Budapest Transport
Our apartment is located about 25 minutes walking from the university where we take our class, so in the mornings I usually just walk. I like to wake up relatively early to walk because it’s really beautiful and I often get breakfast on the way. On the walk to class we walk on one of the most beautiful streets in Budapest, kind of similar to the Champs-Élysées in Paris or Broadway in New York with lots of expensive shops and restaurants. It’s pretty ideal. Some of the other girls take the bus that goes straight to the school building from our apartment (this takes about half as long), but I enjoy the walk. Maybe if I wake up late one day I’ll take the bus, but I haven’t felt the need yet!
I do take public transportation many other places though, especially considering the fact that everyone on my dialogue received an unlimited pass. The main forms of transit are busses (often electric, so they are connected to overhead wires), trams, and the metro trains. Public transportation is everywhere, and it seems like most people here seem to use it, regardless of social class. It is very clean, efficient, and best of all everything comes very rapidly. Most of the busses and train lines are very modern and I’ve always felt completely safe. The metro comes every three minutes or so, and busses come every 5-15 (depending on route and time of day). The train stops running around 11pm, but the busses go all night, so we’ve never even needed to take a taxi or uber yet! I honestly haven’t found any major cons to the public transit system here yet, except possibly that the metro is really far underground so the escalators are a bit scary for me. Another issue is that all the stops are in Hungarian so I have no clue how to say them, but that is of course my fault and not that of the system. I wish the Boston T was this nice!
