Interrailing - Day 11: Sleeper Train and National Holidays

Today was the hottest day in a while which made it harder to do a bunch of stuff, plus our day was inherently shorter due to the sleeper train we had to get at 7pm. After checking out of our hotel and dropping our bags at a luggage storage, we decided that the best thing to do today was to split up for a bit. This was because it was Hungary's State Foundation Day, a national holiday which included a lot of celebrations in the city. We foolishly hadn't done much research about what was actually going on (a decision that would come back to bite us), but we did know that all state-ran museums were free today. So we split up, with one of us checking out the Lizst museum (like I said, they're really proud of Lizst here), and the rest of us going to the National Museum of Budapest.

The museum was cool, but weirdly overwhelming, and probably not worth whatever the paid fee was, in my opinion. It had different sections about the various history of Hungary and its influence in the world, but for some reason felt extremely information dense, so was very hard to take it all in and navigate.

We reconvened and found somewhere to get lunch, settling for an incredibly popular (the queue was so large that the waiters would hand out lemonade as you waited) touristy looking spot that had pretty good prices called Mama Goulash. Amusingly, all the meals could be upgraded to come in a bread bowl, which we all got, not realising quite how filling it was. We also ordered some extra pickled vegetables on the side to share, and unfortunately were too full to finish everything, optimistically asking for a to-go box (sadly the food did not survive the journey). It was delicious though: I had a thick vegetable stew served in a bread bowl with sweet pickled cucumbers on the side, plus a €3 beer to cool down. It was all very tasty at a very decent price!

After this, we were stuffed, and wandered around for a bit before shortly chilling in a park. We then planned to see the Consecration of the Bread, a religious ceremony held on the holiday, but unfortunately fumbled by misremembering and going to St Stephen's Basilica rather than St Stephen's Statue – about 2km apart.

So as our remaining time dwindled, we decided to go visit Buda Castle, which we had planned to see at some point. The heat was genuinely so bad at this point, it was a ~20 minute walk and we were really struggling, there was very little shade and a lot of it was uphill. We crossed the river over a large road bridge which had been fully pedestrianised in anticipation of the 7pm fireworks that we would sadly miss, and then up a thankfully shady hill to the castle. This was really cool, it was atop a large hill with a number of different historic buildings, and a medium-size park. There was a great view down to the city below, and, mercifully, some water steamer devices to cool down.

After wandering some more, we accidentally stumbled upon possibly the highlight of our time here: a HUGE market and folk-festival full of homemade cultural goods: lots of clothes, some food, homemade jewelry, metalworking, felting, leatherworking, and more! It seemed like people had travelled far to come here – there were stalls selling things from as far as Kyrgyzstan! One of us bought a homemade cast-iron ring that the smith made in front of us over the course of about 10 minutes.

If I had an unlimited budget and unlimited carrying capacity, I would've bought half of their whole stock. I can't understate how genuine everything felt – nothing seemed mass produced, no AI brainrot t-shirts, not even anything super tourist-trappy (although some of the food seemed a bit overpriced). This was a really lovely experience to end our time in Budapest!

But of course, it did have to end, and so shortly after, we were catching the metro to go and pick up our luggage, then a short walk, and stop at a Chinese takeaway for some provisions, and then we were boarding our first (and only) sleeper train of our journey!

Sleeper Train

This train was going to take us from Budapest all the way to Bucharest over the course of ~12 hours overnight, and we were slightly dreading it – the train was old and we were booked in a couchette cabin rather than a proper sleeper (just 6 bunk beds rather than a basin or any niceities you'd expect). The train, and our two companions (also interrailers) were pleasant enough, but the pitiful air conditioning was not doing enough to counter the still ~32 degree heat outside. Still, it had power, and was comfortable enough, so I sat and wrote up some blogs for an hour or two and ate my Chinese food. We'd fortunately remembered at the last minute how little water we had, and had bought 2 or 3 1.5L bottles; a decision that saved us from having a genuinely unpleasant time.

The train had a long corridor with individual cabins on the right. It's a cool design, one that I do kind of wish we had in the UK more. Some of the windows opened and you could stick your head out while we moved along, which was quite relaxing, and had the added bonus of avoiding the smell of sour sweat we'd produced in our cabin. The sky was very clear, and so you could actually do some really nice stargazing out of the window as we rushed through the flat and empty Hungarian countryside.

The windows opening so wide also meant that the train was REALLY loud. Like, the whole time, it was loud wind, loud rails, loud everything. We trundled along out of Hungary for a while, making a couple of stops along the way as it got dark. The attendant came and gave us some bedding at about 8pm. We planned to start going to sleep at about 10:30, but foolishly forgot that we would be moving an hour ahead along the way, and so it suddenly changed to 11:30 and we realised we'd be getting less sleep than we planned. Just as we were going to sleep at just before midnight, we were interrupted by Romanian border control, who wanted to see our passports. Nothing really of note here, but it was good timing as we were about 10 seconds away from turning off the lights.

The sleep was about as good as you'd expect. The curtains weren't doing much to block light from the stations, and the open window meant there was a lot of noise, especially at stations (people would often just be shouting for some reason?). Still, the bed was fine, and I was probably able to get about 5 hours of sleep in total.

At about 7:30am we properly woke up, and our conductor kindly knocked on the door to tell us our stop – Braşov – was coming up in about 20 minutes. We packed up all our things and got ready to depart!

I'll save the rest for the next day's article since this is technically been more than 24 hours already :)

Budapest Review

As we've now left Budapest, I'll give another short review. TLDR: it was great! It was a fairly affordable city, with a lot of unique food, architecture, and things to do. We were continually impressed with the sheer amount of beautiful buildings around, and would absolutely come again given the chance. I can't recommend a visit enough!

Random aside: Eastern Europe seems to have a lot more Sex Shops than the UK, which advertise themselves much more brazenly. We even saw an advertisement for a sex shop on the metro!

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