Budapest uni trip – FHT

Last week I visited Budapest with university, it was a busy week packed full with educational trips as well as lots of free time to explore the city.

It was organised by Further Higher Travel https://www.fhtgrouptours.com/ based in Cambridge, they worked with my university tutor to plan a valuable trip for the childhood studies and early years students.

Our itinerary consisted of:

Monday: Arrival at the Star City Hotel and a 3 hour walking tour – It poured with rain so after persevering with our lovely tour guide we scrapped the end of the tour (being tired and hungry) we explored for ourselves found a TGI Friday’s and enjoyed some good food and cocktails with our fellow students.

Tuesday: Peto institute and Vadaskert Alapitvany Hospital – Peto institute was very interesting and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit the staff were friendly, able to answer all of our questions. We learnt that families in Hungary get 3 years maternity leave. The Vadaskert was also very interesting their wait is 1 month for individuals to receive treatment for mental health…. The UK need to take a leaf out of their book!

Wednesday: Petofi Gimnazium High school visit – Wow the students at this school were very impressive they could speak English very well and it was interesting to see how their education system differed to ours. As we are studying early years we would have benefited from a Kindergarten visit instead but this was still interesting.

Thursday: Cseppko Gyermekotthon Orphanage visit – The lady who showed us round was  incredible!!! Many times I had tears in my eyes as she shared her passion with us for the children they care for! They welcomed our gifts and it definitely touched my heart! A cause I would love to support further… they rely on grants/donations to support the children with things like play equipment etc.

Friday: Free time and travel home – Friday was the Budapest ‘National Day’ so there were loads of celebrations, music, parties in the streets. Public transport was limited and some shops were shut but we went on a hop on hop off bus tour, all of the museums were free to explore. We went on the Finnicular which is a *MUST DO* and explored around the castle and the National Gallery.

Our tour guide Rebecca was lovely and very happy to help arranging things for us and translating. We wanted to book an escape room and she was happy to call for us to book the room.

In our free time we were extremely busy we found some great places to visit:

We visited the Ruin bars which are incredible.. once I’d seen them I realised why people visit Budapest. We also visited Instant night club which was great too!

We went on a river cruise with Silverline cruises, which was great with alcohol on board and it was very informative, a great view from the river.

We visited the Market Hall – You can pick up lots of souvenirs from here, I bought the girls a chess set. They also have a massive range of food stalls. I tried Langos which is a hungarian speciality, it’s a bit like fried bread/donut but can be topped with an array of things both savoury or week, being mega fussy I opted for cheese and sausage it was really nice:

We visited ILOCKEDYOU jurassic world escape room and we managed to escape eeekkkk!! Having attempted two escape rooms in Norwich and failing I was super excited to have escaped. Clearly good team work with my uni friends.

We visited the spa which was incredible, so many different rooms, pools, outdoor heated pools which were lush! We didn’t want to get out. One of the pools had a jacuzzi in the middle and a whirlpool which was fun too!

We ate and ate and ate:

Attaboys was great – Pizza and burgers they were lovely we visited twice.

Caravan – lots of market type stalls a bit like Camden in London, very quirky and a large range of food. Including chimney cake… I enjoyed a unicorn one.

Vapiano – near fashion street was great, they had a massive range of pizza and pasta, you choose each of your ingredients and go and collect your food with a bleeper.

Plus we enjoyed all the standard touristy places: Mcdonalds (they had some different things on the menu to what we have in England), KFC (Wouldn’t rate it) Hard Rock Cafe,TGI Fridays,

Budapest is such a beautiful city! The metro and trolley buses are really reasonable and easy to native using an app called BKK Futar it helps you plan your journey in the quickest and easiest way.

Overall I had a fantastic time in Budapest and would say it would be great for an adult break for food and scenery. I’m not sure I would take my girls whilst they are young, a more of a grown up city.

FHT organised some great trips and other than our coach driver taking a while to find us at the airport (we were delayed) the trip went without a hitch!

Thanks for reading.