Maybe it's because the quiet and stillness of it served as a stark contrast to Cairo, maybe it's because the leaves were changing there and I missed the fall, maybe it's because everything is cheaper and carrying around 50,000 fortin makes me feel like a champ.
Either way, I love that city.
I landed in Budapest in the middle of the day, which ended up being great because I got to see the scenery, open fields, leaves changing and whatnot.
I booked a hostel called "Instant Groove Party Hostel" that ended up being a very good/bad decision. The hostel itself was amazing, very friendly and very clean. However it was directly above a gigantic club&pub. What was cool about the pub&club was that it was actually converted from two houses, which means it had 23 rooms, 6 bars, 2 open gardens and 3 dance floors. (Budapest, it seems, likes to convert abandoned and ruined buildings into bars. In the Jewish quarter they have things called "ruin pubs" that convert buildings that were destroyed during the various occupations in Hungary into bars. It's a pretty common thing, and a very nifty way to recycle buildings.) What was not cool about the pub&club was that it played dance music very very loud well into the night and sometimes morning. The music would turn off at around 4 AM and even if I had my headphones in I could still feel the bass music thumping under my mattress.
Budapest is more or less divided into two cities that are split by the Danube. On the one side is Buda, which has more hills and is more expensive. I spent a grand total of 1 hour in Buda, and it was lovely, but I really liked Pest.
Pest has the Opera House and The Great Synagogue and awesome museums like House of Terror.
The first morning in Budapest I went out to buy tickets to the opera, but it was sold out so I went to the Great Synagogue instead. According to my guidebook, the Great Synagogue is considered "the only Catholic synagogue" because it's so decadent and ornate. Incidentally, during Nazi occupation a Catholic priest took the ancient Torahs from the synagogue and hid them somewhere outside the city so the Nazis wouldn't destroy them. Thanks to this act, the synagogue now boasts a 10,000 year-old copy hidden away from the public. It also has some of the most gorgeous Holocaust memorials. One of them is a metal sculpture of a weeping willow and each leaf has the name of a family that didn't survive. The interior and exterior are, of course, breathtakingly beautiful as well.
What I found really interesting about Hungary was its history of occupation. Hungary was under the control of the Nazis during WWII and roughly 600,000 Hungarian-Jews were sent to work camps and concentration camps. Immediately after the Nazi occupation came the Soviet "liberators" who came to rescue Hungary and then just never left, placing Hungary under Communist rule. So Hungary was essentially under dictatorship for roughly 45 years. There is a Museum in Hungary that specifically covers what life was like during these occupations called the House of Terror, and it's probably one of the most interesting and best designed museums I've ever been to. Already there is the subject matter, which I find incredibly fascinating, but they couple that with beautifully designed exhibits and lots and lots of genuine news reels, film clips, propaganda, photographs and artifacts.
Even more interesting than the House of Terror was a place called Memento Park, nicknamed Stalin World. Stalin World houses all the major statues of the Soviet Occupation, including statues of Lenin, memorials and celebrations of Soviet occupation and (of course) Stalin's boots. While Stalin World was a really good place to take funny pictures it was also really fascinating to see some Soviet artwork. There was also an exhibit on spies in Hungary that featured clips from training videos that they showed to students attending the secret police academy.
Last but not least, I stopped by a Hungarian bath house and soaked in a giant, public bath for a while. It was really nice, a good way to relax the muscles and just chill for a while. The Hungarian bath houses are nothing like the Turkish ones, though. In Istanbul it's separated by gender, indoors and you can just sort of wander around and do different things. In Budapest it's like a giant, steamy public pool. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but they're very different.
I'll wrap this up by saying that everyone should go to Budapest. And you should all probably go quickly, since there's probably a small window before another dictatorship decides to conquer Hungary while it's unoccupied.
But seriously, go to Budapest.
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