Budapest
After Prague I took an amazing train ride to Budapest. The entire journey was beautiful through lush green valleys with cows grazing and little houses perched on hillsides. The 7 hour journey was extremely easy and far more pleasant than flying.
I arrived to Budapest and had high hopes for my hostel as it was rated 9.4 out of 10, which is something I've never seen before in my life. It said on hostelworld that it was rated the best hostel in the world in 2011. The first night I started playing drinking games with all the residents. The drinking games were organized with the hostel and started promptly at 7 pm. What struck me first is that everyone was 18-22 years old. That would have been fine, but the drinking game became absurdly raunchy extremely fast. I lived in a fraternity for four years in college, but even for those standards the stuff they were talking about was too much, especially amongst strangers and completely sober. Since I was bored in Prague with the lack of hostel life, I decided to stick with it and stayed out until midnight, but the whole night seemed weird.
The next day I decided to do some more of the free walking tours. Because the groups in English in Prague had been pretty non-talkative, I decided to do the Spanish walking tour and it was a great decision. We were a group of 15 people and I talked to every single person in the group. After the 2.5 hour tour, all of us decided to go have a 90 minute lunch together. It was refreshing to have some real conversations after the weird night in the hostel and the non-social tours in English in Prague. I think in the future I will continue this strategy. I decided to skip the drinking games the second night and instead walked around downtown Budapest soaking up the nightlife.
Budapest is nice, but not that nice. It has a nice basilica and a cathedral, and there is a river in the middle of the city, but it's not awe inspiring. Certainly not as nice aesthetically as Prague. I also found the people to be rude. In my dozen or so interactions with Hungarians, they were rude and unhelpful. The only exception was the Hungarian tour guide who spoke in Spanish. For example, when I was trying to get to the airport, I bought a train ticket at the ticket booth and tried to get onto the airport train. The train conductor wouldn't let me get on the train, but wouldn't tell me why or even point to where I should go for the correct ticket even though he spoke some English. After wandering around the train station for 50 minutes, I realized that although there was a GIANT sign for train tickets right next to the train, train tickets for that train had to be purchased in a separate location that was in another room.
Hungarian is a unique language. Unlike most Eastern European languages that are based on Slavic, Hungarian isn't based on anything. It's a language island like Basque that has no roots in any other languages. This means that it completely unrecognizable to everyone. Unlike in France or Germany where you know a couple words or recognize things, Hungarian makes no sense. I tried to learn simple phrases like "Cheers," but the pronunciation is crazy (Egészségére). Maybe Hungarians are mad that tourists don't learn their language, but how can you expect people to learn such a difficult language that less than 10 million people speak.
Hungary also had a tough past. They were originally a horse people from Central Asia that decided to settle down kind of like the Dothraki in Game of Thrones. After World War I, Hungary lost 2/3 of its territory, mostly to Romania, and most of the city was destroyed in WWII. After the Soviet Red Army liberated Budapest from the Nazis, they forgot to leave and Hungry was subject to 45 years of communism until 1989. The average salary is only 300-500 euros per month and the politics have swung far right. Apparently the Hungarian President was the first leader to call and congratulate Donald Trump. The mafia also operates a taxi ring, which means that as a tourist you cannot hail taxis from the street.
So I guess I can forgive the Hungarian people for being rude, but they should really reconsider since their economy depends on tourism. Although I enjoyed my day at the bath house, I don't think I would go back to Budapest. The food also was not impressive, which is a big deal for me. The infamous goulash is nothing more than tomato soup with vegetables and meat. The three days I was there I could not find any authentically Hungarian restaurants that weren't just catering to tourists. It was weird because in other cities, once you get out of the touristy areas it's pretty easy.
Entrance to bathhouse. I asked one of the staff "Where is the bathroom?" and suddenly realized that asking "Where is the toilet?" is way less confusing when you are at a bathhouse.
This is what I wrote when I was at the airport about to leave: "I didn't really like Budapest but I can't put my finger on why. Maybe the hostel was too weird, the food underwhelming, and the people unfriendly. I also think it's from travelling alone for a week with only superficial human interaction. I don't think I'd come back to Budapest. I also think the European backpacker scene is a little more boring than Latin America because so many people were undergrads who had just finished studying abroad in places like Barcelona where they learned zero Spanish."
