One thing that I forgot to post on my writeup of our trip to Budapest was a list of restaurants and places to see in Budapest.

I compiled this list with help from a friend who lives in Budapest.

Restaurants

Sir Lancelot – medieval restaurant meaning no utensils just bare hands. It is a show of it’s own.

Trofea – all you can eat restaurant with a pretty wide variety of food. Great place to get stuffed.

Malackert – – “Piggy Garden” – the name says it all – it is about 15-20 miles out of town though

Nancsi neni – traditional Hungarian place. Very famous in Budapest and very good food.

Fatal – another traditional Hungarian place. Very good.

Fat Mo’s Very nice “speak easy” restaurant in a basement. Very large selection of adult beverages. Open 5 PM – 1 AM.

Alabardos – – super expensive place in the middle of the castle district. Across from Matthias Church. The Castle there is awesome. This place or any of the places in the castle area were high recommended as good quality.

Apostolok – established 1902, great place, on the expensive side.

You can find an enormous collection of Budapest Restaurants here: they are sorted by districts.

When you are considering prices you can use 200 as the exchange – so a meal for 4000 HUF is roughly 20 USD.

Places to see

· Parlament (3rd largest Parlament building in the world) 60 min, 3200 HUF (16 USD) including English tour guideing, must have same day booking via e-mail

· Basilica 40-50 min – it is about a 10 min walk from the Parlament, free to visit the church part, 500 HUF (2.50 USD) to visit the dome – this later one is must if you have nice weather. There is no better spot to take great overview pictures of the whole city – lots of climbing though

· Synagoge – this is about 15 min walk from the Basilika – I have not checked the entrance fee – 30 min

· Castle area – this is across the river, you can walk, but it takes a while. A cable car goes up to it from the Buda side of Chainbridge – the castle area is pretty huge with tons of attactions (Fisherman’s Bastion, Mathias Church (not much inside, but nice from the outside), tons of 14th century residential buildings etc. You can take very attractive shots of the opposite side of the river with the Parlament building and the river bank at night from the castle.

· Gellert hill – Statue of Liberty – great vantage point too

· Heroes square – very touristy location with statues of all the Hungarian kings

· House of Terror – – this is my MUST SEE of Budapest. It costs about 6000 HUF (30 USD) with IR guidence in English and it take for about 4-5 hours to go through, but it provides the most authentic tase of life under hardcore communism in Hungary. Very professionally arranged 5 story museum in the heart of town.

· Walking street etc. Vaczy utca is the old traditional walking street, while Raday utca is a brand new one. I prefer the later one, it has very nice cafes etc.
Rudas Thermal Bath – Rudas Bath or Rudas fürdő is a thermal and medicinal bath that was first built in 1550, during the time of the Turkish occupation of Hungary. To date, it retains many of the key elements of a Turkish bath, exemplified by its Turkish dome and octagonal pool.

Margit Island

Gellert Thermal Bath One of most popular baths for tourists coming to Budapest. The medicinal spring here was already famed in the 13th century. The spa is decorated with a wealth of original Art Nouveau furnishings, artistic mosaics, stained glass windows and sculptures, although the interior of the hotel built alongside has lost many of these fittings over the years.

If you have a chance to get outside of Budapest you might want to check out these:
· Visegrad Castle
· Eger Castle – really cool place
· Balaton – largest lake in central Europe (anywhere is cool)
· Opusztaszer – quite a ways off (about 2 hours by car) – there is a national memorial park on the Huns

Day 5 was a free day and so I enjoyed the delicious full breakfast. I never tire of the European breakfast that includes fresh bread and cheeses.

I headed off to one of my favorite thermal baths, Gellert. Gellert is certainly one of the most popular baths as can be attested by the large crowds that come. It has a beautiful interior and exterior bath. The exterior bath was still a bit cold to get in, but the exterior hot pools were plenty warm.

It’s quite easy to get to Gellert by simply taking the street cards.

By this time, my American colleagues had about had it with Hungarian food. I recommended a place that I had been to prior, called Fat Mo’s Music Club. Fat Mo’s is a nice mix of Hungarian and American food with about as big of a range of adult beverages that you could ask for. It is easy walking distance from all of the major hotels. They had a live band playing and it was a truly enjoyable experience with good food, friends, and music.

