Kevin Runs Europe: Day 34

Recovery Day

The first things of note that we accomplished on our first day in Budapest were a visit to St. Stephen's Basilica followed by a free walking tour of the city. Whenever you're in a major city in Europe, always be on the lookout for free walking tours (You're more likely to get them if you stay in hostels, because often hostels cooperate to put together free walking tours that are only available for their guests). Of course, "free" comes with a catch. It's still pretty much expected that you tip the guide at least a couple Euros worth if they did a decent job (or a gazillion Hungarian Florints - that's about what the conversion rate is). Granted, not all walking tour guides are decent (as we later discovered in Vienna) but this one in Budapest was excellent and certainly deserved more than the small tip we could giver her at the end. The walking tour also gave us an opportunity to meet some of the people staying in our hostel and other hostels around town, and afterward we stopped at a pub for some traditional Hungarian goulash with Mike from San Diego who's studying biomedical engineering in London.

That night, we went on a pub crawl that was basically made up of people from different hostels across Budapest. We had a very small group (like 10), but it was fun and we got to experience Budapest's "ruin" pubs in the Jewish quarter. Basically, they're big abandoned buildings - apartments, offices, even a dentist's clinic - that have been turned into big clubs and bars. They're not remodeled much from their abandoned state, but they are decorated in the strangest of ways (giant plastic bats hanging from the ceiling, half-human-half-rabbit sculptures, etc.). It's not as sketchy as it sounds, but it's every bit as crazy as it sounds.

LOTS of pictures for today...