Jones

I don’t think Rog mentioned, but we spent the night at the campsite at Esztergom on the Danube, west of Budapest. As Jones is now so well equipped in the bathroom department, we can’t review the facilities, but the site itself is leafy and the young man at reception is both easy on the eye and speaks good English. Win-win.

There was a torrential storm in the night, and while previous readers of our Denby blog will be relieved to know that we didn’t leave the awning out (we didn’t even put it up, I think Rog is still traumatised) we did leave the roof-light in the bathroom wide open. I awoke to discover Jones’s bathroom had had an upgrade – no longer just loo and shower – now we have a bath too!

The forecast for the day was a grey start with sun later, so we decided to take Flynn on the longish hike to the cathedral before it got dog-shatteringly hot. On our way, we wanted brunch. Well, more breakunch than brunch, as it was still before 10am. Our goal was a place called “Piac 42”, which is the market off-shoot of a Michelin-starred restaurant called, wait for it…, Restaurant 42. The bistro was supposed to open at 7am to serve honest grub to market stall holders and shoppers, in contrast to the 57 course tasting menu at Restaurant 42 for 53,000 florints per mouth*.

*More on florints later.

Even though we still like a posh nosh, in our declining years we have become bored with endless incy-wincy courses – when you’re 5 nibbles in, you’re full enough to be bored, and there’s still another 52 chef’s mini delights to go. Give me a pie like the one in Belgium any day.

Back on topic – there was a mysterious notice on the door of Piac 42, and a local passer-by helped us to decipher it. It had moved! We walked over to the new location, to find no sign of said bistro, and gave up on breakunch, moving more to a plan for blunch.

We took an indirect route to the cathedral up many steps. 

Once we’d got there, we established that I got a bargain entrance fee as a pensioner, under half what Rog had to pay, but that it was immaterial as neither of us was allowed inside wearing shorts. Luckily the colour of our forints (or rather, our Apple Pay – Monzo is a fetching coral colour) changed their minds.

*The abbreviation for forints is Ft. When I was perusing the menu of sub-cathedral parts that we could visit, I thought for a moment that the tower was 1,800 feet tall. No, that was just its cost.

So, shorts permitted, we were able to take it in turns to look inside the cathedral, which was having a little light DIY done.

The treasury was fantastic. The weight of gold was astounding in its own right, let alone all the precious and semi-precious stones, and the quality of the early medieval gold-work. My favourite part was the bishops’ chausibles – the embroidery was amazingly three dimensional.

There was also a piece of the true cross. I’m so glad they specified the true bit, as otherwise I’d have been pretty sure it was just a bit from an ambitious merchant’s least favourite cart. If anyone from the cathedral wants to contact me, I have plenty more true cross fragments in my wood-shed available for very fair prices.

Churching done, we walked back into town for blunch. We ignored a café called Kuzin (“Too standard, we want something more Hungarian”) and ended up having a panini down the road. Sigh.

Back at the market, this time we photographed the sign of the errant Piac 42, and found, of course, that it had become Kuzin. Ah well.

We did particularly well at the market – birch honey and garlic honey were definite winners.

Then there were chicken legs for the freezer, a variety of fresh veg, goat’s cheese, water melon, a paprika-chilli paste, a bucket of pickles and a little squeezy jar of frightening chilli sauce. 

The afternoon was spent chilling, with the plan being to eat out later. But when we reexamined the local restaurants, and thought of a better destination for tomorrow, we changed our plans.

First another game of Small World (Rog won again, boo, hiss) and then I made a smoked trout, pea and sour cream pasta. Not bad, and adds a tick to the oily fish box. (Oily fish boxes have to be lined with foil, or they leak.) 

After our rest day, we’ll be heading off for pastures new tomorrow