Life Abroad: Budapest

This past weekend a group of 10 of my friends from Rome and myself traveled to Budapest, Hungary. Budapest pronounced Buda-pesht in Hungarian is such an amazing city! It is definitely my favorite city in Europe that I have visited so far. The city is very clean, easy to get around, very cheap, and the people are lovely! Everyone that we met was very helpful and kind to us!

We arrived in Hungary at around 11pm and from the airport had to find our way to the hostel we had booked. Because we were traveling in such a large group it was a bit of a mess trying to organize these travel plans, but we ended up taking a shuttle from the airport to our hostel for a very reasonable 7 euro per person! When we got to the hostel, they showed us to our rooms and told us not to worry about paying for anything until we were rested in the morning.The six girls that went on the trip all shared a room with bunk beds and a shared bathroom. Breakfast was included in the morning, which was a nice surprise and then we headed off to a free walking tour. Our tour guides were really young and a lot of fun. We learned a lot about Hungarian history and the set up of the city. Budapest is split up into two cities, Buda and Pest. The Buda side is much older and has a lot of historic buildings( i.e. the castles), it is much more family oriented. The Pest side is where we were staying, which is much newer, built on a grid system(so much easier to get around compared to Rome), and has a lot of small restaurants and a huge night life! We started the tour on the Pest side and then made our way over the bridge to the Buda side ending with the castles and Matthius Church. After the tour we went to a restaurant called "M" for some traditional Hungarian food. The Hungarians eat very heavily, lots of meat and potatoes. At "M" we each had a 3 course meal including a glass of wine for 1900 HUF, which is 8.7 dollars!!
Hungarians don't do a lot of advertising, but they have excellent wine and delicious desserts. Unfortunately I wasn't able to try any goulash while I was in Hungary, but that just means I'll have to go back, which I definitely wouldn't mind!
That night we all bought some Hungarian wine at our hostel and then headed out to a bar called Simplza, which had a really cool atmosphere. There were two different levels and many different alcoves with different bars inside. The building was older looking, completely made of stone and was lit with fire torches. We met travelers from around the world and socialized there for the rest of the night. There are a lot of bars on the Pest side, so if I do go to Budapest again I definitely want to do a bar crawl.
The next day was our last day in Budapest, so we headed to the famous baths! I wish we had these kinds of baths/spas in the US. There were various pools at different temperatures which you get in and out of in different progressions, saunas ranging from many different temperatures, steam rooms, and ice cold pools. It was the perfect way to end the trip and very relaxing for the flight home! After a day at the baths we grabbed some lunch and then headed to the train station to catch our flight to the airport back to Rome!
I would DEFINITELY recommend Budapest, if you want to travel around eastern Europe! It is an amazing city with so much to offer, I wish I could have spent a week there!
Here are some pictures from the weekend: