Bye, Bye Budapest

Easter Monday in Budapest wasn’t much more crowded that Easter Sunday had been. Still, most of the places around my hotel, and around town generally, were still shut down. Adding to the problems of Easter Monday is that the weather had basically turned to crap. It had gone from 70 and sunny the day before to 50 and rainy on Monday. You gotta love spring, I guess.

I started off the day running a few errands, like getting a ticket for Zagreb and finding some beer for my final night in town. Then, I headed northeast. Here, I found another popular touristy area in Budapest. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what anything here was called, so I’m not going to be able to provide you with many details.

I hopped on the metro and got off at Hösök Tere. There, I found a huge public square with some magnificent sculptures. It was flanked on both sides by huge museums. The art museum was open and I toyed with the idea of going into it, but it cost $16 and it would have forced me to take more Hungarian money out of the ATM and that was something that I really didn’t want to do. I always try to run out of the local currency rather than exchange it.

Rather than go into the museum, I walked around the area and took some pictures of the buildings. There was a zoo in the neighborhood, and I was halfway interested in going, but again, the weather had gotten pretty crappy and I didn’t feel like spending too much time outside. For lunch, I stopped by a little stand in the area and grabbed a gyro. Unlike in Thessaloniki, this one had tsatsiki but no french fries, so it was a little closer to the gyros to which I had grown accustomed.

Afterwards, I went to my hotel and worked on my soccer blog for a while and watched Jay Leno on the only English-language channel on my television. Afterwards, I went walking around the neighborhood looking for anything that appeared to be even remotely Hungarian to eat. It had gotten dark early because of the weather, and I didn’t feel like venturing too far away from home. Everything, it seemed, was closed except for fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC. I wanted to avoid those, so I finally stopped at this place called Ba Bar, which at least claimed in its window to have some authentic Hungarian food.

I had the goulash soup to start, but it was only okay. In fact, I had much better goulash soup in Prague. (I also had a Czech beer. I would have preferred the Czech goulash and a Hungarian beer.) I followed the soup with a gnocchi and tomato sauce dish that was excellent, but didn’t really scream “Hungary” at me.

That was pretty much it for the trip. As I mentioned in my first Budapest post, I really liked the city, but because of the weather and the holiday and all the time I spent trying to find football stadiums, there was a lot to the city that I didn’t get to experience. Obviously, that’s always the case in these brief four or five day trips, but I felt like it was even more of the case in Budapest. On the bright side, however, that gives me a good reason to come back and visit again.