A Tennessee Girl in Oz: Budapest: the bath edition

If, like me, you were unaware, Budapest is known as the city of spas. I had read about the historical baths in my tourist book, looked up some pictures online, and then promptly put the baths at the top of my To Do list.

First, though, I was lucky enough to have a full weekend in the city before my conference started. I was luckier still to have these two lovely people fly in to join me for it!

So we spent the weekend walking around and hitting tourist spots until our poor grownup selves couldn't take it anymore and we passed out in bed at 10 PM. =)

Up first was the Széchenyi Medicinal Baths. We took the metro up from our hotel area and found the building. I'm not sure what I expected the baths to look like from outside, but probably not this!

Outside the Széchenyi Baths

The Széchenyi Medicinal Bath is much newer than some of the others in the city (1913) but it's very big - one of the biggest in Europe. It's fed from two separate springs, with two different temperatures. We visited the outdoor baths, and it was unbelievable!

In the outside area, there were two bathing pools and one lap pool. We stuck to the bathing pools, of course. One was a little cooler: 28 C degrees. It had cool whirlpool area in the middle where you could pick your feet up and ride in a circle. Super fun!

The other pool was warmer, 38 C, and felt sooo good after being out in the spring air!

The warmer pool

It was clear that the locals treated a day at the baths like a day at the beach: people brought coolers of food, chess boards, and boomboxes. It was pretty interesting to see. Apparently the old Hungarian men are usually playing chess as they boil in the pool, but we didn't get to see this!

The second bath adventure was to Rudas, which was a bit more off the beaten path. It had a very different ambience to it, and definitely felt more historic. And for good reason, because it was built in 1550 when the Ottomans ruled Hungary.

Just like at Széchenyi, we paid a few thousand Forint (about $10 AUD) and got little cabins to change in.

Unfortunately, cameras weren't allowed in the bath rooms of Rudas. But here is a pic from the Internet:

The ceiling is a dome over the main pool and then there are four pools in each corner; they ranged from pretty cool (26 C), to uncomfortably hot (42 C). There were also dry and steam saunas, as well as a little bucket of cold water that you could pull on a string to dump on yourself. So you could pretty much shock your system continually for hours on end.

The water in Rudas had a pretty strong mineral smell (mainly sulphur), so we all agreed that at the very least we smelled healthier when we left!