Dubin Romes the World: Fall Break Part 1: Budapest

Overview
Budapest was probably my favorite city out of all three. The best way for me to describe the city is that it is kind of a Hipster city. It's more industrialized than Rome (Everywhere is) but not as rugged and mechanic almost as Munich for example. It had amazing architecture and history everywhere. We used a tour company called WSA. WSA stands for Weekend Student Adventures and is run by the author of the famous Rick Steve's travel books' son Andy Steves. Unlike Bus2Alps WSA uses local tour guides which personally I think was much better. Our group was 13 total (11 being my Friends). It was very laid back and the culture and food was amazing.

Infront of a church in Budapest

The currency conversion certainly helped, 200HUF = 1USD, and the average dish at a restaurant is about 1,200HUF. We spent most days touring the city, seeing churches and eating really good food. Also really cool were the thermal baths. There is thermal water under the city and they are fed into natural baths in the great bath hall in the middle of the city. It was beautiful and is even used for physical therapy in Budapest. I had really good orange duck one night at the restaurant we went to saw amazing views of the Buda Hills.

Highlights

Ready for caving

My favorite thing was on Saturday we went caving. This is absolutely ridiculous. I crawled through really tight spaces in the Buda Hills. (Budapest is actually Buda and Pest separated by a river but act as one city, Buda is hills and Pest is a flatter city.) We went through this thing called the "Sandwich" because you literally squeeze your body through this REALLY SMALL HOLE and in the end I felt really accomplished. Another favorite part was the ruin pubs. These are pubs that all have unique character and are built into the side of rocks or underground. We went to a really big one that had really cool robot things everywhere and another that was all Mexican with tequila. It was definitely a new experience. Lastly, the Grand market was awesome. its a really huge building (pictures in twitter too) that's filled with different vendors selling fruit, meals and small jewelry. Oh and can't forget the Sparty (Spa Party in the thermal baths Saturday night).