne I'd ever had (but it was good)...

After our "wild night" the previous night - we both decide to have a "nanna night" tonight - and head home...