We arrived in Budapest reasonably late in the afternoon, checked into our hotel and had a bit of a snooze before being collected at 6:30pm for our evening "Folk" tour. Basically, what this tour consisted of was a bus drive to the winery region on the outskirts of Budapest (with ongoing commentary from our guide during) and then a traditional dinner.
The restaurant was very nicely decorated, and located in what must have originally been a wine cellar. They even had huge wine barrels that had been converted into private dining booths!
Unfortunately, we didn't dine in one of these. We were on one of the longer tables at the end of the cellar, in front of the stage where Gypsy musicians played live folk music for the entire duration of our meal. Occasionally, Gypsy folk dancers came through the aisle between the tables to the stage and performed traditional dance - one two occasions, they actually enticed members of the audience to join them onstage and take up challenges (fortunately they didn't ask us, as we were down the farthest end from the stage!)
We were at this restaurant for roughly two and a half hours, the service between courses for our 3-course meal was very slow but to their credit the restaurant did have 5 other tables our size and they would have been flat out. It was very noisy, very busy, and out of a group of 10 there were 8 ladies from Denmark (coincidence, they weren't all together) and ourselves. So basically there was a whole lot of Danish and not very much English spoken at our table... One other thing to point out is that they smoke everywhere in Europe. Including in crowded cellars filled with diners. We reeked of cigarette smoke by the end of the night, and my almost-recovered lungs took a battering...
The meal itself consisted of a nice soup, goulash, and we were supposed to have apple strudel for dessert but due to a mixup we had a mixture of this chocolate dish and apple strudel at our table. I was fortunate enough to score the chocolate dish, and Jase the apple strudel so we effectively shared both :)
After dinner, we bought a bottle of red wine with a souvenir photo of the two of us having dinner on the label, and then went on a short tour of Budapest by night.
We went right up a hill to the Citadel and looked out over the city lights, which was beautiful...
... after many attempts sans tripod I managed to snap this stunning shot of the Royal Palace by night, before we hopped back on the bus and were returned to our hotel :)
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