28.9.24
Another comfy night for me. Not sure why but Carol was woken by flashing lights in the room in the night, which must have been scary.
Breakfast was good, not in the same league as our last 2 hotels, but definitely plenty of choice.
After breakfast I went off to the loo and wondered why there was 5 urinals. I figured it’s gender neutral because they’ll have their back to me.
Looked again at the door, yep it was the mens. Carol did the same somewhere else a few days ago.
Our plan today was to set off to find the red metro to the Jewish quarter.
Once outside the hotel we saw buses and wondered about catching one of those instead, but we need tickets. Hovered around like a pair of loons and opted for plan A as we can buy tickets there.
Tickets bought off we went to the Jewish Quarter.
I’ve no idea after that it was a blur of incredible buildings, rain and walking.
Just under 18km walked, and a few bus and trams thrown in.
I was taking a photo outside Dobay cafe and a chatty young guy welcomed us inside to get dry. We had fabulous traditional Krem cakes and coffees.
I watched a whole YouTube video dedicated to Hungarian cakes. I want all of them.
The lovely young man went to Uni in Brighton, my home town. Small world.
I think the highlight today was Castle Hill. Fabulous buildings and views. The fishermens bastion was my favourite. I’ve no idea what a bastion is, I will add it to my very long list of things I don’t know.
St Stephens basilica was a very close 2nd favourite attraction.
I can’t remember what order we saw things, or indeed what some of the places were.
I’m going to add all photos at the end as there are so many and WordPress jumps around and makes me want to throw my phone off a tall building.
The transport system is excellent, spotlessly clean and so simple that we only got off at the wrong stop once.
My phone was dying rapidly from all the map searching and the power bank wasn’t working. So frustrating because we’d realised we were going to have to stay out all day and evening to have a good chance of getting to achieve the must see list, let alone all the other places. At one point we were 0.6km away from Media Mart, I could see its red sign. Carol was sure that the B bus would do the same route as the one without a B and we could go to Media Mart after travelling the loop of Castle Hill. We came to the end of the bus route and sadly nowhere near being able to buy a new powerbank.
We tried the traditional langos.. A fried dough, which tasted like a doughnut, with sour cream, lashings of grated cheese and garlic. I loved it and ate all mine Carol wasn’t keen. They very kindly charged my phone. It was on 20%. It was on 15% when they gave it back. Eeeek..
One of the last things we saw today was the shoes on the Danube.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoes_on_the_Danube_Bank
Heartbreaking, especially the tiny shoes. I was close to tears.
Carol got us around with the paper map for the rest of the time as my poor phone was worn out.
We were fine until we got the Number 2 metro back to Star Hotel. We got off, looked around the exits, nope, we definitely didn’t see a large shopping mall.
We did 1 more stop, aha! There was our beautiful near to our hotel railway station, so we took the opportunity to look inside.
There were a lot of very wobbly people around, it was Saturday night.
I used the last dregs of phone battery and Carol photographed the route from the train station back to the Star. Just as well as it died just after that. It was a relief to find our favourite Magnums in a little shop on the way. We had those flavours in Turkey 2 years ago. We were such stop outs, back after 10pm.
I wanted to relax and watch MAFS, doze quietly to get to sleep early as I want to get up and have 7am brekkie and enjoy the rest of the city….best laid plans and all that…
