Hello city of Budapest
Almost any travel agency has in its asset proposals for trips to Hungary. Before you buy a ticket, you will be required to provide several documents. First of all, a passport, certificates of income (salary) for the last three months and your position and salary. Their samples are provided by the travel agency. As for the procedure for obtaining a visa, these concerns are also on the shoulders of travel agencies, which is good, because a trip to Kyiv and queuing outside the embassy is not a pleasant procedure. Hungary is part of the Schengen area, and therefore the cost of its visa is standard - 35 euros.
Prices and types of vouchers are almost the same for all. As a rule, focusing on your wallet, you need to choose the appropriate option, namely: air travel or bus tour, and travel time, which can vary from several days to several weeks. Consider the pros and cons of both.
In the case of air travel, the ticket price is naturally higher.
You, with documents and tickets in hand, independently get to the Kyiv Borispol airport, from where to Budapest, where you (and the same air travelers) will be met by a guide and vehicles.
In the case of a car tour, you also arrive in Kyiv, where your group is formed, which leaves towards the border in a comfortable bus. There are options when you join a group near the border - in the nearest Ukrainian city from it.
It should be noted that in any case, timely arrival to the plane or bus is your sole concern, for which travel agencies are not responsible.
And now about some of the nuances. When you travel by air, you have an undoubted advantage while crossing the border. Although you need to be at the airport a few hours before your flight, you will go through all the necessary paper formalities quite quickly - in about forty minutes.
But when traveling by bus, the time to cross the border can be spent from an hour (if you're lucky and there is no queue of the same buses) to ...you can put any number! In general, a kind of lottery.
As a rule, the tour program includes several excursions you have already paid for (a sightseeing tour of the Hungarian capital, a trip to a small town with wine tasting, etc. ) and additional excursions (optional), for which you need to pay separately (from 15-20 euros and higher).
As you understand, the difference in bus and air tours is not only in price, but in greater independence, which the traveler has to show in the second case.
"Equipment"
Many tourists carry a lot of luggage with them. Why is unclear. For a week-long trip, a man should wear jeans and a couple of T-shirts. It is easier to wash them one by one than to carry a full “set” of a dozen dirty things back across the border.
I will not dare to give advice to the representatives of the fair half in terms of wardrobe, but I will only note that your outfits “there” are of no interest to anyone. Europeans dress very simply and democratically. A separate item is shoes. Banal advice for everyone: no model or high-heeled shoes. If you don’t want to turn your vacation into torture, wear only sneakers or something from sports shoes. You should take simple aspirin tablets and a band-aid with you. Do not forget a calculator - it will not hurt when calculating local prices.
Considering that the guides are accustomed to “packing” the brains of tourists with historical information for hours, which is not at all easy to remember right away, upon arrival I advise you to buy a guidebook (from 5 to 10 euros), which you can re-read in the evening, remembering the places where you were during the sightseeing tour, and at the same time plan an independent exit to the city.
In some hotels you can take a free Russian-language brochure “Budapest. Guide"
The local currency in Hungary is the forint. Euros can be accepted in a souvenir shop or in a gas station store, but hardly in a large shopping center. So you still have to change the dollars or euros you brought with you. It is undesirable to look for an exchange point by yourself. The spread of courses can be very solid. In order not to get into trouble, it is better to ask your guide about the location of the “normal” exchange. Or, when exchanging, ask the cashier on the calculator to show you the amount due. In mid-May, exchange offices in Budapest gave 240 forints for 1 euro, and 157 forints for 1 dollar. As for the hryvnia, it is difficult to exchange it. The only item that came across to me is located in a cafe, which is located to the right of St. Stephen's Basilica (it's in the city center). Here for one hryvnia they give 28 forints.
