Hungary for some sightseeing

W!ZZ Air is Hungary's answer to Ryanair, EasyJet, FlyDubai, and any number of other budget, no-frills airlines. Checked bags are extra. Hand luggage that goes in the overhead bin is extra. Guaranteeing an empty seat (the middle one in a row of three) is extra. Food and drink on board is extra, although tins of Heineken still cost half what they charge in the airport bar. The seats don't recline, and Wizz flies in and out of Dubai's other airport, DWC. This is a bit of a trek from Mirdif, but the airport is huge and very quiet.

Beloved Wife had booked her trip to Budapest months ago when flights were 50p, and she pointed out that as the airport transfers by taxi and the hotel room would cost the same for one or two pax, would I like to dredge up the airfare and come along? I'd never been to Hungary, so I checked flights and discovered that I could get on the same outbound flight as Beloved Wife - although Priority Boarding and Guaranteed Empty Adjacent seat were not available. As it happened, I was one of the last to board, so I sought Beloved Wife
in her aisle seat and asked for the window seat. Hey presto! Empty seat between us. By good fortune, a similar thing happened on my return flight.

Having arrived at BUD, we awaited Beloved Wife's loud orange bag, and then took a €30 taxi ride into town and the five-star Corinthia hotel - formerly the Grand Hotel Royal - and grabbed forty winks before the sightseeing started.

The First Day

After an alfreso breakfast in a street café, we headed into town, looking at the late 19th and early 20th century architecture. Caryatids and Atlantes are everywhere. At the Opera House, one of the statues was of a sphinx, apparently doing a very feline thing.

Sphinx: playing with a ball of wool?

Then we encountered St Stephen's Basilica, a late 19th century church. We went inside, and I realised that I'd never seen a real Holy Relic before. It's the mummified right hand of the eponymous St Stephen (d. 15th Aug 1038; Canonised 15th Aug 1083) who founded the State.

St Stephen's Basilica exterior. Stern-looking saints.

Main entrance to St Stephen's.

Reliquary. Flash photography forbidden,
so you gotta put cash in the slot
to fire up the lights to make photography possible.

We paid to go up the lift into the dome, from where there are some excellent views.

View to the west, towards Buda from Pest 

Parliament building rather out-Gothics the one in London.

Under the dome.

I took the spiral staircase back down to ground level. There are so many spiral staircases in Budapest!

Here's just one of them.

We noted that there was to be an organ recital at 5pm, so we headed off to the tourist shops, mindful of the need to be back for Bach.

Busker 1

Busker 2

There were several buskers out and about, displaying varying levels of competence. These two were pretty good. Very popular items for sale were silly hats, plus traditional Hungarian embroidery and the inevitable "My [insert relative] went to Budapest and bought me this T-shirt". Oh, and this:

Smoking dragon.

We eventually found our way right down to the Danube, which was fast-flowing but nowhere near as blue as Johann Strauss would have us believe.

An der schönen braunen Donau

Back to St Stephen's for the organ recital, and then we went in search of food and then back to the hotel for sleep.

The Second Day

St Matthias and Fisherman's Bastion.

Beloved Wife and I emerged from the arms of Morpheus eventually and, after a streetside breakfast of Hungarian omelettes we headed over the Chain Bridge and up the funicular railway to Buda Palace.

It seems that lovers swear their undying allegiance
by clapping a padlock on to the Chain Bridge

Funicular railway and (unnamed) tunnel
(although the Adam Clark Tunnel after its designer might be appropriate).

We arrived just in time for the Changing of the Guard, which we stopped and watched, and then went over to St Matthias' Cathedral and Fisherman's Bastion, from where excellent views were to be had.

What a glorious nation!

St Matthias' roof.

View of the Parliament building from Fisherman's Bastion.

According to Beloved Wife's guidebook, the oldest extant cake shop in Hungary was nearby. It was too: just down the road about 50m.

It was also Beer o'clock.

I foolishly chose to ignore the advice to catch a bus and then a tram to get to Margaret's Island, and we ended up walking around 2.6km down some very steep, uneven cobbled streets until we found the bridge. The island is basically a park, where locals and tourists alike go to get away from the noise and smells of the city. There are bicycles and electric golf buggies to rent by the hour, there's a dancing fountain, there's candy-floss and other junk food for sale, and there's a thermal bath complex. This last one was what we were aiming for, heedless of the fact that it was a further 1.5km walk up the island.

Dancing fountains on Margaret's island.

Bikes for rent.

The Palatinus pool complex has various pools at a selection of temperatures and depths, with fountains and air bubbles. And picnic areas on the grass under the trees, and food and beverage outlets. I went down all the water flumes, including an extra steep one that delivers the participant into the bottom pool at about 30km/h, briefly doubling the number of my tonsils...

