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As already alluded to, Budapest has a lot to offer in many areas with cultural landmarks being but one of them. Despite careful trip planning for the purposes of a generally relaxed and orderly time away, there invariably come moments when the departure date creeps up on you all too fast. Those times you might get hit with a dizzying indecisiveness in terms of what to prioritize, how to get there, at least a general idea of what to do about the intake of food and how to pull the whole thing off in style and not pass out in the middle of the last turnstile. This was, with only minor embellishments, our Saturday.

We managed to cover some decent ground though on our trek through Pest and our first sojourn on the Buda side. Even though our expectations were not quite met in Liberty Park in terms of the number of food cart options on account of the on-going music festival there, we had a great casual lunch whose caloric value committed us to walking for hours to come even close to burning a fraction of it off. On our way to the Chain Bridge to make it over to the Buda side, we paid our respects at the simple, yet starkly moving monument of the people that were killed there by fascist militia during the second World War. Our walk continued over Budapest’s own Lions Gate Bridge that is known as the Chain Bridge. The Lion statues guarding the both sides of the bridge are curiously without tongues; an unintended omission that made the artist throw himself into the Danube out of shame for. As a grrreat admirers of these big cats, I can appreciate the commitment, but could something not be retrofitted and so live to fight another day?

If the Pest side is seemingly visited predominantly by party-aged hipsters, Buda appears to attract the tour-bus crowds that descend like locusts and leave nothing behind but empty water bottles and broken selfie sticks. Buda has adjusted well to this clientele with exorbitant prices from Mojitos (clearly why people travel to Hungary) to Funicular tickets to charging to go up a staircase that ostensibly gives you a slightly better view than 4 metres lower. These are merely artifacts of supply and demand however and with some rudimentary foresight, odds are you’re not in a position to require these services.

Saturday night, we did something we rarely do and haven’t really done in a long time; We entered the bar scene. Starting off with atypical hoppy beers from local brewery Hoptop and others, we almost blended in with the other party-goers and to the untrained eye may have looked like we belonged. In addition to the obvious benefit of drinking interesting beers, we also learned a, for us, new term. It is not new, though: “Ruin bar”. It’s a social establishment situated in a derelict building and the original, Szimpla Kert, is still in business and from the looks of it, doing rather well at it. After being gently patted down by astonishingly polite bouncers, I can report that beyond looking a tad rougher perhaps than the Bengal Room of the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC, it had a bar feel much like all the rest.

While I would consider even the Pest side of Budapest quite ‘walkable’, one has to keep ones wits and be mindful where the streets you’re walking down will take you. On the Pest side, as you get farther from the Danube, the pleasant-to-walk street start to get radically outnumbered by those that are noticeably less so. Despite a heavy reliance on Google Maps for both planning and in-the-wild navigation, I managed with some frequency steer us in a slightly incorrect direction that more often than not resulted in us traipsing through a part of town that you likely will not see on any of the local postcards. For those familiar with Vancouver, BC in Canada, I found myself making the following parallel: While Buda and Pest look similar around the Danube; on the Buda side the farther away you get, the more it looks like West Vancouver with larger detached houses nestled on lush hillsides, while the same on the Pest side looks increasingly like the downtown east side. As budget-minded, duration travellers, we of course stayed on the Pest side and a good ways in to boot.

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