hungry in hungary

Posted on July 24, 2006 Updated on May 23, 2013

On our flight from Santorini, we were rubbing shoulders with celebrities – well, not really. It was only one celebrity – and he was seated towards the front of the plane. He as in Liam Neeson!

Anyway, after two flights, we made it to Budapest and it is SCORCHING! A heat wave is sweeping through Europe and being inland Europe, it was extremely warm. Our hotel was not far from a supermarket so we went down to stock up on water – 6 x 2L bottles in fact to cart back to the hotel. Now in Australia – sparkling water usually comes in glass bottles not your plastic bottles. And we were not fans of sparkling water and had no idea that Europeans were so fond of it so innocently we opened a bottle and started to scull the water which of course was fizzy. So here we were with 6 large bottles of “gassy” water – just great! Usually you get flat coke or sprite if you don’t put the lids back on tightly, right? That’s what we did, released the “air” from all the bottles hoping that it would flatten them. (In case, you were wondering – it doesn’t work!) During our time in Hungary though, we learnt that if you want still water, look out for the pink lids.

The day we visited the Buda side, there were medieval festivities on and as we sat on the steps on Fisherman’s Bastion – there were three children (aged between 10-12 maybe) playing violins. We sat there for over half an hour listening and enjoying the music until there was a quick downpour and everyone ducked for cover. It was also the first time we had tried kurtos, a real tasty snack. It is basically a Hungarian cylindrical pastry and it looks like pork crackle. When we saw the street vendors selling it, from a distance they do look like pork crackle and that is our nickname for it 🙂

After 15 days of travelling where we had been very careful not to blow our funds on extravagant meals, we decided that it was time to top up on our vitamins and minerals and protein, we would have a feast at a restaurant called Sir Lancelot. As the name suggests, it is a medieval restaurant that is underground. The restaurant is decked out in medieval decor: tables, chairs, shields, candles and clay mugs etc. We got served soup in bread bowls and shared a meat platter. There was so much food that it could have fed us three days more. Did we ever get hungry in Hungary? Definitely not!

View more photos of our trips at Photo Gallery.