photos by Bindhu

I had watched a travel show last year about Budapest, and one of the parts that intrigued me the most was how the Hungarians used the natural limestone caves in the mountains for hiding while under siege throughout history. These caves also go underneath Buda Castle, a huge 18th century castle that has over 10km of interconnected caves, cellars and tunnels underneath it. With over 100 caves, early residents lived and used these caves for storage and more recently for a hospital and nuclear bunker.

From 1939 to 1944 the caves status was changed from public to classified while the local government built a bomb shelter and emergency surgical center, finally completing the hospital in 1944. The hospital was one of the most advanced in its time with state of the art surgical equipment, x-ray and it’s own power generators ready for both civilian and military personnel.

After WW2 the communist government upgraded the bunker with larger generators, air and water filtration systems and nuclear proof doors. Able to support approximately 100 people for 30 days, the people inside would be able to sustain an initial nuclear blast.

The museum of the hospital has just over 70 wax figures of doctors, nurses, patients, soldiers and dead people arranged about in various positions. After the war all the boxes with medicine was preserved and they still have a ton of original equipment for surgeries, medicines and bandages. It’s certainly how I would imagine a hospital and they’ve done a great job recreating the scenes.

Even though it was the most modern for it’s time, I sure wouldn’t want to get sick in there. There’s no open windows, it feels pretty cramped and while it was made to fit 300 people, often there were upwards of 700 with people in the halls. I’ll take my overfilled Canadian hospitals anyday!

I’ve always wondered what a nuclear bunker would actually look like, and this one pretty much summed it up. The bunker was meant for the doctors from nearby hospitals and their families, which they only had very limited time to arrive before the door was shut permanently with as little as 15 minutes given. The interesting thing about it is that with the supplies and water they had they would only be able to keep the 100 people and military staff alive for 30 days or so. Of course the severe radiation would be there for much longer than that lasting upwards of a year before they could even try to make an escape. I wonder how many doctors would have made it to the doors only to find them closed.

All in, the museum is worth your time to go in and checkout if your in Budapest. To see an actual 1940′s hospital and nuclear bunker is a sobering reminder of times past, and a caution for future generations.

A quick visit to many countries leaves it difficult to appreciate what each city can show you.

We’ve been planning this trip for years, and part of it has been to meet up with our good friends Steve and Karen to tour Europe with them for 6 weeks. While in Venice we got word that they were going to be done their Scandanavian adventures in 10 days and we should meet up with them in Amsterdam. We quickly realized we only had a short amount of time left to see what we still wanted to see of Eastern Europe. So we made our choices of cities and the result was a total of 5! Venice, Budapest, Vienna, Krakow, Prague. Wow. That was a lot to see in 10 days.

Still to this day we are bit unsure what attracted us exactly to Budapest. Was it word of mouth from others? Claims by the internet that says it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe? All the underground things to explore like caves, labriryths, passageways, bunkers, and even an underground hospital? Or was it the thermal hot springs? Honestly all these things sounded great and very attracting, but for some reason Budapest ended up being hard for us to love.

After our sleepless and hot ass overnight train we arrived tired and cranky in the middle of the day into the central station. Things were looking up though as I had found us our own apartment on hostelbookers.com for $19 CDN per person a night. Complete with a full kitchen, laundry, free wifi, bathroom with fresh towels and a bed with fresh linens. All located in a great location on the Váci utca, which is a shopping street just under a mile long that is conveniently located in the city central to all attractions.

After a long search in the heat of the sun we finally found our apartment, but there was nobody there waiting for us out front. We stood there looking for a while wondering if we should randomly press the buttons, if we were on the right street and what the hell we should do as we only had the address, no phone number. After hanging around the front door for awhile a shop keeper from next door comes to us and asks if we are the Vanderlee’s? We replied yes and he had the key for us to get in as the owner of the apartment was not able to meet with us, but will be by later to get the money from us.

