Day 12 – Budapest

We gleefully slept late this morning, then took our bikes to the shop we noticed just a block from our hotel, and had them clean and lube both bikes, and also check out John’s gearing, which was still not trouble-free. We got some transit day-passes and went over to  the Pest side to walk the main pedestrian district of Vaci Utca. I found a T-Mobile shop to get a Hungarian SIM, and though the lady was extremely nice and helpful, neither she nor the techs could get the data working, though (again) the voice and SMS worked fine. We  crossed back to Buda and had a very nice lunch at Ildikö before picking up our bikes and heading back to the hotel to rest. While John napped, I FaceTimed with Anne and Kate for half an hour, then bit the bullet and did a complete reset on my phone, which finally fixed the data problem, but meant I had to redownload the apps we needed for the trip.  Around 6 we headed out to Agnes and Janos’ house…they had moved since they had let me crash on their sofa when I biked through in 2001. The upcoming stops were displayed on a screen, but before we got to ours the display switched to “Garage” and, even though they were announcing them, we couldn’t understand them – even if they had been in English. We happened to see the name of the street as we made a turn, and immediately requested a stop. Turns out we were just one stop late…thank goodness the data was finally working, as we were able to let Google Maps get us there right on time. Janos had to take their daughter Panka and her friend out, so it was just the three of us for dinner, which consisted of cold sour cherry soup (yummy!) and the traditional Horotbagy palacsinta with chicken paprikash (the Magyar equivalent of a chicken burrito). She then took us to their local award-winning gelato place, which had some great and very imaginative flavors.  We had a lovely evening, and she took us back to the subway stop for our trip back to the hotel.