Buda....Pest (really is two different places)

By time we had touched down into Budapest I was in a fair bit of agony and we had nowhere organised to stay and not a clue what Hungarian was for doctor. Nina (bless her) did try at the tourist information booth in the airport and was pointed in a certain direction. This ended up being the pharmacy, so we did our best there exchanging pointed words in each of our phrase books. They looked at my leg, pointed to Hungarian for bite. I shook my head, riffled through the book for the Hungarian word for rock, and they laughed, they then gave me an ankle support and a cream of some sort!?!

We decided that was the best we could do and opted to give it a few more days and then if my leg was still swelling we hit the local A and E department. We headed off to the airport internet café to book ourselves a hostel. This was done with pretty good ease once we established that Buda and Pest are two different clearly defined parts of the city. After consulting the Lonely Planet guide we agreed that Pest would be best for two reasons it was where the bulk of the functioning City is and also it is a lot flatter that Buda where the castle and various other historical attractions are (mostly up a massive hill).

We booked the hostel and as we were leaving realised that we had wandered directly past the airport doctors several times. So we rang the buzzer and was greeted by a Hungarian nurse who beckoned us in and sat me down before calling the doctor in. The doctor looked at my leg and simply uttered "ah beautiful". He advised that I needed a course of antibiotics straight away and took Nina with him to the same pharmacy we went to before. Apparently he took a look at the stuff we had been already given and said it was useless, but I'm sure we'll find a use for them. Whilst Nina and the Doc were away the nurse was applying all kinds of lotions to my leg, only one of which I recognised as Iodine, the other ones hurt like hell. Along with her constant tuttings, temperature takings and pity filled glances (I think these were meant to be reassuring), I had expected her to produce a rusty saw and start hacking away at me.

In all honesty though the doctor and the nurse that sorted my leg out were brilliant, so nice and through their broken English and general nature I felt very comfortable (if ever you happen to injure yourselves whilst travelling do it near Budapest airport!). As we were about to leave the doctor took my passport to note down my details and spotting that it was in fact my birthday that day, he wished me happy birthday and gave me some extra strong pain killers advising that they were instead of a cake.

Eventually we grabbed a taxi and got dropped off at our hostel, the apologetic looking hostel host looked at my leg and awkwardly advised that our room was on the 2nd floor and they had no elevator. Still we managed to scale the stairs and got to our room which was massive. It had a kitchen, shower room and everything and we were pretty chuffed as we knew at this stage a lot of time was going to be spent in the room whilst I recovered.

We then spent the next couple of days simply chilling out in the hostel, me waking up taking some of the special pain killers and antibiotics before promptly falling back to sleep again. In the evening I would hit the pain killers again and we'd hobble to a nearby street (Raday) for dinner, and we both agreed that the food was amazing in presentation, taste and price (highly recommend the Trattoria Caffee). Even in these little evenings out we were starting to really like Budapest, the people were all so friendly and the atmosphere in general was really vibrant.