We pile into our apartment exhausted and decided to run a load of laundry and have a nap as our sleep was minimal. Waking up in the evening we discover we are no longer laying on the softness of a sheet, but instead on the scratchy top of the actual mattress as the sheet is way to small for it. We also learn the laundry machine does not work, it doesn’t fill up with water and now all of our clothes are covered in soap. Trying to put our long last 24 hours behind we head out for some dinner, take some night shots of a nearby bridge, and head back to bed to start again fresh the next day.

With only one full day to explore Budapest we had a day planned full of sight-seeing, to take a river boat tour on the Danube river, explore Castle Hill, and then go into the underground labyrinth and explore it with lanterns… ending the night with dinner down the street recommended by the apartment owner.

The river boat tour we picked had a very nice boat compared to the rest on the river banks and also offered 2 free drinks in the rate. The tour was actually pretty good with one of the best headset commentaries we have heard which kept you interested, made you laugh, and was clear to understand. It was a love story between Buda and Pest told over historical lessons with slight jabs at each other, in a male and female voice. On the return leg of the trip we found out the second free drink was in fact just a non-alcoholic Shirly Temple… that resulted in Scott biting his tongue so hard while eating the cherry that it bled!

Still feeling eager to explore we made our way over to Caste Hill which just like the name states, a castle built on top of a large hill. There is a funicular car that will take you up for a fee or you can climb the hill yourself up one of the paths for free. We of course climb up the hill ourselves to save some money and were feeling triumphant once we made it to the top. We had just decided to take a victory photo of us when we were interrupted by a strong accented Hungarian man. He says hi and offers nicely to take the photo for us, and Scott handed him the camera and proceeded to take this crappy photo.

He then hands the camera back while at the same time pulls out a name tag, puts it on, and proceeds to offer us his private walking tour. We kindly say no thank you but he started the tour right there by talking about the sights that are behind us. He doesn’t stop talking, not even to catch a breath and we can only understand one out of every 3 words of his broken english. Making sure to not look behind us at the sights he is pointing at, we politely waited for a chance to once again say no thank you. But the chance never comes and finally Scott stops being the nice Canadian and kindly interrupts him, tell him no thank you and we start to walk away.  The crazy Hungarian starts to get extremely mad and starts shouting in hungarian at all the tourists around him. All we could understand was “CANADIANS!!” with lots of angry sounding words as we quickly walked away.

After fleeing the scene we explore the castle grounds and what we could of the Matthias church grounds for free. Soon the sun was starting to set which meant it was time for our lantern tour of the labyrinth but on the way we see a sign ‘Hospital in the Rock’. This is something that Scott saw a special on and wanted to climb down the stairs and take a quick look. Unfortunately due to the time in the day there was only 1 more tour left and it started at the same time as the lantern tour leaving us with a decision to make. I was looking forward to the lantern tour but this one had more WW2 history to learn. (Check back for our next post about our experience at ’Hospital in the Rock’)

Matthias Church

It was now dark by the time we exited the underground hospital which meant it was time to climb back down the mountain with our now very sore feet and go for dinner at the highly recommended restaurant. This place had the worst service we have yet to experience on our trip. Scott had to run to the bank machine so I held the table and was completely avoided by the waiters while he was gone. Scott’s beer took a total of 45 mins to get brought to him and he had asked for it 3 times during the process. He kept getting told it would take 10 mins to come from their indoor location down the street and Scott eventually got up and headed down to the bar himself to get his drink. The food also took a very long time to come and actually arrived before his beer! It was a huge amount of food that was decent but a bit dry. Once we were done they cleared our table but never asked if we wanted dessert or the bill and we waited and waited and had to flag the guy down again to ask him for the bill. He says it will be 10 mins as again it has to come from the indoor location. We wait 10 mins with no bill and Scott asks again, playing this whole 10 minute game. Scott once again walks down the street to get it himself and also got the bill for the table next to us. Pretty crappy dinner!

Our hungarian dinner platter for 2

And that was our time in Budapest. With the large amount of cities in a short time plan, it meant we had to check out the next day and make our way to Vienna.

