13/8/99

There was a good cloud cover this morning and so we managed to sleep until about 9 o'clock. I got up and created a lovely breakfast of risotto, which we forced down and went off for a cold shower. We headed off to wander around Budapest on the way to the police station. The town is odd with some very beautiful, but clearly run down, buildings mixed in with some modern monstrosities. We took a walk around an indoor market, which looked like a health inspectors nightmare and then headed to the offices.

They were clearly old soviet government buildings with huge corridors lined with doors. Eventually I got my passport back and we headed out of town. On the way back we walked through a variety of districts from some prosperous ones to some very very poor ones, again there were a mix of buildings. We saw the nepstadion which is the huge national stadium - it looked very out of place amongst the surrounding housing. We popped into a petrol station and discovered that Hungary clearly has very relaxed pornography laws - the covers of the videos were more graphic than would be legal inside over here.

Soon we were on our merry way out to Austria. We had expected this to be the hardest border, as were re-entering the EEC from the eastern block, but it was actually one of the easier ones, with no checks on the way out, only on the way into Austria. I think we managed to confuse the border guard when we let out a cheer when he told us we were out of Hungary.

We pressed on and found a hotel just outside Vienna. Then we headed into town for some dinner and a look around. Once again due to being lazy, we experienced Austrian pizza hut. Vienna looks like a lovely city but due to tiredness we didn't really look around, just headed back to the hotel to crash.