{"id":122,"date":"2006-12-14T11:09:09","date_gmt":"2006-12-14T10:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/?p=122"},"modified":"2007-01-11T23:01:58","modified_gmt":"2007-01-11T22:01:58","slug":"budapest-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/?p=122","title":{"rendered":"Budapest – day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Got up at 5 o’clock<\/em><\/strong> this morning – having not had any sleep the night before.\u00c2\u00a0 I was up too late packing, and then couldn’t sleep through a combination of excitement and panic that I was going to oversleep and miss yet another plane<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Mum and Dad phoned me from the airport to make sure I’d got up (I’m going to get a bad reputation….), and so that Mum could commiserate with me – as they had to get up at 2 in the morning she hadn’t slept either.\u00c2\u00a0 After that everything went smoothly, I checked in for my flight from Galway in good time, fell asleep almost before the end of the safety talk, and didn’t wake up until we hit the tarmac at Luton.\u00c2\u00a0 At that point I realised I didn’t have my grandparent’s phone number with me, but I was able to find it easily enough using the internet access at the airport.<\/p>\n

Grandad came and picked me up, and I had a very nice day with them.\u00c2\u00a0 As they live quite close to Luton, and I had most of a day to kill until my flight to Budapest, they kindly took me in and fed me.\u00c2\u00a0 Jean joined us for lunch, and Nick popped by as well, giving me an opportunity to be horrified at how tall he’s grown (in my mind he’ll always be 10 :D).\u00c2\u00a0 I also managed to drop off a bottle of Connemara whiskey<\/a> I was sneaking into the house for Grandad’s Christmas present.<\/p>\n

\"Fisherman'sI met up with Jo back at the airport, and we made the rest of the journey without a hitch.\u00c2\u00a0 For the first night we’re taking advantage of some of the Hilton points Dad’s built up that needed to be used.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve got a room on the Executive floor of the Budapest Hilton<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0up on V\u00c3\u00a1rhegy (Castle Hill) with a fantastic view of Fisherman’s Bastion (Hal\u00c3\u00a1szb\u00c3\u00a1stya).<\/p>\n

The Hilton is a strange hotel.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s been built incorporating the remains of a medieval monastry, but is itself quite a modern design.\u00c2\u00a0 While the room is fantastic, and the hotel looks attractive from the front<\/a>, blending in with the local buildings.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s when you get to the back (the side facing Fisherman’s Bastion and over the Danube) that it looks… odd.\u00c2\u00a0 In the photo below, the Hilton is on the left.<\/p>\n

\"Fisherman's<\/p>\n

It just\u00c2\u00a0looks out of place to me, when compared to the fairytale buildings around it.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Got up at 5 o’clock this morning – having not had any sleep the night before.\u00c2\u00a0 I was up too late packing, and then couldn’t sleep through a combination of excitement and panic that I was going to oversleep and miss yet another plane.\u00c2\u00a0 Mum and Dad phoned me from the airport to make sure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bearlybeaded.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}