Welcome to this, the second in the series I like to call "Returning with Rachael to places I've been with Titch" there is probably a catchier title in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it, so just like with the 2011 trip to Berlin I can copy and paste a 2008 post, replace Titch's name with Rachael's and then job done, you can read about me and Rachael crawling around caves underneath Budapest, walking up hills and sitting practically naked in some sort of bath house, so here goes...
Wait, that isn't going to work, quite aside from the fact that we didn't do any of these things (photoshop can easily make it look like Rachael is emerging from a hole beneath the earth, it doesn't matter if I lie to a blog), there is a major plot-hole in the story that will reveal itself much more obviously, that bath house was men only.
It looks like I'm going to have to write a new one, I think once I've gone through the effort to unpick the bath-house bit from the story, I might as well have just remembered back to a few days ago to the holiday we just took. Besides, I've already done my favourite part of the blog, which is the stupid meandering bit at the start where I ramble on seemingly endlessly while resolutely refusing to talk about the holiday itself, if you don't know which bit I mean, I'm talking about this bit right here, the bit that you're still reading and I'm still writing, you see it, the bit that's now become all self referential so it even now still hasn't ended and I have now referred to the fact that it has become self referential, potentially creating an endless reference loop to allow me to keep writing this bit forever referring to the fact that I have referred to the fact that I... and so on.
This trip started a little bit differently as we went down to London for a day 1st and flew out from there after completely failing to attend some VR zombie thing, though it turned out it was just a demo for a new video game anyway...
Not including the 2 flying days we spent 3 full days in Budapest and during that time we did 5 room escape games, 5! that was the total number of games we had played in total up until that point, If you scroll down 2 posts (or just remember), you can see that we did 2 last year in Riga, but Budapest is full of them, they started there due to the large number of unusually shaped buildings with really low rents.
The first was called Claustrophilia (apparently the first one) unlike with UK ones, they don't seem to take photos of their participants in Budapest, so I don't have a victory / failure photo to share (this was a victory) but I do have the map I drew to get there. I am perfectly aware that there are real maps available and that nowadays with this new fangled internet thing, I could easily show you a real map, but this one is better, way better, this is quite a simple one to follow, not as complicated as say the map for the invisible exhibition.
The invisible exhibition was a museum about blindness, there’s not much to show as the whole thing was in complete darkness, we were led around by a blind man through different rooms, across pretend streets (where I presume I was hit by a car and am absolutely certain I walked into a traffic light) Not being able to see anything was confusing, disorientating and terrifying, even though logically I know I'm not going to get lost, I just kept on expecting my eyes to adjust to something or wishing that they would just put on a light so I can get my bearings, but obviously, that isn't the experience, so that doesn't happen.
What I do have pictures of is the Braille we learned to type beforehand and because now I feel bad that all of the pictures so far have been of pieces of paper (however tempting it is to include nothing but pictures of pieces of paper in this particular post, mmm don't they make you feel like you're there? All of these were created there so they should...) a picture of the ducks we watched for probably close to an hour before we went in.
There were several ducks on the pond, but these 2 were the 2 we adopted as Rachael and James duck that sat lazily by the side of the pond around which the soap opera that was the life of the ducks on the pond, this show had it all, relationships, the one lonely duck, fights and the bully duck going around trying to chase the other ducks out of the pond. Rachael and James duck mostly just sat by the side or they would float about 3 feet to the left and sit there, not even swimming across the pond to the humans delivering occasional gifts of bread, we became so engrossed in this drama that we actually felt proud of James duck, when the bully (nicknamed "bad duck" our names were great) came over and tried to chase them out of the pond and James duck fought back and managed to chase him away.
Yes, that duck story did just happen.
Back to the escape rooms, we did 5 and won 4 of them, they were very well made and themed and they made good use of the spaces with the games opening out into new rooms, there was a good Egyptian one with no padlocks just push blocks, rotating disks other Indiana Jones-esque puzzles.
What else, well we did visit a rock, well it had once been a rock, but it had been converted into a hospital, well it had once (actually twice) been a hospital, but it has been converted into a museum, to get there we had to climb up all of these stairs, oh sorry, that's too visual, these stairs:
The hospital in the rock was used during the siege of Budapest when they were invaded by soviet forces near the end of world war 2 between 1944 - 1945 (oh yea, they were on that side!) and again in 1956 during an unsuccessful revolution.
I did not take this picture.
Deák Ferenc tér, where Metro lines 1-3 meet, there is something magical in the air, we passed through a few times before investigating what that something magical was, it turns out the something magical was the smell of the Kürtőskalács or chimney cakes being sold, pleasingly they were just as nice as they smelled as well, I don't think a picture will do it justice, so here is a nice smell file.
Mmm isn't that nice!
Before we left we had a visit to the Zoo Cafe as well, which is amazing, while you sit there and have your food and drinks, the staff bring you animals, such as chameleons, snakes, guinea pigs and rabbits, oh and these guys.
That was a nice way to spend a few hours, much nicer than when we got home and searched for our escaped hamster.
