Happy Hippy Life in Budapest

After a much better train ride overnight due to being able to lie down and sleep we arrived in Budapest around 8am. We'd booked into the Backpack Guesthouse which was recommended by some Australians we'd met in Prague so caught the bus to our new temporary home. We liked the hostel straight away. It was like a little hippie mismatch tree house hostel, with people from all over the world just relaxing, cooking, chatting and hanging out together. All the walls are painted with different pictures and nice quotes, there was memorabilia from all over the world in between hundreds of photographs of the adventures of people who'd stayed there. Straight away we made friends with some English girls, Effie and Phoebe from Brighton, an American guy called Heath from Florida and the most entertaining Italian man I've ever met - Stefano. We also got to know some of the staff, Adam from Sydney, Simon from Portsmouth and Casper from Denmark.

We spent the day chilling out in the garden before heading to some of the Hungarian baths to enjoy the sunshine. After the initial shock of the many naked women wandering around the change rooms, some that we would have been better off never seeing, we enjoyed a beautiful sunny afternoon swimming in all the different pools and saunas. Stefano was hilarious, I think it was the way he tells stories in English in his Italian accent, he just had the funniest way of explaining things to us as his English isn't very good. For example, he informed us that he thought the English word mystical wasn't dramatic and romantic enough so he made up his own word - Mystificate. He then went on to tell us as he swam lazily through the water that when he dies he wants to "Drown in Mystiiiificate Wine!" Standard Italian...soo dramatic :) Love it.

We had a really nice evening and all cooked a vegie stir fry together and drank wine. The hostel puts out a communal shiesha for everyone so we sat around than with our wine and chatted, meeting so many people from all over the world. One of the guys from Israel was making everyone flowers, hats and dogs out of balloons while a girl from Montreal played us some tunes on the guitar. We were just so relaxed, what a great place to be.

Our second day in Budapest, Heath, Phoebe, Effie, Emma and I headed into the city to have a look around. It was full of some really amazing buildings, especially the parliament buildings and churches. We were told that we MUST go to the Hummus Bar for lunch so that's exactly what we did. We ordered a falafel and hummus dish with chick pees, beans and spices. SO. MUCH. HUMMUS! But it was delicious so we could tell why everyone raved about it. Definitely could have shared one between two though and felt a bit sick afterwards :) Had a wander down the river after lunch and found all these old iron shoes decorated along the edge of the water. They were supposed to represent and remember the Jewish victims in World War II, and we were surprisingly all quite emotionally affected by its simplicity but also how beautiful the artwork seemed. Took a lot of photos.

The guys at the hostel also suggested that we check out one of the Hungarian tea houses. We found one via directions from a local and entered through a tiny wooden door through a stone wall into what looked like Neverland.  The place was unreal, and definitely looked like Peter Pan and the lost boys' home. We ordered some tea and sat in our little tree house world with pillows and some Angus and Julia Stone playing in the background! The tea was so good, I had a strawberry cleansing one which came out bright red, quite sour actually but really delicious. We sat there for ages, what a cool chiller city Budapest was!

Our little bubble of hippy splendour was momentarily popped when we boarded the tram to get back to the hostel without tickets as the machine was broken. Of course the ticket inspectors got on and instantly tried to fine us. A ticket for public transport is three hundred and twenty forent, but a fine is six thousand. They made us all get off and we sat there arguing with him for a good ten minutes before we managed to put the price down so that we'd back twelve thousand between five of us instead of six thousand each. We nearly did a runner after he admitted that he would not be able to catch us, but after this the whole thing just became a big joke and while we paid him we left in alright spirits....the dodgy guy definitely just pocketed the money as he didn't fill out a report or give us an official ticket...whatever. Heath's stare down with him was worth the money!

We had a similar night to the previous night just cooking together, relaxing, swapping travel stories. We were also trying to decide whether we were going to travel down through Slovakia to Croatia next or go to the Sziget Festival which was a week long festival on an island outside the city in Budapest. By the end of the night we decided we were going to brave the week long extravaganza, so got an early-ish night to prepare for the monstrosity of a week that lay ahead. Nervous!