It's possible that my perspective was influenced by traveling alone and staying at a weird hostel. Probably with the right group of people Budapest could be quite fun, but this was my experience. I'm back in France now and getting ready for school to start again.
I arrived to Budapest and had high hopes for my hostel as it was rated 9.4 out of 10, which is something I've never seen before in my life. It said on hostelworld that it was rated the best hostel in the world in 2011. The first night I started playing drinking games with all the residents. The drinking games were organized with the hostel and started promptly at 7 pm. What struck me first is that everyone was 18-22 years old. That would have been fine, but the drinking game became absurdly raunchy extremely fast. I lived in a fraternity for four years in college, but even for those standards the stuff they were talking about was too much, especially amongst strangers and completely sober. Since I was bored in Prague with the lack of hostel life, I decided to stick with it and stayed out until midnight, but the whole night seemed weird.
The next day I decided to do some more of the free walking tours. Because the groups in English in Prague had been pretty non-talkative, I decided to do the Spanish walking tour and it was a great decision. We were a group of 15 people and I talked to every single person in the group. After the 2.5 hour tour, all of us decided to go have a 90 minute lunch together. It was refreshing to have some real conversations after the weird night in the hostel and the non-social tours in English in Prague. I think in the future I will continue this strategy. I decided to skip the drinking games the second night and instead walked around downtown Budapest soaking up the nightlife.
Budapest is nice, but not that nice. It has a nice basilica and a cathedral, and there is a river in the middle of the city, but it's not awe inspiring. Certainly not as nice aesthetically as Prague. I also found the people to be rude. In my dozen or so interactions with Hungarians, they were rude and unhelpful. The only exception was the Hungarian tour guide who spoke in Spanish. For example, when I was trying to get to the airport, I bought a train ticket at the ticket booth and tried to get onto the airport train. The train conductor wouldn't let me get on the train, but wouldn't tell me why or even point to where I should go for the correct ticket even though he spoke some English. After wandering around the train station for 50 minutes, I realized that although there was a GIANT sign for train tickets right next to the train, train tickets for that train had to be purchased in a separate location that was in another room.
Hungarian is a unique language. Unlike most Eastern European languages that are based on Slavic, Hungarian isn't based on anything. It's a language island like Basque that has no roots in any other languages. This means that it completely unrecognizable to everyone. Unlike in France or Germany where you know a couple words or recognize things, Hungarian makes no sense. I tried to learn simple phrases like "Cheers," but the pronunciation is crazy (Egészségére). Maybe Hungarians are mad that tourists don't learn their language, but how can you expect people to learn such a difficult language that less than 10 million people speak.
Hungary also had a tough past. They were originally a horse people from Central Asia that decided to settle down kind of like the Dothraki in Game of Thrones. After World War I, Hungary lost 2/3 of its territory, mostly to Romania, and most of the city was destroyed in WWII. After the Soviet Red Army liberated Budapest from the Nazis, they forgot to leave and Hungry was subject to 45 years of communism until 1989. The average salary is only 300-500 euros per month and the politics have swung far right. Apparently the Hungarian President was the first leader to call and congratulate Donald Trump. The mafia also operates a taxi ring, which means that as a tourist you cannot hail taxis from the street.
So I guess I can forgive the Hungarian people for being rude, but they should really reconsider since their economy depends on tourism. Although I enjoyed my day at the bath house, I don't think I would go back to Budapest. The food also was not impressive, which is a big deal for me. The infamous goulash is nothing more than tomato soup with vegetables and meat. The three days I was there I could not find any authentically Hungarian restaurants that weren't just catering to tourists. It was weird because in other cities, once you get out of the touristy areas it's pretty easy.
Entrance to bathhouse. I asked one of the staff "Where is the bathroom?" and suddenly realized that asking "Where is the toilet?" is way less confusing when you are at a bathhouse.
This is what I wrote when I was at the airport about to leave: "I didn't really like Budapest but I can't put my finger on why. Maybe the hostel was too weird, the food underwhelming, and the people unfriendly. I also think it's from travelling alone for a week with only superficial human interaction. I don't think I'd come back to Budapest. I also think the European backpacker scene is a little more boring than Latin America because so many people were undergrads who had just finished studying abroad in places like Barcelona where they learned zero Spanish."
It's possible that my perspective was influenced by traveling alone and staying at a weird hostel. Probably with the right group of people Budapest could be quite fun, but this was my experience. I'm back in France now and getting ready for school to start again.
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