Budapest: Day one

Read ahead to hear about our arrival into Budapest and how we headed right out to explore the ruin bars!

So we went to Budapest for a few days over New Years, it was my Christmas present to Adam. We flew from Luton, I haven't flown from there in a while and we enjoyed eating at Wasabi, a Japanese chain we've never tried before. It was actually really good, well priced for Japanese food and we were able to try quite a selection of both sweet and savoury goods.

We flew with Wizz Air, which was good value and not bad compared to the other budget airlines. I had also arranged upon booking the flight that we would get a transfer from them. Having done a bit of research this was certainly the easiest way to make our way to the city centre. It dropped us off on one of the main roads and it was just an easy 20 minute stroll to our hostel.

It was about 10pm at this point and the temperature was about -5. It hit us quite hard, we were dressed appropriately however I had packed the gloves away in the suitcase and I thought my hands were going to fall off! It was a really lovely walk to the hostel though, regardless of this. There were some beautiful lit up buildings such as The Great Synagogue and the National Museum.

We got to our hostel, the Hipster Hostel. Despite it being a hostel we had actually booked a private room with en suite. The service and welcome to the hotel was really friendly and we noted the good location, right next to a metro stop. When they showed us our room it was clean and a good size but it obviously hadn't been stayed in for a while and they'd turned the heating off so it felt ice cold. They turned the heating on for us and we decided to head out to give the room time to warm up.

We headed to a road called Kazinczy which is where a lot of the ruin bars were situated. It was about a 20 minute walk from our hostel and we felt very safe the whole time, despite it being very dark. I had originally wanted to visit Szimpla Kert, the most famous of the Budapest ruin pubs but the queue outside was astounding and it was just too cold to wait.

We ended up visiting 'Illegal' which was a bar just a few doors down from Szimpla. The good music choices drew us in and the amazing priced alcohol kept us. My glass of wine was the equivalant of 50p! We ended up staying there until just gone 2am at which point we stumbled out and straight into the kebab shop on the same road. We had the juiciest chicken kebab ever! We returned to our hotel about 3am, our latest night for a long while, and collapsed onto the bed. The room had warmed up but it wasn't totally comfortable, we did end up sleeping in jumpers.