Hungary for Budapest
- Joanna
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
I liked Budapest.
Like... really liked Budapest.
On one side of the Danube, Buda rises in steep hills, with old stone streets, castles, staircases, shadows, and majestic grandeur. On the other side, Pest buzzes with trams, ruin bars, cafés, nightlife, and that chaotic modern energy you expect from a city.
Budapest is one of those cities that feels a bit rough around the edges... but full of personality and atmosphere. There are layers of history everywhere... empires, wars, revolutions, occupation, survival. Even the buildings seem to carry memory in their walls. Every street has a story.
I ended up booking accommodation at Dean’s House, the same hotel where I nearly got scammed before I even arrived.
About a week before my trip, I received a WhatsApp message from someone claiming to be Linda, a member of the hotel's administrative staff. They said they couldn’t verify my credit card on Booking.com and asked me to re-enter all my details via the link they sent.
And honestly? It all looked real.
The message was convincing. The link appeared to be a Booking.com link. The wording sounded professional. Kinda. I had already clicked the link and was seconds away from typing in all my credit card information before something in my brain suddenly slammed on the brakes.
Scam... ????
So I contacted the actual hotel directly.
Of course, it wasn’t them.
The final giveaway - which I should have noticed right off the bat- was seeing that the phone number attached to the message was from Mexico. These scams are becoming increasingly terrifyingly believable. They look polished enough to fool almost anyone. Not that they would’ve found great wealth in any of my bank accounts, but still. The whole thing was unsettling.
Why does this stuff always happen to me? It would be nice to just have a plain ole vacation... no scams, no hiccups, no issues...
One can only dream.
The hotel itself was… fine.
Despite the slight inconvenience of their guests’ private information apparently being vulnerable to hackers.
It was much farther from the city centre than I would’ve liked... about a twenty-five-minute walk to most places in the centre... but manageable for a few days. I needed the exercise anyway... apart from the day that I almost collapsed from the build-up of jet lag. That day, the hotel was WAY too far away for my liking. The building was half university dormitory and half hotel, which gave it a lot of young hostel energy. Emphasis on "young."
And loud? Excruciatingly loud.
Somehow every student in Budapest seemed to gather directly outside my window every night to yell, laugh, sing, smoke...
And speaking of smoking... There are smokers everywhere in Budapest. Everywhere. It's odd to see so many smokers considering it's so taboo at home. Budapest didn't make me want to smoke again like Greece did!
Other fun facts in Budapest...
The city is obsessed with Michael Jackson.
There’s a Michael Jackson memorial tree that’s basically become part of the city’s cultural landscape. Honestly! It's on travel sites and maps. People know about this tree! Fans maintain it, tourists seek it out, and people still leave messages and tributes there. Apparently, Michael Jackson visited Budapest multiple times, filmed there, performed concerts, and interacted extensively with fans, so the city adopted him as one of its own in a strange, slightly fascinating way.
The man who invented the Rubik's Cube was from Budapest.
Ernö Rubik invented the Rubik's Cube almost by accident while trying to solve a teaching problem. Once he added coloured stickers to the sides, he scrambled the cube... and then realized something funny: he couldn’t solve it himself.
It reportedly took him about a month to return the cube to its original state. That was when he understood he hadn’t just created a teaching tool... he had accidentally invented a puzzle. After any random scrambling, it can be solved in at most 20 moves. Because of its complexity, there are a total of 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible configurations. I don't even know how to say that number.
Crazy, eh?
I think the current record for solving it is 3.13 seconds. And that's about half the time it takes me to just pick it up from the table and look at it, before I even make the first turn.
Not kidding...
One of the great sagas of my Budapest trip, however, was trying to buy a single stamp.
Why do places that sell postcards not also sell stamps? Why?
Why aren't postcards already sold with international postage included? Why?
These problems feel solvable. Retail & Postal consultants should honestly contact me immediately. I can help.