A slightly unusual, although perfectly decent thing from my point of view was the unisex changing rooms. You change in a private cubicle and then put your outdoor stuff in a locker, but there's no separate Ladies and Gents.

Having walked "bloody miles," we attempted to get a tram back to the hotel, only to discover that we had to pre-purchase tickets at a main station. So we walked back, stopping halfway at an Italian restaurant near the main railway station.

By the time we got back to the hotel, "bloody miles" turned out to be over 10km on Shanks' Pony, plus another 400m of breast stroke. Quite a lot really, but it probably burned off the beer and cake.

The Third Day

After breakfast at our new favourite café, we bought a book of ten tickets at the metro station by the opera house. Beloved Wife decreed that we should visit a shopping mall so that she could pick up some comfortable shoes that are inexplicably Not Coming In Dubai™. We rode the metro to the end of the line; she bought shoes. "Ooh, these are comfy. I'll take three pairs."

Opera metro station.

Now back into town and the Hungarian National Museum.

Roman tombstones.

Elsewhere in the museum, a "No Photos" rule was being strictly enforced by armed Bottom Inspectors, so I wasn't able to take very many, and I didn't use flash. It irked me that I should have bought a photography permit, but when we paid our admissions, I was told that the permit wasn't necessary.

Overly ornate meerschaum pipe.

Armour plating.

Having finished with the museum, we went back to the basement to recover our left luggage comprising a bag full of ladies' shoes, and then there was an enormous clap of thunder and the heavens opened. Beloved Wife had an umbrella; I had my hat. But there was nothing for it but to sit in the café and drink wine at €0.50 a glass and wait for the rain to ease off.

Budapest in the rain.

When it failed to stop, we headed off into the rain, and were actually fairly damp by the time we got to the Hard Rock Café and decided that enough was enough and we needed dryness and food.

Picture disc: Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London

I'm told that the (obviously heavy metal) sheet music
welded on to this railing is by KISS.

The Fourth Day

Another bath? Aren't we clean enough?

Apparently not. This time we took the metro to the Szechenyi Spa, a huge complex of indoor and outdoor baths, steam rooms, and saunas in a gloriously neoclassical building.

The outdoor baths.

Care was necessary. Some of the tubs were at 36°C or more; others were at a gonad-shrivelling 16°C. Great fun was to be had in a couple of the pools where water was delivered in jets to cause the entire pool volume to rotate, dragging the bathers with it in a circular drift dive.

Having spent enough time here to dissolve, Beloved Wife and I wandered around the park.

Vajdahunyad castle and moat.

Vajdahunyad castle.

There was still more to see and do, so after a beer, we boarded the metro and headed back into town and the market hall at Vamhaz Square.

Market exterior.
They love their ornate roof tiles, don't they?

Market interior. Regrettably, all these hats were too small.

It wasn't only Communist-era hats for sale. Beloved Wife purchased a handbag and some candied fruit. Not from the same shop, obviously; this isn't Dragon Mart.

As we were both by now getting the munchies, we crossed Liberty Bridge into Buda, and found a small traditional Hungarian restaurant next to the dead-posh Gellert Hotel. Beloved Wife informs me that the Gellert was typically cheaper than the Corinthia, but that when she checked, they only had single rooms; grotty concrete boxes around the back, and no opulent rooms as per the brochure.

Over the Liberty Bridge.

The restaurant was deserted when we arrived, but soon became filled with a coachload of German tourists. There was traditional live music laid on, presumably for these tourists. The musical trio was nonplussed to discover that when we got up to leave, the Germans were rather more interested in my kilt.

Yes, I've been wearing my Utilikilt around Budapest every day, and why not? It has deep, pickpocket-resistant pockets.

It was too late to go into the main synagogue by the time we got back to the city centre, so I had to satisfy myself with exterior photos followed by an early-evening walk through the Jewish quarter back to the hotel.

Synagogue.

The Fifth Day

That was the lot, really. We went out to breakfast, and then returned to the Corinthia for our luggage and a taxi to the airport. I flew to Dubai, while Beloved Wife headed off two hours later for a girls-only week in Amsterdam.

As I didn't have any checked bags, it took the grand total of ten minutes from touchdown at DWC to hailing a taxi. I was even home at a civilised hour, and Luna the cat was pleased to see me back.

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Daily dairy diary

Screenshot nicked from O₂

The Goat decided last July that fattening himself up on the run-up to Eid may have career-limiting consequences, and he at last resolved to lose some weight. His chosen strategy first involved diet and gym, followed by a much cheaper version of the same: diet and bicycle around the streets of Mirdif. Now that summer is fast approaching, it’s diet. The bicycle will re-emerge when it’s possible to ride one without melting.

The diet is an apparent success. All the Goat does is keeps a diary of calories consumed, and he endeavours to keep the total below 2,000kcal per day. This is obviously not always possible when posh dinners out get added to the mix, but the Goat has managed to keep his weekly total below 12,000kcal except when he was in Scandinavia last summer. Most weeks, it’s below 10,000kcal. And, surprise surprise, the weight falls off. The Goat has lost over 14kg in ten months by merely being aware of the number of calories he puts into his mouth.

The food-and-drink diary is most effective. It develops a clearer understanding of how many calories are in a particular food, but doesn’t actually put on any restrictions on what the Goat can eat. He will choose tomatoes rather than Pringles, toast rather than fried bread, and Guinness rather than lager. These are all the lower-calorie options. Strawberries, incidentally, have the same calorific value as tomatoes. It’s the sugar and cream that does the damage. Accurately estimation of foods’ calorific values has become easier with practice, but the Goat still has occasion to refers to the nutrition information on the packet.

Which, at last, brings the Goat to the point of this essay. How the nutrition information can be horribly misleading.

It’s fair enough to tell the consumer that one serving of Sky Flakes is three biscuits and has 120kcal, because no-one who hasn’t got a severe attack of the munchies is going to eat an entire kilo of Sky Flakes in one sitting. And an Almarai Fresh Cream 100g tub is listed at 320kcal per 100g. One tub; presumably one serving. The Goat has to hand a 35g packet of Ready-to-Eat Barbecue Flavor Chicharrito in Delicious Bite Sizes. Servings per container: 1. Calories per serving: 210kcal. So far so good.

Now look at small tins of California Garden Baked Beans. According to the blurb, one serving size is 150g and contains 150kcal. But the tin contains 220g. What is the Goat supposed to do with the remaining 70g? Share them? Waste them? And Lacnor Essential Orange Juice comes in a 180ml package with one straw, yet the nutrition information says that it contains 40kcal per 100ml. That’s right; the apparently individual package contains nearly two servings!

Final example is Glacéau Vitamin Water. This comes in a 600ml package, and contains 50kcal per serving. But one serving is only 240ml. This so-called energy water has to be shared between three drinkers if the stated calories aren’t to be grossly exceeded.

Here, then, is the problem in summary. If you pick up what looks like an individual single-serving pack, the nutrition information should state what is in that individual single-serving pack. The problem isn’t actually in the labelling, but in the package size. It should be one serving, not an illogical 1.5 servings.

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Tour of the UAE

Picture: Gulf News

Nanny Goat is in town this week. The Goat’s sister came up with a brilliant plan that Nanny Goat should visit her favourite first-born male child because he’d quite obviously be unable to cope for the two weeks that Beloved Wife would be away. Because, of course, several years of domestic wedded bliss have cause the Goat to forget everything he ever knew about shopping and cooking and cleaning. Oh my.

Beloved Wife is now back in Dubai, and Nanny Goat is still here. For entertainment, the Goat has taken his mother to the top of Jebel Al Jais in Beloved Wife’s newly-repaired car, he’s taken her around the Dubai Gold Souq and the Spice Souq, they’ve been to Sharjah Central Souq, and been out to dinner. The 2014 Entertainer book – full of BOGOF vouchers – has already paid for itself, and we’re only just into February.

The Goat did suggest that, if Nanny Goat fancied a ride on the Goat’s motorcycle, she should bring appropriate footwear. Jackets, gloves and helmets would be easily handled in Dubai, but not boots. And as she was game, this Friday the Goats rode over to Hatta Fort Hotel to avail themselves of the splendid Biker Breakfast. In order to allow this to happen, the Goat had to promise that he would keep his right wrist under a very tight rein, and would also undertake to practise none of that footrest-scraping, knee-dragging behaviour more suited to the Dubai Autodrome, but quite common on the mountain roads near Hatta and Kalba. And, as it turns out, the Goat has discovered that he does indeed have sufficient self-discipline.

Nanny Goat said afterwards that she really did enjoy the ride, the view, and the breakfast. The only problem was getting on and off the pillion seat of a Kawasaki 1400 GTR, which is up in the stratosphere. Beloved Wife says Nanny Goat is very brave.

The route chosen was coincidentally be very similar to Day 3 of the Tour of Dubai bicycle race. During the cycle racing, the roads would be shut to general traffic, but the Goats planned to be out of Hatta and back in Dubai probably before the pelaton left the start line. It was a bit disconcerting to see the ‘50km to finish’, ‘20km to finish’, ‘Hill Climb Ahead’ signs set up for the cycle race. Jeez, the Goat has trouble maintaining more than 20km/h on a bicycle around the gentle grades of Mirdif! Those world-class cyclists must be unbelievably fit.    

“Unbelievably fit” is not how the Goat would now describe himself, especially following a Hatta Fort Hotel Biker Breakfast followed by Second Breakfast. And there’s a pizza party tonight; Beloved Wife wishes to fire up the outdoor oven. Sic Transit Gloria Diet.

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