Too busy to…

I’ve been very lucky this year to take two business trips, one to India and a second to the beautiful city of Budapest. The office I was visiting is a just outside central Budapest which gives me the opportunity to see the “real” city; although my initial attempt to interact with the public transport system was something of a failure, in part due to some “creative” route-finding by one of my colleagues, but also because this Gordian route involved the metro as well as a tram and I didn’t know the Hungarian word for “transfer ticket”…

Budapest really is a city of two “halves” being originally two settlements called “Buda” and “Pest”. Buda has an impressive castle (completely rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII) which completely dominates the river skyline, but also a warren of quaint streets made for strolling. Also on the Buda side of the river is the amazing Gellert Spa: a rambling complex of 19th Century corridors leading outside to sun-drenched terraces, or inside to intricately decorated thermal pools which reminded me of the Roman Spa in Bath. Given its evident attractiveness to tourists, it was surprisingly reasonably priced too.

Not to be outdone in the impressive buildings league, Pest features a Basillica, which would not look out of place in Rome, set within a very picturesque square. Lovers of European cafés with “atmosphere” will enjoy Café Montmartre with its great location in the shadow of the church.

Reaching the Statue Park involved another public transport adventure, but it was bizarrely fascinating and definitely not to be missed.

Finally my trip was rounded off with some wine-tasting organised by my team. Hungarian wine is very good…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.