One word of caution to anyone going to Budapest – the girls walking up and down the street that try and talk to you are not interested in you. I try and do extensive research before going to any city and I have read about the “trap” that the local girls set. If you are approached by two girl’s that want you to go to the disco / club with them – don’t go. I’ve read that they will take you to the club and order a 1000 Euro bottle of wine. When you protest, the huge muscle bound Hungarian bouncer will approach the table to make sure that you have purchased your wine.

I used to just sit on a bench and watch the poor, unexpecting American businessman fall into the trap time after time. As they walked away arm in arm with the two temptresses, part of me wanted to yell out “Nooooooo – don’t do it. It’s a scam”. The other part of me was thoroughly entertained as to how they were going to explain a 1000 Euro charge on their credit card to their unsuspecting boss / spouse.

Day 3 was full of more company visits. We started off at EGIS which is a pharmaceutical company in Budapest. They had an amazing array of machines and have partnered with French firms in order to become a major player in the pharma industry.

After that, we went to Graphisoft. Graphisoft is the maker of Archicad 14 and a direct competitor of AutoCad. We had the pleasure of meeting with Graphisoft Founder and CEO Gábor Bojá.

Gábor has an amazing story. He started Graphisoft while communism was still prevalent in Hungary. Personal PCs were banned from being imported into Hungary and therefore Gabor created a version of Archicad to be used on a Texas Instruments calculator. The company today owns 10% of the architecture software market.

If you’re interested in his story, you can buy his autobiography from Amazon.

The final company we met with was Thales Nano. In their own words “ThalesNano and Mettler Toledo are collaborating on combining their existing market leading technologies to offer flow reactor technology with real time reaction monitoring for faster reaction optimization and improved continuous process production.”

Prior to going to the reception for the night, we went to Citadel Hill for some stunning views of Budapest.

That night we had a reception at the home of the Commercial Officer for the US Embassy and were able to meet a lot of the business leaders in Budapest. There truly is an entrepreneurial spirit in Budapest.

We arrived in Budapest without any problems. We headed to the Kempinski Hotel, which is supposed to be the best hotel in all of Budapest. I have stayed at the Marriott, Intercontinental, and Sofitel in Budapest previous. Of the three, the Intercontinental is my favorite of all due to it’s location, breakfast buffet, and size of the rooms.

The Kempinski is a very nice hotel. The service staff was excellent and the breakfast buffet was superb. My only complaint was that the rooms were a bit too tiny. It seems like if you are positioning yourselves as the premier hotel in Budapest and charging rates correlated with that – your rooms should be larger.

The staff at the Kempinski was happy to see us and told us that for the past five days they had basically been empty due to the ash cloud disrupting all of the flights into Budapest.

We checked into our rooms and headed over to the US Embassy Building.

The US Embassy gave a very interesting presentation on the history of Budapest along with some of the current issues that Hungary is facing. I never realized that an Embassy would be so keyed in to the local scene. I thought they were there in case you got into trouble while traveling or to issue visa to the US.

After that, we headed to a church where you could go to the very top for stunning views of Budapest for about $3.

We headed down to the Spoon Cafe Lounge for dinner. It is situated on a docked boat down on the Danube River at the foot of the Chain Bridge, right across from the Intercontinental Hotel.

The cuisine was exquisite. We had a full course meal there that was about the best food I have tasted in Budapest.

We stayed there late into the night and finally headed back to our hotel heavily jetlagged.

Day 1

Recently I took a school trip to both Hungary and Italy for the completion of my Executive MBA program. I decided to tack on a work trip to Kazakhstan at the tail end of it.

In the days leading up to the trip, I thought that the trip was going to be cancelled due to the volcanic ash problem. As I posted here and here, it really was looking pretty grim.

While we headed off to the airport, we were just hoping for the best and coming to the realization that we may not even make it over there.

I arrived at the airport in Salt Lake City and there were signs that air traffic was starting to move again.

Last year, I was very close to hitting Gold status. I was actually 3000 Skymiles away and was debating a last minute mileage run. However, due to Delta’s announcement about rollover MQMs, I decided to not make the run and get a head start on Platinum qualification for 2010.

