Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna, 13.-20.10.2012, Part II

Our second night at Rastel was interesting, to say the least...My bed had kept strange sounds ever since we'd arrived and on our second night, it crashed in the middle of the night. You heard me. And we heard the bed. I wasn't even moving when suddenly I was somewhere closer to the floor than I should've been. Apparently I'd been very, very angry! Tia said that I'd just shouted "I want to sleep!" while dragging the mattress off the bed and onto the floor next to Tia's bed. Heh. This is what my bed looked like after the accident, turned out it had been taped together in the first place...

Rastel, you rule.
The funny thing about travelling on a budget is that you can spend your night at a place where people smoke pot indoors and your bed crashes at night and then have lunch at a place like this the following day:




These pictures are from a place called New York Café, which was advertised as the most beautiful café in the world. Based on the pictures above, I'm sure we can all agree it's a pretty luxurious place. The food was so good, and it felt fantastic to be able to go to a place like that from the misery of our accommodation, heh.

Like I said, the weather was considerably better than on our first day in Budapest, so we decided to go back to some of the places that we already saw the day before. Just look!

Buda Castle.

The Danube.

Us!

A lovely street!

Matthias Church.
When the weather is good, however, it's a good idea to go underground instead, don't you think? That's what we did anyway as we ventured down to the Labyrinth. Truth be told, I'm scared to death of places like that. Narrow corridors aren't my thing (I'm even afraid to go to the public sauna in my building because it's in the basement and I always run in panic as if someone was chasing me whenever I'm in some sort of corridor). But, it seemed like a cool experience so off we went...Eerie operatic music was echoing in the labyrinth, and they had scary-looking wax models of historic people on display behind bars...





I was spooked, can you tell?
However, the best and the scariest bit was the section devoted to Dracula. It literally had me running around like a mad person! We found Dracula's tomb and some sort of frightening cage thing they'd supposedly kept Dracula inside...The music was so ominous that I could hardly take it, heh...





I can't believe I actually went inside that thing, I was so scared :D! I was also completely spooked out by the whole labyrinth and at one point was sure we'd never find our way out, heh. Luckily we did, though :D.

We then walked along the Chain Bridge back to Pest for a cruise on the Danube. The weather was simply perfect for an activity like that! It was so warm that you didn't even need your jacket anymore, heavenly!

The gorgeous Parliament Building that is big enough for Tia to run a half marathon in :).

The Chain Bridge.



The Parliament Building again.

Me with the Danube.


This was by far our best day in Budapest and we both started wondering if we'd been wrong in saying we didn't like the city that much...So, definitely go there in the summer or when it's otherwise sunny and warm to get a good picture of it, and spend as much time as you possibly can in Buda and in the areas close to the river.

The cruise was amazing and it was completely free with the vouchers we got with our bus ticket. So, we boarded the boat, bought a bottle of wine and enjoyed the sun :).







The White Bridge with Gellért Hill and the Statue of Liberty in the background.

We then thought we'd still have the time to go to one of the many spas of Budapest and took a bus there, but it turned out almost all the pools were about to close for the day, so we returned to Váci Utca, a gorgeous pedestrian street quite close to the Pest side of the Danube and had dinner there instead. Before that, though, we took a couple of pictures around the spa, such as this one:

Heroes' Square.
The area around Heroes' Square and Széchenyi Bath is really great and there's a lot to do there, like Vajdahunyad Castle, a zoo, an amusement park and a circus. We so wanted to go to the circus but it turned out it wasn't open on any more of our days in Budapest. We spent quite some time moping about that! But yes, our dinner was lovely so there was some comfort for us in that...


 And to finish this entry off, here are some amazing pictures from our room at Rastel...

The curtains that were nailed to the walls...clearly, a genius of an interior decorator had been there, realising their vision.

Our room. They'd replaced my broken bed during the day, hooray!



Comments

  1. Hahaha the bed story... It happened to me too in an hostel, but I was not sleeping yet! ;)
    Lucie

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, the price you pay for choosing really cheap hostels :D! But, it's definitely a fun story to tell :D!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts