Goodbye Budapest!

Wednesday morning saw us heading off to Keleti railway station to buy tickets to Kosice in Slovakia for the following day, as we thought that we needed to book international tickets 24 hours in advance. This turned out not to be the case, but we were still glad we had got it sorted in advance, as the process was unbelievably tortuous. The rather grumpy lady behind the counter wrote everything out by hand in triplicate with not a computer in sight. We then wasted a lot of time talking at cross purposes before realising that the reason she had sold us return tickets rather than singles was because returns are cheaper. Not sure what the logic in that is, but there you go.

From here we went back to revisit the area of Pest we had explored on our first day, and spent a lovely afternoon pottering up and down the beautiful streets visiting a number of lovely bookshops, reading Hungarian poetry, and drinking coffee surrounded by dishevelled students and intellectual looking old men reading. We also popped into the Liszt Academy of Music to see if there were any concerts on that day (there weren't) and again mingled with lots of arty looking music students. We really got the sense of Budapest as a university town for the first time.

Rather than going out for supper as we had initially planned (Budapest has been quite expensive enough already!), we decided to cook our own version of Hungarian paprika chicken, supervised by the lovely girl working in the hostel. We bunged in chicken thighs, root vegetables, herbs and tonnes of paprika....and it was gorgeous. Later in the evening we went out for mojitos at an arty little place called Cafe Kafka just down from the basilica, which was a fantastic way to end our week in Budapest. We walked back along the Danube, looking at the stunning view of the river and bridges all lit up at night, finally getting back to the hostel around midnight.

Today it's on to Slovakia. We're finding it hard to tear ourselves away from Budapest: it's such a beautiful city with so many different layers of history and culture to explore. But it'll be good to be back on the road, and with something of a research project to work on (watch this space....). And of course it's less than a week now until we see a crowd of Chadsians in Bratislava....can't wait!