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Well out trip has been good. We are in a net station waiting for our 3 hour delayed flight in Budapest. For some reason the enter key doesn´t work. Will update what we have been up to when I get home.

Our Croatia photos are here

Monday morning We decided to visit another thermal bath called Szechenyi. On our way there we got talking to another Hungarian business studies student who was just come back from work experience in London. He sounded like he was going back but only long enough to earn the pounds as wages in Budapest for blue collar workers aren’t too hot.

We roasted in a mixture of saunas and thermal baths before making our way back to town for a tour of the Hungarian State Opera House. In the afternoon we went to Margaret Island spend most of our time trying to dodge joggers and PDA.

We went to a supermarket to find the bottle of wine we had the night before in the restaurant. When we found it for £1.50 we decided to buy a couple.

On Tuesday morning we got stuck in traffic in Budapest so we were little worried that we would be late for our plane back to Bristol. At one point we were stuck behind a truck which was unloading palates of concrete or something. The guy behind us tooted his horn and showed the truck driver a symbol of a diamond. I’m guess in Hungry it means something more like ‘I want to ring your neck scum bucket’ than ‘Hey how are you doing aren’t diamonds great?’.

Anyway there was no need to stress as our flight was delayed for three hours.

While on the plane to Budapest we meet a Hungarian lawyer who gave us some top tips for the city. Arriving in Budapest airport was a bit of headache as our flight was little late and we were waiting for a lady to let us into our accommodating. Unfortunately the terminal is a new building and the phones were working and our cell phones couldn’t get reception. We ended up turning up 10 minutes late to our accommodation but thankfully the lady was still there.

She spoke Hungarian and Dutch and we didn’t speak either of those but we ended up with a great apartment and a recommendation for dinner (or at least I think it was).

Sunday morning Budapest was pretty dead. I got up early to look for a bakery breakfast but nothing was open and many of the shops around our part of town looked a little worse for wear. Eventually I managed to find a supermarket where with the very little Hungarian I know I managed to leave with a few provisions.

We spent most of the day looking around town at the opera house, St Peters Basilica and the Hungarian parliament. We were going to go inside the parliament but there was one queue for tickets and another for getting in and neither seemed to be moving so we decided to flag it and walk up the Danube River to Castle Hill instead.

In late afternoon we went to Gellert thermal baths which had an amazing Art Nouveau interior. We didn’t realise that there were single sex thermal baths each had a 36 degree pool, a 38 degree pool, cold pools and a sauna. I don’t know about the girls but the guys area was choca with guys O naturall.

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While in the changing rooms I met a guy from London, who was on a lap dancing trip with his mates. I couldn’t help but there is quite a seedy tourist track here like there is in Prague. Perhaps lap dancing and baths are the main reasons to come to Budapest.

For dinner we went across the road for our accommodation and to have a traditional Hungarian 3 course meal. After polishing off Goulash Soup, a bottle of wine and the rest of the meal we were quite pleased to be paying 5550 FT or £15 the price of the bottle of wine in an English restaurant.

Tomorrow morning we fly out of Bristol at 0700 hrs for Budapest then have two hours to make our connection to Split, Croatia. Hopefully it all goes well and the next update from us is in Croatia rather than stranded in Budapest airport. It’s a particular worry as the next plane to Croatia is on Tuesday.

The temperature has been significantly hotter in Split that Bristol (10 degrees) the Dubrovnik 5 day forecast is between 20 and 27 so it should be pretty sweet.