Budapest (and McVeigh)

From Salzburg I flew to Budapest, first in a little baby plane (with propellers) from Salzburg to Vienna, via Linz. I then had a five hour stopover in Vienna (I've discovered that stopovers are not too bad, when you can spend them in the business class lounge, enjoying complementary food and drinks, comfortable couches and chairs, and access to the news (the first I'd really seen since leaving Bangkok).

Most of the stopover was taken up with watching the coverage of the McVeigh execution with some kind of morbid curiousity, and debating with a couple of other watchers, the validity of the death sentence (I'm against it). A strange afternoon.

Eventually my plane to Budapest was ready to go, and after some apprehension regarding being able to get from the airport to my hostel in a country where I had no hope of understanding the language, I arrived at my new temporary home. My first thought was 'I'm not in Austria anymore' (the three Austrian hostels I stayed in were all wonderfully clean and modern places), and although the first impression was one of 'oh my god' I ended up loving this hostel.

I met some really fun people and we had some great times out in the city, and staying in at the hostel. Budapest is wonderfully cheap too. I went out for dinner one night and although we both had mains, sides, desserts and lots of wine, it was still less than $10 AUD each.

Pretty cool. Unfortunately there was a coldie-fluie thing running rampant through the hostel which I managed to catch, meaning I did less in the city than I planned, I still had a wonderful time. The mineral baths were fantastic. There was one only a few minutes away from our hostel that we visited almost every afternoon.

The two cities, sitting side by side, divided by the river (Buda and Pest) are a great contrast - Buda with its hills and medieval town, and Pest with its great flat plains covered in industrial and residential zones.

One of my favourite sightseeing thingies was the statue park - when communist rule was ended in Hungary, instead of tearing down and destroying the propaganda statues, they were set aside and put on display in a special park. Took lots of photos. These structures are incredible, and I'm glad they were saved - if only to act as a lesson of how communism did not work there.