Ok, so compared to Bucharest and pretty much the whole of Romania, this place is like Scottsdale is to AZ or the Pearl district is to Portland. It's a pretty touristy place where we are situated, and the biggest difference I've seen thus far is the fact that we feel pretty damn safe around here. A few scammer types around the big tourist traps but other than that most of the folks we've met have spoke great english and been very friendly. Hungarian is a language all it's own, so we don't understand a damn thing anyone says... but again, almost everyone speaks english. We're in the super nice part of town but everything is still pretty cheap. A bit ago we had a full meal, 4 beers, a shot of ouzo and an espresso and our bill was still only around $28... our most expensive meal in a while, if not the whole trip.
People here dress like they're all going to a posh club every minute of the day, much like some French and Italian folks I've seen in the past. The guys dress sharp, wearing suits or some well known name brand clothes while the women all wear heals and dress to impress. This makes the women look amazing but in all fairness, Romania still has the natural beauty over this place when it comes to the ladies. :-)
Today we walked around Buda castle, which is situated on top of a big hill on the Buda site of the city. The other side of the city is the Pest side... hence the name Budapest. There is an amazing amount of great architecture in every direction you look. Even the hostel we're staying in is in a building with gargoyles on the side. The streets were a bit tough to figure out when we were looking for the hostel the other night, but once we figured it out and walked a few miles we finally found where we needed to go.
Last night we stayed in a mixed dorm with 8 beds... which we're staying in again tonight of course. Our neighbors were a couple 20ish chicks from California that we chit chatted with this AM before heading out, 3 asian guys who spoke practically no english and a chick who just checked in at 8am (and woke me up) whom I'll have to ask where she's from in a bit. So far the girls are still there along with the one that woke me, but we've added a few German guys in place of the Asians. They seem alright, I talked to them a bit ago and their English was as good as mine. Apparently, this is one of the coolest hostels in this city, because almost everyone here is from America...haha. Ok, only an entire other room of 8 that let us in the gate yesterday.
It's been awesome with the world cup going on, because every day after we've walked around all day and need to sit around and eat or drink beer... we just stop by a bar that has TV's outside with the world cup matches going on and vuvuzelas blaring in the background in case you didn't know where the game is on. We've caught about a match or 2 a day other than the days we've traveled and weren't able to, so that's been awesome. About 5 minutes away they have a huge projection screen in a park where everyone gathers to watch the games... how cool is that?
This has been most of our times when we're not walking around being touristy.
We're going to go out in a bit and figure out something else to do tonight since we have one more night in this awesome town. Hopefully I'll be able to hop on here in the morning but if not I'll probably write a bit more when I'm on the train to Prague about this place. We were told that if we like Budapest, that Prague is a 10x cooler place... so really looking forward to that... so much so that we booked 3 nights there rather than our typical 2 in most places we've been so far.
I reckon that's about it for now. :-)
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