We left Vama at 9am and arrived in Budapest at 11pm. We had not been able to get in touch with Gabor, and did not want to impose anymore anyway so we had booked a hostel ahead of time and since we knew our way around it was a snap to get there and get checked in.

The hostel was nice, nice people and all, but very smokey. In the morning we got up and moving -- we were really in town for two reasons and the first was errands... we went and bought our Train ticket and mailed some things back home. We tried to do email at the two free places, but both were booked up. My palm top computer has no way to save data other than the memory and I REALLY need a 1 or 2 mb memory card for it. We shopped for that a bit with no luck and ran some smaller errands. We were also, despite warnings it was impossible, able to change our Romania Lei (Only about 150,000) into Hungarian Forints -- which paid for our train seat reservations! That was the first time we had been to a money changer -- so far everything has been ATMS... very easy, very convenient and very cheap!!!

Then we settled in for the main reason we were in Budapest: The Baths!

We went to one we had not been to before -- Szenchenyi, in the City Park. At first it looked a bit sterile, and there were only 2 pools, but as we explored we discovered more and more pools... it was a maze! Beautiful architecture and great pools for soaking and steam rooms... but then we discovered the OUTDOOR POOL!

We soaked in the pool, 37 degrees, 5 degrees outside and raining! It was wonderful!!!!! What a great place THAT would be in the snow! The following morning we packed quickly and went back to Lukas Baths for a few hours before our train. Lukas is quite wonderful, dimly lit and very steamy... it feels very real and the hot pool is 40 degrees!!! (40 C is about 104 F!)

© Copyright Mark Canizaro 2000