I booked Budapest because the flights were cheap and I'd never been to Hungary. That was about as much thought as went into it. I'd seen a few photos of the Parliament building lit up at night and I knew the beer was supposed to be dirt cheap and that was enough for me.
Wizz Air from Luton, twenty-seven quid return.
I landed on a Friday evening and took the 100E bus from the airport to Deák Ferenc tér, which is basically the centre of everything on the Pest side. The bus costs about 2,200 forints, roughly five quid, and takes about thirty-five minutes. You buy the ticket from the machine at the bus stop before you get on. Don't try to pay on the bus. They will not be happy about it.
I'd booked a bed at Maverick Downtown, a hostel on Ferenciek tere about two minutes from the Danube. Twelve euros a night for a mixed dorm with curtains and lockers. Twelve euros. In a capital city. I kept checking the price thinking I'd misread it. The place was small and clean and the woman on reception gave me a map with about fifteen things circled on it and said "skip the Fisherman's Bastion, it's a gift shop" which immediately made me trust her.
I dumped my bag and walked straight to the river. You have to. The Danube splits Budapest in half, Buda on the west side, all hills and old buildings, Pest on the east, flat and busy and where most of the food and nightlife is. I stood on the embankment near the Chain Bridge and watched the sun go down behind Buda Castle and the whole hillside turned orange and the Parliament building on my side of the river lit up and I just stood there with my mouth slightly open like every other tourist on the riverbank.
I walked south along the embankment for about ten minutes until I found a little kiosk selling draught beer for about 600 forints, which is less than £1.50. I sat on the stone wall with my legs dangling over the water and drank it slowly and watched the river boats go past. The Danube is wide here, much wider than I expected, and the light on the water was doing that thing where it breaks into a thousand pieces every time a boat goes through. A man was fishing off the wall about twenty metres away. I don't know what he was hoping to catch but I respected the commitment.
Saturday I woke up early and walked across the Liberty Bridge to the Buda side. The bridge is green and ornate and at 7am there was almost nobody on it. On the far side I climbed Gellért Hill, which is steep and took about twenty minutes and I was sweating by the top, but the view is worth every step. You can see the whole city from up there, both sides of the river, the bridges lined up in a row, the Parliament, the Basilica. I sat on a bench near the Liberty Statue and ate a banana I'd brought from the hostel and felt extremely pleased with myself for being awake.
I'd planned to go to Gellért Baths, the famous Art Nouveau ones at the bottom of the hill, but they're closed for renovation until 2028. Nobody tells you this until you're standing outside looking at scaffolding. So I walked north along the Buda embankment instead, past Rudas Baths (which are open and which I'll come back to), across the Chain Bridge, and into the Pest side for breakfast.
I ended up at Retró Lángos near Arany János metro station. Lángos is deep-fried dough, flat and crispy, and you top it with sour cream and grated cheese and garlic. It costs about 1,500 forints, roughly three quid. It is disgusting in the best possible way. I had mine with extra cheese and stood at the counter eating it over a paper plate while oil ran down my wrist and I thought: this is exactly the kind of breakfast that would horrify my mother and delight me.
After breakfast I walked to the Great Market Hall, which is this enormous indoor market at the Pest end of the Liberty Bridge. The ground floor is all fresh produce, meats, paprika in every conceivable form, and the upper floor is food stalls and souvenirs. I had a bowl of goulash for about 2,000 forints from a stall upstairs. It was good but not the best I had that weekend. The market is touristy but worth a quick look, especially on a Saturday morning when it's busy. It closes at 3pm on Saturdays and it's shut on Sundays, so time it right.
The afternoon I spent in the Jewish Quarter, which is District VII on the Pest side, about a ten-minute walk north of the market. This is where the ruin bars are. If you haven't heard of them: in the early 2000s, people started turning abandoned buildings in the old Jewish Quarter into bars. They filled them with mismatched furniture, bathtubs, old bikes, fairy lights, whatever they could find. The result is these enormous, rambling, multi-room drinking spaces that look like someone raided a skip and a vintage shop simultaneously. The most famous is Szimpla Kert on Kazinczy utca.