In conclusion, Budapest was a beautiful place but we were there for far too short to really get an appreciation for it. I do wish we had time to check out it’s famous hot springs and caves to climb through but you just can’t do it all!

Should you buy a Eurail pass? It’s not always as easy as flashing the pass…

When we first started planning this trip two years ago, we thought long and hard as to how to travel within Europe. We knew of companies such as Easyjet and Ryanair who have $1 flights between multiple destinations, but you usually have to know where your going and have a route and time frames planned out. And paying for rail each time seemed pretty expensive, but so did the eurail pass. The thought ran through my head many times “Should I buy a Eurail pass?”

After lots of research we thought the Eurail pass would work the best for us. We didn’t have a set itinary, wanted as much flexibility as possible and were sold on being able to see anywhere in Europe at the drop of a hat. There was only a “small” reservation fee on “the most popular” routes so we paid the €2000 ($3000 CDN) total for the two of us and were ready to start using our money’s worth!

I’ve never paid so much money for something to cause such a pain in the ass. The plan was easy: to go from Venice to Budapest on an overnight sleeper train leaving Friday night and arriving on Saturday morning.  On Wednesday we went in to the train station to reserve our seat on the train, but once we showed our Eurail tickets were told that the connection was down and to come back tomorrow. The next day we were told the same thing.

More than a bit frustrated, we went down to an internet cafe to see if we could book online. We found a Eurail fare for €65 pp, but didn’t think that was correct as the full fare was only €130 pp. We didn’t book the tickets because we wanted to talk to the train office the next morning to verify these prices, as it shouldn’t be so much.

We got to the train station at 9am the next morning to make sure we would get the tickets. After queuing in line, I finally got up to the front window only be told the connection was down again. It was quite frustrating walking over to another ticket window, waiting in line, being told the same thing, walking to customer service, being told to just try and get on the train and finally walking back to another ticket window. It seems that there were no more Eurail passes available to be let on the train is what the real problem was.

Sometimes it pays to be nice to the people that are causing you the most frustration. Even though this entire system was BS, we managed to keep our cool and joke around with the lady at the counter a bit. It ended up paying off as after 5 minutes of searching she found us a ticket out of there that night. There was an overnight train leaving at 7.10pm to Vienna, and in the morning we could transfer to Budapest and be there by lunch. We had two options with our First Class Eurail pass: pay €30 pp to sleep in an open car with 4 other people or €60 pp for a private sleeper. At this point I just wanted some peace and air conditioning and agreed to the outrageous price.

Dee and I hopped on our train only to find our sleeper cabin door locked. It’s a good thing we didn’t block the passage with our bags, and I finally managed to grab the attendant and burst into our little private space. It was about the size of a small bathroom, with two bunks that could pull down, sink, small closet, table and an excellent view of the train yard. Never-less it would be our home for the next 12 hours, and jacking up the knob for the AC we cracked open a bottle of red wine to enjoy the trip as we slowly started moving.

30 minutes later we were both drenched in sweat, having opened up the window, door and hall windows for some sort of circulation. Looking around the passageway I saw a mixture of travelers in varying states of undress and hoped I looked better than they did. The thermostat on the wall was somewhere around 40 degrees and the sounds of the train riding on the rails was thundering through all the open windows. I swayed with the moving train and heat waves down the hall until finally finding the attendant. After spending what seemed an eternity trying to speak englitalian, I finally figured he was saying the AC was broken. By that time a crowd formed behind me and nobody was very happy at having to ride another 9 hours with this heat. I pushed my way back to the compartment to break the bad news to Dee and left the mob to yell at the attendant.

So we did what we could and watched some movies as loud as possible to drown out the open window, and went to bed in stifling heat with earplugs that couldn’t block all the noise. Good thing we paid €2000 total for the Eurail tickets and €135 total for the seat reservations!

So far I’m not very impressed with the savings with our Eurail tickets.

I will be posting more thoughts about the Eurail tickets as we go along as they were one of our largest expenditures before we left! Just look under the Eurail category on the right hand side!