Budapest; Saturday, 19 December, 2015

An early flight, so at an unpleasant hour of the morning I exited the airport hotel and made my way down to Terminal 3 to drop my bag off.

A surprisingly smooth journey all the way through the airport, through the flight and with the connections at the other end had me at the reception desk of the hotel a little after 13:30 local time. It did mean I caught the hotel unaware and I had a 10-minute wait to be able to get into the room as it was still being cleaned.

After dropping off all my stuff I headed out into town and first off headed over to the castle. The city appears to have quite a bit of cash floating around to do refurbishment programmes, as I’d found on previous trips – this time it was the area around the Metro station near the castle, and it took a good five minutes’ walk before I finally tracked down where the buses up the hill went from.

I had a bit of a wander around the castle area, taking in the views over the Danube from the Fisherman’s Bastion. I stopped off at the new 3D history of Hungary film that was in a part of the castle previously closed off.

With the sun starting to set I climbed up to the café in the largest tower of the Fisherman’s Bastion and picked up a mulled wine to drink as I watched the misty murk of day turn into the misty murk of night as the city’s floodlights illuminated the gloom.

I wandered back down through the castle, making a note of some potential places for dinner, before catching the bus back down into town and heading over to one of the Christmas markets to have a wander around and pick up some last minute Christmas gifts.

Back at the hotel in time to drop my shopping off and freshen up before heading back up to the castle for dinner.

After a bit of wandering around I decided on a nice looking restaurant located in the cellars. In hindsight I should have chosen elsewhere as the first two stone steps leading down into the restaurant were slippery, I lost my balance and came down with my back and my coccyx both making a heavy impact with the steps totally winding me at the same time.

It took about 5 minutes to get my composure back before I very carefully, and slowly, descended down into the restaurant for a pleasant, if slightly uncomfortable dinner.

Dinner completed I had a bit of a wander around the castle just to see if anything else other than my back was hurting, but everything else appeared to be working fine, so I headed down to the metro station and picked up the tram back round to the hotel to turn in for the night and to try and get some sleep.