On falling hard for a city you didn’t see coming.

I had Paris figured out before I ever went there.

Not in the way that anyone truly knows a place, but in the way that a child builds a whole world inside her head from movies and magazine photos and the specific kind of romance that only exists in your imagination. For as long as I can remember, Paris was the city. The city I would visit one day, and it would be everything. The Eiffel Tower lit up at night, the Seine, the pastries, the effortless beauty of streets that seemed to have been designed for people who deserved to walk down them, looking a little bit like they were in a film.

I held onto that idea for years.

And then I went to Paris.

It was beautiful. Of course it was. The city delivers exactly what it promises, and there’s something to be said for that. But somewhere between the tourist crowds and the feeling that I was standing in a postcard I’d already seen a thousand times, something was missing. The magic I’d been carrying in my chest since childhood was there, but dimmer than I expected. More distant. I kept waiting to feel the thing I thought I would feel, and it kept not arriving in the way I had planned.

I didn’t expect Budapest to be any different. It was just another capital on the list.

Then I got there. And I understood immediately that some cities don’t announce themselves. They just quietly rearrange something inside you without asking permission, and by the time you notice it happening, it’s already done.

Budapest is my favourite city in Europe. I’ve said it out loud many times now, and I still mean it every single time.

Before we talk about Budapest, you need to know that it was two cities

This is the part that changes how you see the whole place.

Budapest wasn’t always Budapest. Until 1873, it was two entirely separate cities sitting on opposite sides of the Danube River. Buda on the west bank, hilly and ancient and full of castles and cobblestones. Pest on the east bank, flatter, more urban, the kind of city that builds grand boulevards and means it. They were unified into a single capital and named Budapest, but they never fully merged in character. Walk across one of the bridges, and you can still feel the shift.

Knowing this before you arrive makes everything make more sense. Why does the city feel like it has two different personalities? Why are the views so extraordinary from both sides? Why crossing the bridge is its own kind of experience.

I explored Buda first, which felt right. Buda is the older story. Pest is the newer one. It made sense to read them in order.

The Buda side: History written in stone

The climb up to Buda Castle is the kind of thing that earns everything that comes after it. You can take the funicular if you’d like to, which is charming and worth doing once. But I walked, and the walk gave me time to notice the city unfolding below me in layers, the river, the bridges, the rooftops of Pest stretching out towards the horizon.

Buda Castle itself was under renovation when I visited. The scaffolding was up on parts of it, and certain sections were closed off entirely. I had braced for disappointment. I didn’t need to. Even partially covered, the castle grounds are extraordinary. The scale of it, the courtyards, the views out over the Danube and across to Pest, none of that was diminished. Sometimes a place is so genuinely impressive that scaffolding is just a minor inconvenience you photograph around.

I spent time in the grounds just sitting with it. Not rushing to tick the box and move on. There’s a quality to Buda Castle that rewards stillness. The longer you stay, the more you see.

From there, I made my way to Fisherman’s Bastion, which is one of those places that photographs well but is somehow even more beautiful in person. The neo-Gothic towers and the arched terraces look out over the Danube in a way that makes you feel like you are standing at the edge of something important. It was built at the end of the nineteenth century as a decorative lookout and viewing terrace, and it does its job so well that you forget there was ever an intention behind it. It just feels like it grew there.

I also visited the Hungarian Heritage Centre, which gave me more of the cultural and historical context I’d been wanting. Hungary has a story that stretches so far back and moves through so many different chapters that it’s easy to feel like you’re only ever reading a few pages. The Heritage Centre helped me slow down and read more carefully.

One recommendation: give yourself an entire day for Buda. Not a morning. A whole day.

The Jewish quarter and the weight that comes with it

There are places you visit for the beauty, and then there are places you visit because you owe them your attention.

The Jewish Quarter in Pest is both.

Physically, it is one of the most visually interesting parts of the city. The ruin bars started appearing here, in the early 2000s, in the abandoned buildings of what was once Budapest’s Jewish ghetto. These are bars built inside crumbling, reclaimed spaces, multi-floored and eccentric and full of mismatched furniture and fairy lights and the particular energy of a city that decided to turn something broken into something worth keeping. As a solo traveller, the ruin bars are worth an evening, if not two.

But the neighbourhood carries a weight underneath the colour and the noise, and if you know anything about what happened here during the Second World War, you feel it.

I visited the Jewish Museum. I won’t try to summarise the history in a few sentences because it doesn’t deserve that kind of compression. What I will say is that I came out of that museum changed in some small but permanent way. The scale of what happened to the Jewish community of Budapest, the specific and deliberate cruelty of it, the loss of lives and families and an entire world that once existed on these streets, sits with you long after you’ve left.

The memorial I wasn’t fully prepared for was the Shoes on the Danube Bank.

It’s a small installation, but it does something to you that large monuments sometimes fail to do. Sixty pairs of iron shoes, cast in the styles of the 1940s, were fixed to the edge of the riverbank. During the war, Jews were brought to this spot and ordered to remove their shoes before being shot into the river. The shoes were valuable. They were taken. The people were not.

Standing there, looking at those small iron shoes lined up at the water’s edge, with the Parliament building gleaming behind me, I didn’t have the right words. I still don’t. Some things resist being articulated, and maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe you’re supposed to just stand there and let it land.

If you visit Budapest and you skip this memorial, I think you’ve missed something important about the city’s full story.

The Pest side: Grand, loud, and alive

Pest moves differently from Buda. Where Buda is all quiet stone staircases and hilltop views, Pest has the energy of a city that is entirely comfortable with how grand it is.

