And so we say goodbye to Spain and our companions and we head North to Hungary.
Unfortunately, the only sensible way to get there is to fly. By train it would take several days and be considerably more expensive. Mind you, there was a flight leaving for Seville from the next door gate to ours, and that’s only a couple of hours by train, so that makes no sense.
Our flight left late morning, which didn’t give us any useful time in Madrid except to get to the airport. The flight was 2 1/2 hours, I spent it catching up on this blog and swapping over my Duolingo from Spanish to Italian. I was sorry to do so: I’ve become attached to the language over the last week. The “th” is really far less irritatingly noticeable than I had expected.
We arrived mid afternoon, I had expected immigration and customs queues but of course we’re in the Schengen zone so you just pick up your bags and walk out.
Simon had arranged a taxi to take us to our hotel, the traffic was awful so we had plenty of time to look around.
He had also booked us into a nice hotel on the Pest side of the river, we had paid extra for a small upgrade but in fact they gave us a junior suite at no extra cost. Hopefully they won’t charge us for the coffee pods.
Hungary is in the EU but not in the Eurozone: they use a bonkers currency called the Forint. 1000 of them makes 2.5 Euros.
We are here for four nights so after the inevitable brief afternoon nap we walked round the corner to the local supermarket and bought milk and breakfast stuff. The booze section was impressive.
We went for a short walk to familiarise ourselves with the local area, and then looked for somewhere to eat. Simon found a highly recommended place on Google but unfortunately everyone else had read the same review: there was a queue out the door. Instead we went for an upmarket version of a traditional Hungarian restaurant that was nowhere near as expensive as we’d feared. We were pleased to find it as it was getting late and it was now bucketing down with rain.
The people here are very hard to read. They don’t seem to smile a lot. Our waiter was quite unnerving at first although he warmed up later. When I said I’d missed the specials board he said in an annoyed voice that he was in the middle of explaining it to me. He became friendlier when Simon said nice things about the wine and ended up asking us to do a review of him on the website.
The food wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I thought it would be all heavy stews, meat and potatoes. In fact they are renowned for their bread, and I had a lovely sourdough with an eggplant and pickled onion dip, and a pasta and cheese (and pickled onion) dish for my main. Simon had something called fish greaves for his starter which is like a fishy version of pork crackling, usually eaten as a snack with beer, and sausages for his main. The wine was indeed also very nice, including the famous dessert wine Tokay, which we were told is the envy of the world. A mad dash back to the hotel in the rain having forgotten to take our umbrella.