When buying a ticket, you choose the level of your hotel. You can choose three, four stars, or you can choose five. I discard the last option because of its high cost for the average Ukrainian tourist. As for the dilemma - three or four, then you can safely make a choice in favor of three-star hotels. First, save money. And secondly, you are not going to spend your days in a hotel room, but to watch the country and the city. That is, the hotel will be for you a place to sleep, nothing more. And the level of three stars in the same Budapest (and throughout Europe) is very worthy. Rooms with shower, TV, refrigerator, change of towels, etc. In the mornings, both there and there, a standard buffet breakfast. Pretty much the only difference is the location. Four-star hotels are located closer to the city center. But this, in my opinion, is a very relative advantage.
After all, such a hotel may be in a cramped and noisy lane, where tourists will not push through. Whereas three-star hotels are located on quiet streets. And getting to the city center by public transport is not a problem (more on that later). Another difference is that some Russian-language channel can broadcast in four stars, but this is not possible in three stars - only Hungarian TV, Euronews and CNN. But do you really want to waste time on a “box” when a magnificent city is close at hand?
In the hotel refrigerator you can find a set of several soft drinks, beer, chocolates. These are not gifts to the client, if you decide to drink or eat something, you will have to pay for it. The list with prices is here. But keep in mind that the cost of all this goodness is godlessly overpriced. For example, if a can of Red Bulls in your refrigerator costs 900 forints, then in a store it costs 500-600.
The Hungarian language is very difficult.
Mastering even the simplest words or phrases in a few days or weeks is simply unrealistic. Even if you can say something, you will not understand the answer in Hungarian. Any close verbal language associations (as in the case of Polish or Czech) simply do not work here. The only words that “fall into memory” are uca (utca-street) and ter (ter-area). Otherwise, to be honest, trying to remember something is a waste of time.
Among local residents who speak Russian are rare. As a rule, older citizens know it at the elementary school level, and they readily suggest the right street or attraction. But don't really count on it. It will be very useful to master three dozen (and you won’t need more) common English phrases or even words: bus, metro, tram, left, right, straight, ticket, how much it costs, product names, etc.
Special attention should be paid to public transport in Budapest. It deserves the most positive reviews - clean, modern and, most importantly, works like clockwork. The city has a lot of bus and tram routes, plus the metro. The bus stops have posted timetables that are strictly adhered to. By the way, the new Budapest trams, consisting of six sections, are over 50 meters long! It is useful for tourists to know that in some models of buses and trams, special buttons are located at the doors (both outside and inside). When the transport stops, in order to get in or out, you need to press this button.
But the “minibuses” known to us are absent in Budapest as a class. All buses are “normal” size. In public transport and the metro, the same tickets are valid, and the fare is quite high. A one-time ticket, which can be bought at the metro ticket office or at a newsstand, costs 270 forints.
On sale there are special books of ten such tickets. Then the cost of one trip to go out a little cheaper. But buying a ticket is half the battle, at the entrance to the transport and the metro you need to validate it. There are two types of composters in trams: old (manual) and electronic (the numbers break through the paint there). It is important to know that when moving from one metro line to another, you need to validate the next ticket. By the way, it is in the metro that the concentration of controllers is highest. Realistically use a less troublesome option. Subway ticket offices sell various travel tickets. You can buy, for example, a travel card that is valid in all modes of transport for a day or several. A day pass costs 1550 forints and does not need to be stamped or marked in any way. Put it in your pocket - and ride as much as you want and on whatever you want (taxi does not count! ).
Two modern signs of Budapest that I remember are ...sirens and cyclists. Sirens sound almost every ten minutes and can be heard for several blocks. These are the ambulance drivers willingly turn on the sound signal and make their way among other cars. And a considerable number (by our standards) of cyclists feel quite comfortable on city streets. Here they are marked even at traffic lights, along with figures of pedestrians.
Many travel Internet sites write that Hungarian shops close quite early - at six or seven in the evening, and therefore it is problematic to buy something in the evening. I don’t know about “clothes”, but small food stalls with the abbreviation ABC are open until the very night and have a full range of products on the shelves.
Finally, we recall that we gave practical advice to tourists and did not write about historical and architectural Budapest.
The capital of Hungary is undoubtedly one of the most significant monuments in Europe, but it is better not to read about it on the newspaper pages, but to see this wonderful city with your own eyes.