I felt like half my time in Budapest was spent wandering from location to location, trying to find somewhere that actually sold stamps. Every single souvenir shop had an enormous sign in its window saying "WE DO NOT SELL STAMPS!" Every place I found on Google Maps either no longer existed, was closed, was just a mailbox, or was an international shipping company that apparently handled every global parcel delivery... except a basic postcard stamp.
Eventually, I found an actual post office, stood in line, and was served by one of the rudest women I have ever encountered. She was HORRIBLE. Horrible.
All of this. For a bloody stamp.
After hearing endless praise about Hungarian wine, I finally decided to sit down in a wine bar and properly try some. It was the least I could do after walking 50k to find a simple stamp. Pretty much, Budapest owed me wine. I found a nice wine bar, sat down alone at the bar... and sampled a rosé and a reisling... or rizling, as they spell it.
And when I say, "I sampled," that actually means that I sat there and polished off a full glass of each. Both were lovely.
Only after I'd paid and left, did I realize I had completely forgotten to try Bull’s Blood wine.
A rookie mistake. Next time.
I’ve figured out how you can tell if someone is Canadian... and it’s not by the red & white flags some people drape themselves in anymore. That doesn’t really work these days anyway, as some Americans do it too, especially when travelling.
In my experience, you can often hear Canadians before you see them, because of one specific habit: the enthusiastic overuse of the word “awesome.” Everything is awesome. The bridge is awesome. The wine is awesome. The napkin is awesome. The building is awesome. The city is awesome.
Everything is awesome.
It feels like the word exploded in the 1980s and never really let go. It's like we collectively decided no other adjectives were necessary after that.
If I ever accidentally use the word myself, I immediately apologize, replace it with something else, and pray nobody noticed.
There you go. Canadian spotting... simplified.
"How to Spot a Canadian 101."
Awesome.
Ok...
There is much more to Budapest than the Rubik's Cube and the Michael Jackson tree. As I mentioned previously, this city has layers of history everywhere... Everywhere.
Some, not so distant.
In my exploration, I stumbled across The Citizens' Holocaust Memorial in Budapest. It is located directly in front of the very controversial "Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation".
I had to look up why this was so controversial. This is what I found on my Google search.
The 2014 "Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation" on Budapest’s Liberty Square is a highly contentious monument depicting a German eagle attacking the Archangel Gabriel (representing Hungary). Erected secretly overnight, critics argue it inaccurately portrays Hungary solely as a victim of Nazi Germany, obscuring the role of Hungarian authorities in the Holocaust.
Citizens' Holocaust Memorial consists of personal items, photos, and stones placed by families of Hungarian Jewish victims to protest what they view as a state-sanctioned whitewashing of history. It functions as a moving, living memorial that highlights the active role of Hungarian citizens and government in the deportation and murder of its Jewish population.
Along the Danube riverbank, on the Pest side of Budapest, the Shoes on the Danube Bank, is a memorial that commemorates one of the darkest chapters of Budapest’s history: the mass murders carried out in 1944–45 by the fascist Arrow Cross militia during the Holocaust.
It is devastating.
A row of bronze and iron shoes fixed to the stone edge of the Danube.
The story behind it is dark and deeply unsettling.
Jewish men, women, and children were brought to this stretch of riverbank during the final months of World War II. They were forced to remove their shoes... as shoes were a valuable possession at the time, often reused, traded, or sold. Once their shoes were off, they were shot at the edge of the Danube so that their bodies fell directly into the river and were carried away by the current.
The shoes remained.
"Dozens of empty pairs were left behind on the stone embankment — silent, personal traces of lives that had been abruptly erased. That absence is exactly what the memorial seeks to preserve. Today, the installation includes 60 pairs of iron shoes in various sizes, representing men, women, and children. They are not arranged as a dramatic sculpture, but as something more restrained and haunting — as if the people who once wore them had only just stepped away for a moment."
Visitors often pause here in silence. Many leave candles, candies, flowers, or small stones — a Jewish tradition of remembrance.
It is one of the most visited Holocaust memorials in Hungary, not because it is grand or imposing, but because it holds attention through absence... through the simple, unbearable idea of ordinary life suddenly interrupted... and never returned.
“To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor
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