Buda and Pest divided by the Danube

Zok and I had to fly through Budapest and then change planes to get to Skopje, Macedonia.

When I first met 'Speed' of the STRD roller derby league, she had just come back from staying in Budapest and talked about how much she liked the city.
So Zok and I were inspired by her recommendation and we decided to stay over a couple of days and re-acclimatize ourselves.
We stayed in the same hotel because they have thermal pools that can be accessed from the hotel side, making the whole, bathing suit, robe, towel process easier. We could not take much with us, as we knew we would be loaded down with gifts from Zok's family.

The hotel was really interesting.
http://gellertbath.com/

I was a bit disorientated during our whole time there. Zok pointed out that this was the very first stop we had ever made where I didn't research the city beforehand. Normally I have a small notebook filled with places of interest, cafes and bars to try and dozens of places to try and overwhelm Zok into at least one cultural event.

Zok knew of a really, really good Italian eatery that he went to when he was in Budapest with The Hives. If you have not gotten the impression from me about how expensive the food and alcohol in Sweden is, then I am not typing loud enough. We went for Italian twice. The entire dinner (and we were splashing out) with a bottle of wine, a dessert and Zok's appetizer and main were less than the price of just the bottle of wine here in Stockholm.

I also found a funny place for lunch, and a lovely little chocolate and wine bar.
Budapest although definitely inclined towards tourists, was still quite foreign.
The city is not trying to really change itself in any way to appeal to a tourist.
Also I suppose due to the amount of languages, most staff people simply ignored you. There was a definite theme of people sort of looking around in a confused manner, in the entry of some place and being completely ignored by the staff. Or, there were hawkers trying to reel you in to places with there "Sir, Madam, very good, very hungry, Good day" a chatter of broken English.
Somehow this depressed me, as I know I sound about the same when trying to speak Swedish.
I lucked into a copy of 'Time Out' in English at our lunch bar which is how I found the chocolates and wine (Vin and Wonka). I also found some markets, and we tried one, I really wanted to get onto public transport and see another neighborhood. Turned out I shouldn't have bothered. Haggling is conducted of course via a small calculator, even Zok had a hard time since we were dealing with about 200 ft to the AU dollar, and had just been dealing with Macedonian denar. I never get used to 'Oh, 20,000 ft for that jacket? What a good price'. I thought we would find quaint second-hand shops filled with communist era treasure, but what we found was warehouse and warehouses of dollar store items. Later we found out that the market was across the street, but this was just vaguely better quality. Knock off items and second shift items from China mostly.
By the fourth immense warehouse of repeated, fake flowers, odd linens, bizarre jeans and endless stretch pant leggings I felt as if recycling my whole life has been ridiculous and futile.

I would have liked to go further out, there is a summer palace, which can be gotten to by the suburban train line.
The countryside of Hungary has a reputation of being really beautiful.
Zok says 'There is always next time.' but of course Zok's favorite place to go is to a place he has never been before.