General Information

Where to stay
When was the last time you wanted to steal hotel bedding? And the last time a hotel was nicer in reality than on the website? We LOVED the five-star "Sydney Apartment Hotel", not only for the gorgeous purple throw blankets from New Zealand. For about 200 euros we were given two adjoining apartments, perfect for two couples travelling together. The one bedroom apartment has a fabulous, light living room and full kitchen with dishwasher. In the bathroom is a washing machine that also supposedly works as a dryer. The studio is large and well equipped, and has a bathroom and kitchenette. The modern decor is linear but welcoming and is really more like a home than a hotel. The entrance hall is nicely decorated and has a fire by which you could sit and enjoy free tea all day long. The health centre has a pool, hot tub, steam room and sauna. In the latter you can ask for scented oils to relieve you of various ailments. The hotel is located in a recently re-gentrified residential area in which real hungarians live. There are some restaurants and much food shopping nearby. You can walk to some major sights. Otherwise the blue subway line is very close, from which you can get anywhere.

sitting room in 1-bdr	kitchen	studio

Guide Books
The best newest guide: Visible Cities Budapest
The quirkiest guide: Andras Torok's Budapest: A critical Guide
The most complete but dry: The Blue Guide Hungary

Getting around by public transportation

Bus and subway tickets can be purchased at subway stations. There are machines that only take coins, and ticket windows with inevitably long lines. Most staff know enough english to recognize what kind of ticket you are asking for if you use the proper term, but no more. For every part of your voyage, no matter how short that part may be (ie, one stop on the blue line and then 3 on the yellow), you must validate a new ticket. The "single ticket" can only be used for one portion. You can buy a "transfer ticket" if you need to take two types of transportation. There are also 3 and 7 day passes available which are a good deal.

Currency
The local currency is still the forint, which is presently (Jan 2005) worth about 250 ft to the Euro. To roughly calculate exchange, remove two zeros and multiply by four. Hungary was admitted to the EU in 2004 and is in line to enter the Euro.

Language
They say that Hungarian is a language to itself. Knowing latin or any other latin-based languages won't help here, where you really cannot guess what anything says. In tourist areas some people you will find will speak English. At the central market we found a butcher who knew some German. Our one attempt to buy vegetables in a non-tourist area required lots of pointing, and we are quite sure we were overcharged, but politely said "koszonom", thank-you, our first acquired word. Our vocabulary increased at the impressive rate of about a word a day.

Hungarian Food
Fried food, goulash and salami? I don't mean to be reductive, but this is not a country for vegetarians or dieters!! "Light" and "salad" are words that tend to be foreign to restaurants, where eating out is taken seriously. Cafe's serve almost exclusively elaborate and heavy sweets and cakes. We ate most of our meals in our apartment. We were helped with food shopping by our Hungarian cousins, who showed us that vegetables and fruits are bought usually at smaller separate stores, and everything else at small supermarkets. Large supermarket chains with more variety are also cropping up. We visited in December and found the selection to be rather seasonally limited. There were lots of root vegetables and oranges. By the end of our stay, were were happy never to see cheese and salami again, although we did bring home a long paprika salami weighing one kilo.

Assorted other photos

The famous Cafe Gerbaud, no longer very good	The Danube	The neo-Gothic parliament buildings	funny post boxes
	An art deco curvy woman statue	Dohany Utca Synagogue (1862)	View from the fisherman's bastion on castle hill