One way to the UK?

Well, Budapessht was a really nice place to visit, even though as I said earlier, most things were closed the entire time we were there. Kristy and I still had some fun! Especially because our supplies in-room consisted of 2 boxes of chocolates (lindt and toblerone) and 2 bottles of alcohol (bailey’s and vodka) that we picked up duty free, as well as some necessary things from the local Match (?) Store such as bread sticks, nutella, packet soup, hot chocolate (we then realised we had no kettle in the room later!), 2 litres of milk to have with the Baileys and 2 litres of lemonade to have with the Vodka. Oh and some cheese and yoghurt (we ‘borrowed’ spoons and a knife from the hotel’s restaurant).

On Christmas Eve we ventured out into town to find a restaurant with room, one was fully booked, and the other only had space for the 9pm and 10pm sittings, and we were hungry! So we headed to one of the main mall-streets and went to Casablanca, where we had ‘hot rock’ food from a set menu. My soup was a Hungarian dish, with bits of meat, lots of onion and garlic flavouring and Kristy has a goulash soup. My main was a big slab of Hungarian Beef and Kristy had Chicken. They came out Raw. Yep – you heard me, raw! At first I thought I was supposed to eat my steak blue (shudders) and was contemplating sending it back to the kitchen, however when we saw the chicken was also raw, it clicked that we had to ‘cook it ourselves’ on the ‘hot rocks’!!! Ahh, such a nice and tender piece of steak. I don’t even eat much red meat at home, but since we’ve been in the UK all we get occasionally is mince (apart from steak we had in Birmingham) and so I definitely enjoyed my piece of cow. I got to cook it exactly how I like it too on the hot rocks – dead and not mooing. There were no vegetales or salad or anything – just meat! Desert was nice too – we both chose pancakes with berries yum! And of course it was washed down with a bottle of Hungarian white wine.

We left the restaurant, and it was snowing!!! I have plenty of pictures, and they are on Facebook, otherwise I’ll soon post them on flickr for everyone else (this blog doesn’t allow many uploads). The next morning, Christmas day, we woke up to more snow underfoot. Now I’m not talking about big amounts of snow here, but we still got our White Christmas! Kristy and I both slept in and then lazed around watching Hungarian television. The Muppets Christmas Carol was on, in Hungarian, but the songs were still in English so we could partly understand it. That made it the 4th version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ I’ve seen this year. Poor souls in the UK, I don’t think they know there are other brilliant Christmas movies out there!!!

We eventually wantered out into the freezing cold (-5) all rugged up, and headed to the Buda side of town to see all the Historial and touristy things including the National Library and Gallery, St Michael’s Church and we continued to look for the ‘Buddha’, which I told Kristy didn’t exist in Budapest – but it was actually a little copper ‘nymph’ thing sitting on a bridge somewhere. We walked and walked and Budapest is a lot smaller than the map makes out, and eventually crossed back over the Danube and found an open cafe, where there were cakes galore! We both got a proper hot chocolate (made with cream, no skim milk haha) and I thought I ordered black-forrest cake, but it was just triple-choc-sponge! After warming up we then headed back towards our Hotel, passing the huge St Stephen’s Basilica and taking loads more photos.

For Christmas night, we went to a ‘submarine’ like Restaurant. Which is underground, like most in Budapest, however this one had all blue lighting and was kitted out just like a submarine inside. The food was great here too – I had Hungarian Paprika Chicken with gnocci dumplings (little twists of pasta/potato). All the food in Hungary was great – was never disappointed with a meal we had.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.