Welcome to Budapest :) June 30th

Heads up-sorry for the delay in uploading these, but I will be posting a lot of my drafts soon hopefully!

By late Thursday afternoon I landed in Budapest and successfully navigated public transit to my hostel. That is after arriving at the wrong hostel initially. So for some reason hostels aren’t creative enough with their names or something because the hostel I’m staying at, Carpe Noctem Vitae, is conveniently named quite similarly to the hostel I accidentally went to about a half-mile away called Carpe Noctem. Not confusing what.so.ever. But after I got to my place I was able to check in and get settled, planning my time in Budapest. 

Thursday night happened to be the night that my hostel does a boat tour of the Danube river. So we started the night by walking over to our “sister hostel” and hanging out at a bar there before walking towards the river to the boat. For a slightly more, you can “upgrade” your boat ticket to also include a bottle of champagne, so I did this. Which means I had my first experience with opening a bottle of champagne and nobody or objects were injured/damaged in the process! The views from the boat were absolutely spectacular. Honestly Budapest is beautiful, but it is so so beautiful at night when things are all lit up. 

In front of Hungarian Parliament 

Popping open our first bottles of champagne! 

 Can you tell which picture of Hungarian Parliament is mine vs wiki? lol

Buda Castle

After the boat, we got buses back to one of the ruin bars in town. Did I mention my hostel is part of a group of party hostels? lol I went back though at a “decent” time so I could get some rest since I had planned on doing the 10:30am free walking tour of Budapest. 

So my hostel had a kitchen which was extremely nice to be able to buy groceries and then be able to cook food if you want. Also if you were too lazy to cook dinner but wanted food from the hostel vs. paying even more to eat out, then you could sign up for “family dinners” made by someone on staff at the hostel. Also the hostel had a rule where basically all dairy products (eggs, milk, butter…) were free and the hostel provided them. So I got meat, cheese, bread, and fruit and made a lot of omelettes that week for breakfast and had some sort of egg or meat/cheese sandwich for dinners that week. Nonetheless, I still managed to make it to all my morning walking tours in time! I guess that’s a perk for not having a comfortable bed, its easier to force yourself up in the mornings even with little rest because laying down isn’t as comfy.