{"id":956,"date":"2009-10-12T22:25:38","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T21:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=956"},"modified":"2010-01-26T22:38:22","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T21:38:22","slug":"budapest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2009\/10\/12\/budapest\/","title":{"rendered":"Budapest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nI spent the last three days (Friday to Sunday) in Budapest, at our company&#8217;s annual conference\/off-site. (Last year&#8217;s trip went to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2008\/10\/07\/berlin\/\">Berlin<\/a>.) We spent most of our time in various social activities, including a lot of eating, so I didn&rsquo;t have time to see as much of the city as I had hoped, but here are some brief notes:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\nWarm. The temperature was around 15 to 20&deg;C during daytime. After the +5&deg;C we had in Stockholm, it was a bit of a shock. I&#8217;d forgotten what 20&deg;C feels like, and wished I had brought sandals.\n<\/li>\n<li>\n&#8220;Continental,&#8221; with lots of outdoor cafes and restaurants, shops spreading their wares into the streets, street performers etc, and a lot of people out and about in the evening. Of course it&#8217;s easy to get people to hang around in sidewalk cafes when the weather outside is so balmy.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nGrey and beige, since almost all houses were clad in local sandstone. Made me think of central Paris, which was similarly grey.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nThe Donau (Danube) is nowhere near blue.\n<\/li>\n<li>\nBuda and Pest are strikingly different. Buda is hilly, green, residential. Pest is flat, gray, commercial.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nThe most interesting sight I saw was the thermal baths of Sz&eacute;cs&eacute;ny. It&rsquo;s a complex of indoor and outdoor pools, heated by natural hot springs. It was interesting to see bathing as a social activity: the crowd was mostly adults hanging around, conversing, and floating. There were hardly any children around, and I imagine they would have found the baths quite boring (although there were some fountains and a jet stream.) The coolest pool had a water temperature of 18&deg;C and the hottest was 38&deg;C &ndash; too warm for comfort, in my opinion. But the 34&deg;C pools were quite pleasant, and the relaxing atmosphere was quite contagious, although I have to admit to getting slightly bored and impatient after an hour or so (at which point I fetched my camera and did some wandering).<\/p>\n<p>\nPhotos coming up soon, hopefully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent the last three days (Friday to Sunday) in Budapest, at our company&#8217;s annual conference\/off-site. (Last year&#8217;s trip went to Berlin.) We spent most of our time in various social activities, including a lot of eating, so I didn&rsquo;t have time to see as much of the city as I had hoped, but here [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[151,138,137],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travels","tag-budapest","tag-hungary","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1296,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions\/1296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}