Budapest: Part I
We didn’t quite know what to expect when we decided to honeymoon in Budapest. Neither of us are Hungarian, and we actually chose Budapest because we wanted to have a different destination than most honeymoon hot spots. Everything in Budapest completely surpassed our expectations.
The best thing about Budapest was that everywhere you went, there was something new and interesting. From it being Harry Houdini’s hometown to the dungeon that held Vlad Dracula captive for 14 years, there was always so much to learn!
We also loved all the different restaurants and cafes. Some food was traditional, like goulash and chicken paprikash, but we were surprised to find a lot of diversity. We found many Middle Eastern, Spanish, and Asian restaurants. Our favorite discovery was the wok bar, where you choose your base (rice or noodles), your protein (Nick got duck, Jess got tofu), and then your sauce (our favorite was the garlic sauce), and they cook it in a wok right in front of you!
There were also so many eccentric shops. We found a corner store that only sold strudel - the owner gave us a free strudel as a "Welcome to Hungary" gift. We also stumbled across an e-sports bar, where the entire place was filled with computers, tvs, and different consoles. Apparently there were several e-sports and virtual reality bars in Budapest, something that we had no idea of before we found it randomly one night! We spent two late nights there playing Super Mario on the Wii U and befriending the one employee who worked there.
Before we left for our honeymoon, a friend gave us a lock to put on one of the many lock bridges in Budapest. We ended up locking ours onto a fence around a tree in a park we walked through almost every day! We spent some time reading the other locks from people all around the world. It left us wondering who would see our lock in the future.
Our favorite part was that by the end of the week, we started to really know the city. We felt comfortable using public transportation, we started recognizing some Hungarian words, and we stopped using our GPS to get to most places. We felt like we could stay there forever. One week was definitely not long enough to explore.
- Nick + Jess
