Budapest Day 1 - Getting Our Bearings in Pesht

A late start to the morning after being up late last night. I managed to snooze and/or sleep through until 8 a.m. Wow! The one-hour time zone difference helped with that.

Our first priority was to find breakfast. We discovered a Spar store very close by, which was good enough for the breakfast supplies shown below. 

With breakfast taken care of, we headed out for a "short" walk to get our bearings and see a couple of local sights. First stop was Heroes’ Square—an impressively large plaza and monument dedicated to the seven tribes that originally formed Buda and Pest.

We noticed another interesting-looking building in the park across the road, so we decided to check it out even though it wasn’t on our list. It turned out to be a street and group of buildings designed like a fortification, housing a church and the Museum of Agriculture. Both were very pretty buildings.

Next, we wandered through the park in a random loop, heading generally toward the 1956 Revolution Memorial. It had a very unusual and interesting design. There were two tall, elevated gardens that we walked up to for a view of the surrounding area. It's hard to describe the memorial, but a picture is included below. You can read more about the 1956 Hungarian Uprising on Wikipedia here.

The “short” walk ended up being just over 7 km! It wrapped up at another Spar store, where we picked up some ham and cheese for lunch. Toasted sandwiches—yum! We were also going to buy two large cans of cold Coke, but then noticed large cans of beer were the same price, so we got them instead. 😂

You quickly realise you're in a different part of the world when you can't read signs and when figuring out what cheese to buy is difficult. Or which packet in the fridge is actually ham! Pricing here is also fun because they don't use the Euro. Here they have the Hungarian Forint (HUF) and the conversion to NZD is roughly 200 to 1. Our breakfast purchase cost 3,893 HUF and lunch with the the beers 2,256 HUF. I'll let you do the maths this time. A single 500ml can of Lowenbrau lager beer was 369 (HUF). 

The afternoon is spent recovering from our day of travel yesterday. We are here for a whole week so there is no need to rush around the place. I spent a couple of hours editing video footage from our London visit and then did some book reading. Sarah had a sleep as she wasn't feeling 100%. Hopefully she hasn't picked up something from the plane travel yesterday. 🤞

Late in the afternoon we headed to a bigger Spar supermarket to see what we could rummage up for dinner. We purchased chicken breasts $12/kg and an unfamiliar packet of spices that Google said was honey chili. Plus a boil in the bag rice. We decided to get some yoghurt to even out the spices but Google translate wasn't working. Turns out we got sour cream! A few pita breads completed the meal plan.

Cooking completed it was deemed to be ok but not brilliant. Certainly a long way from the worst meal we have ever prepared but not one to add to the recipe book. We had a Lowenbrau lager to wash it down. Total cost of dinner including the beer was $19. 

A good first day in Eastern Europe and in a City we both never thought we would ever visit. I'm really looking forward to seeing the river and Buda tomorrow.