Live Like Kings And Queens

The lyric that forms the title of this entry is borrowed from Killing Joke and very appropriate.

We’re spending our third night in the Hungarian capital of Budapest tonight. We had planned four nights in total, but have already decided to extend our stay to five. We’re staying in the luxurious Kempinski on the Pest side of town, where we have a lovely room and just about all the amenities you could wish for. In the course of this trip, we’ve stayed at just about every kind of pension and hotel you can imagine, but this place is definitely the most upmarket. We’re feeling very pampered.

Budapest is a fairly large city, much larger than Amsterdam or Prague, for example. Consequently, it’s taking us a lot of time to get things done. We were also quite poorly prepared for this city, having done most of our reading on Czechia and Slovakia. It really does take quite a lot of advance research to get the most out of a place and, one way or another, we hadn’t found the time to do it on Budapest. Consequently, we’ve done few touristy things thus far and have scarcely ventured over to the Buda side of town.

We sauntered along the very elongated and wide Andrássy utca this morning to the famous Gundel restaurant, apparently a Budapest institution, for its reputedly top-notch brunch. And a top-notch nosebag it was, too, I must say.

There was a minor hiccough getting in, as we were dressed in shorts, but we came prepared! After zipping on some trouser legs, we were into the dining-room and sidling along into a nice window seat, scarely noticed by the overdressed rich people all around us.

After that, it all becomes rather a blur, as we were waited on hand-and-foot, and made innumerable visits to the starter tables, the main dish tables and, ultimately — you know it — the dessert section.

The concept of time having become meaningless somewhere around the 27th dessert, we waddled out of the Gundel some unspecified amount of time later, our brains sated, our waistlines inflated. It was warm outside, so off came the unzippable trouser legs once again, their purpose amply served.

We headed directly for St Stephen’s Basilica (Szent István-bazilika) and spent quite some time looking around the cathedral, including a visit to the Chapel of the Holy Right Hand (Szent Jobb-kápolna), where the thousand year old mummified hand of Hungary’s first Christian ruler lies at the back of the chapel in a case, for all to marvel and cringe at.

After a visit to the hotel’s spa this afternoon, we were feeling lazy, so we opted for dinner at the hotel restaurant, which turned out to be nothing short of excellent. Rarely have I eaten so well during the course of a single day.

As I type this, I’m sitting in the hotel’s lounge downstairs, having just enjoyed an excellent after-dinner cappucino. Sarah’s upstairs, putting Wiesje to bed and watching today’s stage of the Tour de France.

Incidentally, you can follow the Tour using Google Earth, together with the appropriate KML file. Very cool, indeed. And what an interesting Tour it promises to be, too; with Basso and Ullrich dropped at the last minute on suspicion of doping, and Vinokourov also out, due to a decimated team (five of his team-mates having appeared on the list of suspected doping users), it has to be anyone’s race this year: a bizarre turn of events to be sure. I wish we could be in Valkenburg for the finish of the third stage, but we’re having such a good time here. Oh, well.

Yesterday, we went to the famous Gellért Baths, just over the bridge in Buda. Eloïse loved the various pools and had a big smile on her face the whole time we were there.

The guidebook warns that the pools are confusing, and they certainly are. There is very little information in English, and the information that they do have is at odds with reality. Inside, there’s an endless series of pathways and passages, and renting a towel requires having money on you after you have changed and headed out to the pools in your swimming trunks (your wallet now safely tucked away in a locker back on the other side of the building). It’s also a complete mystery to me where one books and pays for a massage (not that we had time for one on this occasion).

In the end, we gave up trying to rent towels and opted to drip-dry. It was so warm that it was scarely an inconvenience, anyway.

The weather has cooled off in the last few days, rendering life much more pleasant for us. May the stint long continue.

The Netherlands are out of the World Cup and the Dutch cabinet fell a couple of days ago. With that and the Tour de France doping scandal, I’m wondering what else will happen before it’s time to head home.

We picked up a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Austria yesterday, so we’re now ready to take on Vienna about a week from now. Before then, we’ll be travelling to a couple more Hungarian towns and back to Slovakia to visit the capital, Bratislava.

I have to get a haircut in the morning; then it’s on to more sight-seeing. So much to do and only a couple more days in the city in which to do it.