I went to Szimpla at about 4pm on the Saturday because I'd read that if you go at night it's stag dos and pub crawls and you can't move. At 4pm it was half full, mostly people having coffee or an early beer, and I could actually look around. It's spread across multiple rooms on two floors, with a courtyard in the middle. There's a car filled with plants. There's a bathtub hanging from the ceiling. Every wall is covered in something. It's a lot, but it's fun, and the fact that it's been doing this for over twenty years means it doesn't feel forced. A beer was about 1,800 forints, around four quid, which is steep for Budapest but standard for the tourist places.
The better ruin bar, the one I actually went back to, was Csendes. It's on Ferenczy István utca, about a five-minute walk south of Szimpla, and it's quieter and cheaper and full of locals. The walls are covered in collaged magazine pages and old film posters and there are mismatched armchairs everywhere. I had a beer for 900 forints, about two quid, and sat in an armchair by the window reading my book for about an hour. Nobody bothered me. Nobody was taking selfies. It was perfect.
That evening I went to Bors GasztroBár, a tiny place on Kazinczy utca that does stuffed baguettes and soups. You eat standing up because there are about four seats and they're always taken. I had a baguette stuffed with goulash for about 2,500 forints and it was absurdly good. The queue was out the door but it moved fast.
I ended up back at Szimpla that night because three people from my hostel were going and I'd done the thing where I forced myself to say yes. It was rammed. Completely different energy from the afternoon. Loud music, people everywhere, drinks sloshing. I stuck with the group for a couple of hours, met a guy from New Zealand called Sam who was halfway through a year in Europe, and a French couple who were on their honeymoon and had chosen to spend their Saturday night in a ruin bar, which I thought was brilliant. We ended up at a place on Gozsdu Udvar, this long covered passageway lined with bars and restaurants, and I had one too many pálinka shots and walked home at 2am through streets that smelled like fried food and felt like the whole city was still awake.
Sunday. I took myself to Rudas Baths. This is the one to do. It's on the Buda side, right at the foot of Gellért Hill, and it's been there since the 1560s when the Ottomans built it. The main pool is octagonal, under a domed ceiling with star-shaped holes that let light in, and it looks like something from another century because it is. A weekday ticket with a locker is about 7,000 forints, roughly fifteen quid. On weekends it's a bit more.
I went early, about 8am, and it was quiet. The thermal water is warm, about 36 degrees, and slightly sulphurous, and you just sit in it. That's it. You sit in hot water in a 500-year-old building and let your hangover dissolve. There's a rooftop pool that was added recently with views across the Danube to the Parliament building. I sat in that pool for about forty minutes watching the river and the sky and not thinking about anything at all.
After Rudas I walked north along the Buda side to Margaret Island, which is this long, thin island in the middle of the Danube. You can walk across from either side. It's basically a park. People were running, cycling, lying on the grass. There's a musical fountain that does a little show every hour. I bought a kürtoskalács, a chimney cake, from a stand near the fountain. It's a spiral of sweet dough baked on a spit and coated in cinnamon sugar and it's warm and crunchy and I ate the whole thing walking along the path and got sugar on my shirt and didn't care.
I spent my last evening at Csendes again because I liked it so much. Sam from New Zealand turned up by coincidence and we sat in the window with cheap beer and talked about the places we'd been and the places we still wanted to go. He'd just come from Slovenia and couldn't stop talking about Lake Bled. I told him about Prague. We swapped recommendations the way travellers do, writing place names on napkins and in phone notes, building each other's future trips from our past ones.
Monday morning. I packed up, walked to Deák Ferenc tér, took the 100E back to the airport. Sat on the plane doing maths on my phone.
Four days. Twenty-seven quid on the flight. About forty-eight euros on the hostel. Pálinka for about a pound a shot. Lángos for breakfast. A 500-year-old thermal bath for fifteen quid. The best stuffed baguette of my life from a place with four seats.
Budapest is absurdly cheap and absurdly good-looking and it knows it. The food is heavy and brilliant, the beer costs nothing, and there are hot springs under the city that people have been soaking in since before London had plumbing. Every backpacker I've ever met says go to Budapest and they're all right.
I should have gone years ago.