Not the sort of doorways you see around The Liberties, I must admit, but I guess these sorts of grand entrances that we came across from time to time in Budapest aren't that uncommon in the old cities of Northern Europe.
Spotmatic, 28mm, home-brew thiourea tone on Foma 133 paper. |
Interesting fact: it occurred to me during our short trip that this was the first foreign trip I've made where I didn't take - or need - any local currency. Hungary uses Florints - and there were 450 of them to the pound. Not an easy number to do on-the-spot conversion, unless you round up to 500 in which case it's a little more straightforward. Still, when you see something advertised at 14,000F it's still hard to get your head around the fact that equates to £28, more or less. I think that was the cost (each) of our open top bus tour ticket for two days, which included a short river cruise. The guy taking our money - well, scanning our credit card with his machine - was very pleasant and offered to throw in a third day for free. Not much good to us when we only there for two days, unfortunately. The cruise was an hour long and everyone told us to go near sunset so that we could appreciate the lights of Buda Castle and the Parliament Building. We weren't that organised though - we'd spent the morning and most of the afternoon hoofing around the city before we found ourselves near the river. We were in dire need of a sit-down so we just decided to go for it, earlier than planned which meant we missed the lights. It was interesting enough but a cruise is just a cruise - not much to do other than look left and right and listen to the commentary. Still, it was a welcome rest and the commentary was pretty good with lots of historical stuff as you might expect in such an important city.
What was surprising was that the subway machines (well, machine might be more accurate as usually only one seemed to be working), which looked like they were ancient, actually gave us tickets when we tapped our card. Every other outlet - restaurant, pub, shop all were geared up for contactless, no matter how small or large the transaction. It still seemed weird that we were able to take a 3-hour flight, walk around a city in a foreign land for a couple of days and not even think about (or use) cash for anything. 'Tis the future, begorrah - right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment