I spent a week in Budapest to follow up on last year’s first visit. This time around, I had enough time to walk around the city and explore more. I stayed in the city center, an area crawling with ex-pats, digital nomads, and short-term vacationers. I wasn’t able to get as much of a local feel for how the city operates outside of these influences as I would have liked — my own fault. Next time I hope to spend more time, and outside of this vacationer bubble.
I did manage to escape during a rainy weekend outside of the city to an Airbnb in the town of Pécs, which was the perfect weekend hideaway from the storm of cold, wind, and rain.
Another highlight of Budapest this time around was my visit to a locally famous bodybuilding gym, which is apparently often frequented by Hollywood movie stars who spend time filming in Budapest. I didn’t see any, but there were a lot of pictures on the wall of them with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who seems to have some sort of association with the gym—there was a metal statue of a Terminator robot in the gym’s lobby. AS visiting local gyms remains one of my favorite on-the-road hobbies, this was a fun place to visit, despite the fact that the three-floor gym only had a couple of squat racks (kind of embarrassing).
