Open Air Bathing in Budapest

You cannot complete exploring Budapest without dipping yourself in one of the public baths called "furdo". There are several big ones such as Gellert, Kiraly, Rudas, and Szechenyi. We went to Szechenyi, which is in a City Park on the Pest side.

Szechenyi is said to be the biggest public bath in Europe, and is famous for the chessboards set directly in the bath for the chess lovers. There are three good-size open air baths (pools), each with a different temperature.  Despite it being another cold day in Budapest, the pools were enjoyed by lots of local people and tourists like us. I, being Japanese, tend to enjoy hotter baths(defnitely above 39 C degrees), but none of the three baths had a temperature that high. I suppose it was designed to be that way, so that people can dip themselves for a long time. In fact, we were in the water continuously for over an hour (well, we couldn't get out as it was freezing!), which I could never do in a hot Japanese bath, and most people were there before we got there and stayed after we left. The old men playing chess definitely had a plan to stay there and to enjoy their Saturday chess games in the bath all day.

You will need to bring your bathing suit, a towel, slippers, and maybe a robe especially during the cold winter time. Since we only brought our bathing suit, we ended up renting a piece of cloth that they called a towel.  It didn't work out that well.  Also, the facility is not like a spa and more like a public pool. You would smell sewage, and you definitely don't want to walk through the facility with bare feet like we ended up doing. But, the bath itself is great, and we felt really good after dipping ourselves for nearly 1.5 hours.

Artistically Old and New Budapest

As our remaining days in Europe are now limited, we decided to make a weekend getaway to Budapest, Hungary. Hungary is just south of Slovakia, about 3 hrs drive from Brno through Bratislava. As the capital of Hungary, Budapest indeed had a lot to offer to us.

One thing significantly different about Budapest compared to Vienna or Prague is that the city does not have a single center point. It even looks as if the Danube that cuts through the city into Buda side (west side of river) and Pest side (east side of river) is the center. Buda side is hilly, and it is where the palace spreads alongside the beautiful Danube river. Pest side is flat, and it is where Parliament and St. Stephen's Basilica are located; both of which were really close to our hotel luckily.

What I loved the most about Budapest was that I didn't see too many modern and ugly looking buildings. Some were very old and ruined which made them even artistic - kind of natural form of Hundertwasser's Kunst Haus in Vienna. It looks like most of the renovation was done by maintaining the original exterior and modernizing the interior. Just like our hotel. The hotel clerk told me that the building itself is over 100 years old but the interior looked very 21st century. 

I also liked the arts here and there on the streets. Budapest really reminded me of the old proverb called "Onkochishin" which basically means something like "examine, learn, and appreciatethe old and understand the new." I felt the sophistication in the city.

Avia Cafe - Mediterranean Restaurant in Brno

Before moving into this new flat, the super sweet owners introduced us to the surrounding restaurants. Avia Cafe was one of them.  It is on a small alley, and you can hardly recognize it as a restaurant from outside.  The square building was built in 1929 as the first modern sacred building (it was the Jan Hus Congregational Church) in the Czech Republic. Yes, it looks like you are walking into a modern looking church. And, even when you walk in, you stop for a moment and wonder if it is really a restaurant. You see a wide floor a few steps down with cheap looking tables and chairs in three rows and a set of round and white tiled pillars reaching up to the tall ceiling.  It makes you feel like you just steped into a public bath place or something. :)

However, once I got seated and looked at the menu, I immediately had a good sense about the place. Unlike other restaurants in Brno that have hundreds of menu items (someone needs to tell them to stop doing that!), Avia had a one-page menu. Sophistication! I love it.

There was also a list of daily specials available on a small blackboard. For the appetizers, we decided to go for a salmon tartar on the daily menu and a grilled eggplant filled with goat cheese from the regular menu. I have to say the salmon tartar was okay. I could smell fish. They could have reduced the smell by mixing in some more lemon, dill, and capper. The eggplant was excellent! We also had a bowl of cream onion soup with basil, which was also great. For a main dish, we ordered seared tuna with mashed potato (well, in Czech it is called potato puree), which was also very good.

We ended our dinner with a cup of cuppuccino and a wonderfully sweet Tiramisu. Superb!

I have to list Avia as one of my favorite restaurants in Brno. And most of all, the price was very reasonable.