We made it up in time for breakfast on the Monday and it was very nice: we sat in the conservatory part of the breakfast room and the buffet selection was good. Unbelievably full yet again, we went up to the Royal Palace on the Funicular (near the Buda side of the Chain Bridge). The Funicular was more fun that the Royal Palace – which was a lot less impressive up close than it had been by night from near the river.
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On Sunday, we decided to continue a tradition we started the year before in Prague: namely, oversleeping because we forgot to adjust the time on my phone which we used as an alarm clock. We missed breakfast but it wasn’t a big deal because we were still digesting the big meal from the night before.
We set off on our explorations by heading up Bem Rakpart, away from Chain Bridge, towards the Batthyany metro stop (our “home” metro”) and stocked up on water at the Spar there. We bought excellent value three day tourist passes for the metro, buses, trams and the HEV (urban railway) for 1600HUF (about £4.50) each then took the metro up to the West End Mall. John was suffering sore feet issues too so we set about trying to find him some new trainers/inner soles.
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We had a decent flight out of Leeds Bradford – departing at 1030 so not a hideously early morning – and arrived in Budapest (via Amsterdam) at about 1600. I had already researched the different transport options into the city and we decided to use the airport minibus service. It was cheap (about £7 return each), convenient (no need to book journey into the city and easy to book the return journey) and quick: we only had a wait a few minutes until a minibus turned up and it took us straight into the city. We stopped at perhaps one or two hotels for other people before we got to ours but that was hardly a hardship – we got to see our first glimpses of the city. I would certainly recommend using the service.
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After going to Prague in July 2003, John and I decided to scratch another city out of our “I-Spy Eastern Europe Capital Cities” handbook and trekked to Budapest for my 25th birthday in July 2004.
We flew out with KLM from Leeds Bradford on the Saturday (17th) and returned on Tuesday (20th – my birthday itself, because I’ve always said, birthdays are best spent in airports), and stayed at the ArtOtel on the Buda side of the Danube.
Day-by-day journal:
– written up from notes, August 2004
I’m about to get a new work email address. It’ll be very similar to my current one just 10 characters shorter. Presuming the average word length is 5 letters, these characters equal a full 2 words and as I type around 50 words per minute, it means I will save 1.6r seconds when I type my new email address in the future.
As a pretty much completely random estimate, I reckon I type my email address about 10 times per working day for one reason or another so saving this 1.6r seconds each time, I’ll profit an extra 16.6r seconds per day. Multiply this over the year (20 working days a month, 12 months a year) and I’ll have a whopping 4000 seconds per year going spare. That’s somewhere around one hour and seven minutes to use as I please.
I’ll probably just waste it doing pointless calculations though.
At the beginning of September 2003, Gianni moved to Luxembourg to start a job that didn’t involve any circus-related footwear. In November 2003, Leachy and I finally got our arses into gear and went to see him.
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