Travelling to Budapest, and first impressions

Wow! We've been travelling less than two weeks and I'm already behind. I need to get myself on a schedule for writing! Perhaps when I've conquered the jet lag it will be easier. I've been staying awake until well after 1 in the morning and then waking up around 4 in the morning... which results in a much needed nap.... which results in me not fixing my sleep schedule.

We flew direct from Las Vegas to Frankfurt on Condor, which is the Lufthansa discount airline. I was pleasantly surprised because the reviews were TERRIBLE! So don't always trust reviews, maybe only people who are really cranky post reviews?

When we got on the plane there was a blanket, pillow and bottle of water on each seat even though we were in "economy". Now the seats were squishy. If you can afford the "premium economy" or "business class" it would totally be worth it to have more room... but I was budget conscious 😁

They came around several times with beverages during the 11 hour flight, and also provided (for free) dinner and breakfast. Both of which I thought were good for airplane food. There was seatback entertainment, but the "economy peasants" (my term, not theirs 😉) had to pay 8 Euros for this. We just paid for the one on Steve's seat and we both watched his when I wasn't napping.

Our flight arrived a little bit early and we had plenty of time to make our connection to Budapest on Lufthansa. I feel like we walked approximately 37 miles to make our connections... but that might be a slight exaggeration.

When we arrived in Budapest they sent out one of our backpacks on the carousel right away and then sent the other out about 15 minutes later. This resulted in some anxiety on my part (what if everything I own doesn't arrive???) but, no problem, it all came.

Budapest airport was easy to navigate as there was a line painted on the floor that directed you to the official taxi stand. Budapest is infamous for having taxi drivers that are rather unscrupulous so I would recommend using the official taxi. You follow the line out to a kiosk, tell them where you want to go, and they give you a voucher saying how much it will cost. Then you hop in a cab and show them your voucher.

Our driver was excellent telling us many interesting things about Budapest. His English was considerably better than our Hungarian (we can say absolutely nothing in Hungarian), and Steve liked the driver's cool name "Zoltan". When we arrived at our hotel he asked for exactly what our voucher said, which we paid him with a rather large tip. Steve likes to help stimulate the local economy through tipping people who are nice to him 😁

We arrived at "Hotel Parlament" and checked in. They let us know that John and Angie had already arrived, but Senne and Dianne had not arrived yet.

When we got to our lovely room (my research paid off, the hotel was terrific!) Steve said "I'm just going to lay down for a minute". My response was "NO WAY! Have a shower, we need food!" He was an obedient husband and did what I said (for once!)Just before we we headed out John and Angie came by. They were just returning from dinner, but walked with us to find a place that our cab driver had recommended. It ended up being full (unless we wanted a shared table... which I wasn't up for with my jet lag and lack of Hungarian) so we decided to walk and find somewhere else. Unfortunately his recommendation took us in the wrong direction and we wandered aimlessly unable to find food that we wanted. Not knowing Hungarian was a a problem in this neighbourhood! We decided to go back to the hotel (after doing some circles and getting lost) to get a recommendation. Guess who we ran into? Senne and Dianne. They needed dinner too, so armed with a recommendation from the lovely Petra we headed out to the Strudel House for a delicious dinner with the family. This was exactly what we were looking for in a much better neighbourhood.

On the way back we took a little walk where we saw hundreds of birds circling over an amazing looking building (which we later determined was the Parliament Building.) Then we decided we should get some sleep since it was approaching midnight... ha ha ha... jet lag, that crafty devil, ruined that plan!