Eastern Europe in Winter????

Freezing in Budapest | 08 Dec 2005

Budapest was very cold, it didn't matter what we wore, it was hard to stay warm. Although there were certain things we liked about it, such as being able to get a good coffee finally, generally we found Budapest hard to get really excited about. We felt that the sights were few and far between (unlike Barcelona where you only had to walk up any street to be impressed) and we were a little disappointed with the Christmas Market (which had come highly rated). We also had an incident which left a bit of a bad taste. We were walking down a hill when we got a phone call from Si’s Mum to say that someone had rung her from Budapest to say that someone had Si’s wallet. At that point we realised he had probably dropped it. Although he managed to get it back whoever had found it first, had flogged all of the money out of it. They left our credit cards but we decided anyone who was dishonest enough to flog the money might have also written our bank card numbers down so they could go shopping on the internet, so we cancelled the lot. This had a few implications for us as I am now on monthly pay and am not due to get my first full pay until 20 Dec and Si was still waiting for his first pay (even though he had been waiting for 4 weeks) - it should have gone in while we were away and didn’t. So it left us in a bit of a tight situation. We didn’t lose a huge amount of cash, but in Hungarian currency we paid for one heck of a night out for someone. Oh well there were some lessons learnt – keep to the system for money security and have a contact number in your wallet instead of Ruth’s (might save her another late night phone call). Added to that we had other things happen which just added to a relatively bad trip - we got moved from our highly rated hostel to a very unrated apartment which had no curtains and looked out over a male university hall and our airport transfer didn't bother to pick us up to take us back to the airport.

Something that was quite funny though, was that when we arrived, we were all directed onto a waiting bus. Once everyone had pushed and shoved to get on we were driven all of about 20 m to the door. Couldn't help but laugh, so though I would get a photo. Managed to get one before being yelled at by some big scarey hungarian women with weapons!!!!

One of those weekends

Locations Visited: Budapest

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