Separate Rooms Make Great Neighbors (Wednesday September 5th, 2007)

I didn’t sleep especially well, but having my own room for a night did help. Still, I certainly wasn’t feeling great when I work up this morning. We enjoyed a nice breakfast at the hotel (a “real”, rather than continental breakfast included with the room) & walked around to see some of Eger’s sights (that we hadn’t already seen), such as Europe’s furthest north minaret, a bustling local market & an impressive cathedral. We checked out of the hotel & through the help of a taxi driver, made it to our train with about 60 seconds to spare. For the majority of the trip, Charlie & I had an entire 1^st class train car to ourselves.

We arrived back in Budapest & checked back into the Marriott. We debated about going up to see an area north of Budapest called “the Danube Bend” (a series of 3 towns, reportedly where the Budapest locals go to take a brief nature break). Personally, I thought the Danube Bend was some sort of position in European Yoga. Nevertheless, we opted to not go today (the weather was still rather dreary) & instead across a very rainy &windy bridge to Buda to head for the famed Gellart Baths.

These baths are a pretty wild place! They are part of a hotel, but seem to be the majority of the facilities. It was a beautiful, very ornate building containing a series of indoor & outdoor pools & other spa facilities. We met two women (an aunt/niece) from Northern & Southern California. As it turns out the aunt lives in the Montclair district of Oakland, which is about 5 minutes from me & 2 minutes from my previous residence in Oakland. What a small world! We ended up talking to them in the 36 degree (C) pool for awhile & then each of us attempted the steam bath (which seemed to be infused with eucalyptus). It helped my troubled sinuses, but as it was extremely hot, I really couldn’t stay in there for more than about 2 minutes. All in all, this was a very enjoyable experience. Not quite as relaxing as the visit to the baths in Eger, solely because of the far larger number of people at the baths here. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped back at a restaurant we visited a few days back…it was so good that we both thought we should repeat the experience.

On our way back to the hotel, we were once again approached by a pair of the “consumption ladies”. This time, we must have only earned the JV team, as the two ladies who closed in on us were about as clumsy as you could imagine. We waved them off & once a respective distance away, had a laugh at their relative inexperience. We later ran into a gentleman trying to convince us to visit a “club” (I’d repeat the moderately funny pitch he used, but this*is* a PG-13 blog).