Greetings from Bratislava

Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, it’s a 2-2,5 hours drive from Budapest. It’s one of the four capitals along the Danube river. A charming town with Bratislava castle from the Middle Ages and the Baroque style city centre with colourful buildings, cobblestoned streets, little cafés, art galleries and great atmosphere.

I’d highly recommend a tour when you are in Vienna or Budapest, you won’t be disappointed. These are the pictures from our last tour, we were lucky with beautiful weather and clear blue skies.

 

The Gödöllő Palace

I would like to share with you this little video I took last weekend when we visited the Gödöllő Palace. This beautiful Baroque palace from the 18th century is included in my Gödöllő and Hollókő tour and the visit is always a special experience. I very much love being lost in the past, in history, it’s a real time travel and history comes to life.

 

Eger wines – tradition, history and culture

I keep posting about Eger wines and wine tasting tours, and it seems to me that wine tours are becoming more and more popular. My personal opinion is that exploring local food and wine is a defining part of our travel experience. I’m so happy to realise how much my travellers enjoy the local wines and traditions.

Eger is a very cute Hungarian little town with a lot of history and culture and with amazing red wines. Let me know if you’re interested in a tour, so that I can send you more details. We can include as many different wineries as you wish, we can do wine tasting, we can walk around the wine cellars, it is the best way to explore local food and local wine.

Here are some pictures of our last tour to give you more ideas.

 

Another great wine tour in Eger

You might have noticed that the Eger Wine Tour is one of my favourite daytrips from Budapest. I love Eger, it’s a charming little town with beautiful Baroque architecture and its castle is still considered as a national symbol of Hungarian patriotism. The tour is topped by wine tasting both in the city centre and in the Valley of the Beautiful Woman, where you can taste Bull’s Blood, the local cuvée.

The weather is getting more and more beautiful day by day so we enjoyed our time in Eger in beautiful sunshine and I can tell you that everybody loved the red wines we tasted. I hope I’ll have the chance to go back to Eger many times this year.

A Must-See: House of Hungarian Music

A new museum opened in the City Park of Budapest, the museum of Hungarian Music. We had a private tour in the museum last week and were truly impressed by both the design of the building and the museum’s programmes and exhibitions.

The building was designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, to me it looks like an extremely ornate spaceship abandoned in the woods. For example I love the 12m high glass windows and panels and the hundreds of golden stylised leaves decorating both the interior and the outside. As a result it looks like a huge forest of gold, which is even more beautiful in the sunshine when the lights are nicely reflected on each and every gold leaf.

In the sound dome you can enjoy a unique audio-visual experience with sounds and music coming from all directions. I loved when all the sounds and music came together by the end of the show. It really felt like as if we witnessed a special chemistry experience in a musical laboratory. As an addition the permanent exhibition offers a musical journey in space and time. You must take some time to explore it, because you can easily spend hours in this underground musical maze. Music lovers should plan to spend some 2-3 hours in the building. Visitors can expect to get a better understanding of Hungarian music from the different periods of our musical history.

(On a personal note I have to add that I’m very much against all new constructions in the second largest public park of Budapest. The reason is that I think we should preserve and enlarge the green spaces in the city. However, I like the modern approach and the fact that the building is supposed to use sustainable and climate-friendly solutions.)

Private Cooking Class at Borganika

Last week we had the chance to meet and cook with chef Zita from BORGANIKA. Zita has an amazing gastro space in Klauzál market in the Jewish district. She offers cooking classes, all sorts of gastro events and she also hosts private dinners. She is amazing and is truly in love with Hungarian culture and food, all of my guests were fascinated by this unique culinary experience.

We cooked green pea soup, chicken paprikas with nokedli and strudel, it was a lot of fun, we enjoyed cooking and eating together and we also tasted some great Hungarian wines.

It’s a great experience for smaller and larger groups and her enthusiasm and professionalism will most probably brighten your day and contribute to an amazing Budapest experience.

Private cooking class at Borganika
Private cooking class at Borganika

Update on travelling to Hungary from the US

I’ve had received today some inquiries about how the new recommendations issued by the European Union might affect travels from the US to Hungary. The US is one of the five countries that have been removed from the EU safe travel list.

What is important is that this is a guidance and each EU countries decide individually about travel restrictions. As for Hungary, you can enter Hungary if you come from the US with a negative PCR test not older than 72 hours – no PCR test is needed when you get to Hungary by road, rail or waterway.

What is even more important is that Budapest is as beautiful as always, it’s not overcrowded with tourists, so it’s still a great time to come and see. Let me know if you have questions, or book a tour! Also, don’t forget that a private tour is safer than being in large tour groups, myself and the drivers I work with are fully vaccinated and can’t wait to meet you!

Beautiful Budapest - Fiseherman's Bastion
Beautiful Budapest – Fiseherman’s Bastion

Budapest fireworks – 20th of August

It’s always nice to watch the fireworks from the balcony – the advantages of living on a beautiful hill in Buda. St. Stephen’s Day (20th of August) is a national holiday in Hungary and the day’s celebrations are crowned every year by amazing fireworks at night.

Visiting the Gödöllő Palace

I love my Gödöllő-Hollókő tour for many reasons, one of those being that I’m truly fascinated by the beauty of the Baroque Palace of Gödöllő. There are so many things to fall in love with: the architecture, the style, the colours, the details. It really is special because throughout the tour one has the impression to travel back in time to the 19th century.

On our very last visit earlier this month we were being guided by Queen Sissi – the wife of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef which has made our tour even more remarkable.

New entry rules for travellers coming outside of the EU

Finally, the moment has come, as of the 7th of August, travellers from outside the EU can enter Hungary by air. The rules are:

“persons who are able to present an English or Hungarian language document containing the results of a molecular biological test (SARS_CoV-2 PCR test) not older than 72 hours, conducted in conformity with professional medical regulations in one of the following countries:
a Member State of the European Union or in a candidate state of the European Union,
a member state of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
a member state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation,”

It means that all you need is to have a negative PCR test (not older than 72 hours). We’ve been waiting for this for such a long time, it’s such a great news and I really hope that many visitors will want to visit my Beautiful Budapest these coming weeks.

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