I therefore wasn’t upgraded from SLC – NYC, but I wasn’t expecting to be either. I had picked an exit row aisle seat long ago and this was ample legroom for me.

We arrived in New York City and the airport seemed to be extra busy. In the terminal where the Budapest flight was leaving, there were hundreds of stranded passengers there – all eager for the latest information.

Due to the large amount of stranded passengers, Delta was upgrading everyone Gold and above for the transatlantic flight. In retrospect, I wish I had made the push and had Gold status.

I felt a bit sorry for all the passengers who had been there for days as our entire group boarded the plane and took off to Budapest. We were one of the first flights allowed to leave for the European airspace and we had somehow managed to not have our trip cancelled.

If we had left one day earlier, we would have been caught up in the backlog with everyone else. We were truly lucky to have made it.

It was all lining up to be a disaster. Volcanic ash shutting down all the European airports. Our international school trip having been planned for the past 22 months.

And somehow our flight wasn’t canceled and was basically the first flight to Budapest from the US following the reopening of the airports.

It’s been a fun time with trips to Gellert thermal bath, Szechenyi thermal bath, the solemn message of the Terror Museum, dinner at Fat Mo’s, and meeting a lot of up and coming companies.

Tomorrow it’s a very early bus to the airport for a flight to Rome. We’ll have a free day and it happens to be a national holiday as well. I wonder what will be open.

Lonely Planet is giving away their IPhone Europe Guide books for free until April 22nd.

The cities included are:

Amsterdam
Barcelona
Berlin
Budapest
Copenhagen
Istanbul
London
Moscow
Munich
Paris
Rome
Stockholm
Vienna

These are usually $10-$15 a piece.

This is perfect for my trip tomorrow to Budapest and Rome.

Hungarian airspace opened for all flights

2010-04-19 12:52:58

Hungarian airspace has been opened at noon on Monday, local air navigation services Hungarocontrol has announced on Monday. Earlier in the day it has cleared only overflight traffic above 7,500 metres (24,000 feet). With no flight restrictions in effect the Ferihegy Airport is also open for the air traffic.

Hungarian air traffic authorities implemented no-fly regulations at 7 PM on Friday over plume from a volcanic eruption in Iceland crippling Europe’s air traffic. The airspace closure was extended several times, finally to 12:00 on Monday.

Hungary’s national carrier said there would be no Malév flights until 3 PM today.

Some 700 flights have been cancelled at Ferihegy International Airport since late Thursday. The entire Malév fleet is grounded at the airport, along with aircraft of British Airways, Lufthansa and Alitalia (one Airbus each).

Among the cancelled flights there were 150 Malév flights that left nearly 25,000 passengers stranded abroad, causing the carrier several million forints in lost revenues per flight.

Here is a link to get free Gold Status with Accor Hotels. For those of you unfamiliar with the chain, it includes hotel chains like Sofitel, Pullman, Novotel, Ibis to name a few.

The reason I post is that in Budapest, Hungary there is a Sofitel there that is a fantastic hotel. It is the softest bed I have ever slept on. You also get free casino entrance with your stay.

I was at that casino with a colleague where we made some Ukrainians very unhappy with us when my friend kept splitting face cards in blackjack.

In any case, it’s worth signing up for since it’s free!

Sign up here and use promo code CMBANKACLUB.

Last week, our international trip was finally announced! Our EMBA class is going to Budapest, Hungary and Rome, Italy!

Unfortunately, I’ve already been to both cities. Fortunately, Budapest is easily in the top 3 of all of the European cities I’ve visited. What’s not to love – the mild climate, fantastic and cheap food, and the natural hot baths. I’ve stayed at the Marriott, Intercontinental, and the Sofitel in Budapest before. Of the three, I prefer the Intercontinental. The Sofitel had one of the softest beds I have ever slept on. The Marriott was in need of a serious overhaul. I’ve heard that they have redone the hotel since I’ve been there last.

I went to Rome in 2005, but it was only for three days. I did a quick bus tour of all of the sites, it will be fun to go back there with this group. Someone in our group even speaks Italian.

It is tempting to extend on this trip, especially if Hungary is the last leg. I have wanted to go to Croatia for a long time, especially to the coastal town of Dubrovnik. This may be the perfect time.