Day 8 (Part II): The Paris of the East

This is one of a series of entries from my travel journal chronicling my recent trip to Europe. You can click here for the archived entries.

Day 8 (Part I) | Day 9

Budapest photo gallery.

Hotel Rila, Budapest, Hungary 13/06/2008

I met up with Jeff at the airport right after passing through customs, snagged my bag off the claim without difficulty and took a shuttle to our hotel, situated somewhere southeast of the city center in a grey concrete jungle reminiscent of the glory days of living behind the Iron Curtain. We mucked about unsuccessfully for a while trying to find the metro to take us downtown but ended up going the wrong way once we left the hotel despite the receptionist's directions. After strolling through a neighborhood of what appeared to be dimly lit gulag blockhouses for some time, we cut our losses as it got late and decided to get a good night's rest after a long day of travel and get an early start on tomorrow's activities.

They call Budapest the "Paris of the East." So far I'm underwhelmed - I've seen a Burger King, McDonald's, and a Pizza Hut in my first couple hours here amidst hideous Brezhnev-era tenement buildings. The Hotel Rila is functional (it used to be an old workers' barracks back in Hungary's gay Soviet puppet-state days) with hallways decorated in the asylum style. Institutional green, the vague stench of old medicine/bad food/death, and entirely pitch dark upon entering. The green-minded Rila has its lighting operating on motion sensors, which I applaud for its energy efficiency. However, it was a bit unnerving when we first stepped off the elevator. (Jeff coined the nickname "Rape Alley" for our floor.) Jeff's currently reading the Lonely Planet guidebook to Budapest and tossing out tidbits now and again like "Budapest can claim to be Europe's gayest city with over 20 gay bars."

I can't wait to hit the town this weekend!