St. Stephen’s Basilica is exactly as impressive as it looks in every photo you’ve seen of it. The interior is worth the entry fee and the time. I stood inside and looked up at the dome and experienced that particular feeling that old religious architecture produces in me, something that isn’t quite reverence but isn’t far from it either. A recognition that whatever you believe, someone poured an enormous amount of human effort and devotion into making something this beautiful, and that matters.

The area around the Basilica is also one of the best for wandering. Best Bagel Basilica is just around there, and if you are the kind of person who believes a good bagel is one of life’s more reliable pleasures, you need to go. I don’t usually talk about a bagel like it was a meaningful experience, but this one genuinely was.

I walked a lot in Pest. More than I planned to, because the city rewards walking in a way that not all cities do. You turn a corner, and suddenly there’s a square you weren’t expecting, or a building with details on its facade that you have to stop and look at properly. The architecture in Budapest is doing a lot, and most of it is doing it very well.

Elizabeth Bridge is the cleanest, most modern of the Danube bridges, and the views from the middle of it in both directions are worth standing still for. Buda on one side, Pest on the other, the river catching whatever light is available. I went back to this bridge more than once during my trip, which is the highest compliment I can give a bridge.

Budapest at night is a different city entirely

I need to tell you about the Danube cruise.

I almost didn’t book it. I had assumed it would be one of those tourist activities that looks spectacular in promotional photographs and delivers something considerably more ordinary in person. I was wrong.

I did the evening cruise as the sun was going down, and the city transformed in a way I genuinely did not expect. The Parliament building on the Pest bank is already extraordinary in daylight, a neo-Gothic giant sitting at the edge of the river with a confidence that says it has always known exactly what it is. But when the lights come on, and the sky darkens behind it, and the whole thing turns gold against the water, it becomes something that does not feel entirely real.

I kept thinking, this looks like a film set. Not in a fake way, in a way that makes you question whether beauty is allowed to exist at this scale without some kind of catch. The bridges lit up. The Buda Castle is glowing above the western bank. The reflections moving on the river. All of it was so quiet from the boat, the city holding itself together with a grace that felt almost deliberate.

I sat at the front of the boat, and I did not take a single photograph for about fifteen minutes. I just watched. I think that is the right thing to do when a city gives you something that deserves your full attention.

The sunset from the Buda side is also worth arranging your day around. I found myself standing on the Buda bank as the sky was going orange and the Pest skyline was catching the last of the light, and I had a moment of understanding exactly why I do this. Why I travel. Why I pack my bag and figure out the public transport system and eat alone at restaurant tables in cities where nobody knows me. Because sometimes a city hands you something that belongs to you in a very specific way, and you could only have received it by being exactly there.

Budapest is that kind of city.

Where to eat (Because this matters)

I take food seriously when I travel. Not in a precious, everything-must-be-a-destination-dining-experience way, but in a way that means I think hard about where I eat, and I remember the meals that were worth remembering.

Budapest fed me extremely well.

Blueberry Brunch was everything I needed it to be. The kind of brunch spot that understands what brunch is supposed to do for a person, which is make them feel like the day has started correctly. The food was thoughtful, and the coffee was good, and I sat there long enough that the staff probably noticed.

Lulu is a breakfast and brunch place that I want to tell everyone about because it is exactly the kind of small, warm, genuinely good spot that makes a neighbourhood feel worth exploring. Not performative about being good. Just good.

Cookie Bacon did brunch in a way that reminded me why brunch is one of the best meals available to humanity. I am not going to be more specific than that because sometimes a meal is best described by the fact that you finished everything on the table and sat back feeling that a particular problem had been solved.

Best Bagel, near the Basilica, for the bagel situation I mentioned earlier. Go. Get the brutal best bagel (they have a vegan option too). You’re welcome.


Budapest is also an excellent city for just eating wherever it looks good when you’re hungry, which is something I appreciate. The food culture here is unpretentious and generous, and the prices are very reasonable compared to most of Western Europe.

The practical things (They matter too)

Public transport in Budapest is so good that I genuinely got a little emotional about it.

This is not a small thing for a solo traveller. The trams, the metro, the buses, all of it runs well and runs often, and navigating the city without a car is completely straightforward. I used public transport for nearly everything, and it never once let me down. This is the kind of city where you buy a multi-day transit pass on arrival and then stop thinking about logistics entirely, which is exactly how travel should feel.

I also want to say something about safety, because it comes up every time I talk about solo female travel.

I felt safe in Budapest. Not in a naive, nothing-bad-could-ever-happen way, but in the practical, lived experience of walking around a city alone at different hours and not once feeling like I needed to be somewhere else. The city is well-lit. It is not deserted at night. People are minding their own business in the way that people in genuinely functioning cities tend to do. I explored the ruin bar district after dark, and I walked back to my apartment along the riverbank, and I felt fine throughout.

I stayed in an apartment I found on Airbnb, not a hostel, which suited the trip. Having my own space to come home to after full days of walking and feeling things was the right call. The apartment was central, clean, and gave me a base that felt like mine for the days I was there.

Why Budapest

I’ve thought about why this city got to me the way it did, and I think it comes down to the fact that Budapest doesn’t try very hard to impress you.

It is impressive. Obviously, and everywhere. But there’s no desperate performance happening. The city isn’t competing with Paris or Prague or any of the other European capitals that have built a mythology around themselves. Budapest is just quietly, confidently itself, with its thermal baths and its ruin bars and its devastating history and its extraordinary parliament building and its two banks that still feel like two different places even though they share a name.

I came here with low expectations and left with one of the deepest travel feelings I’ve had anywhere. That is the trip equivalent of meeting someone at a party when you weren’t looking and realising three hours later that you haven’t spoken to anyone else.

I’ll go back. I already know this. There are cities you visit and cities you return to, and Budapest is firmly in the second category for me.

If you’ve been wondering whether it’s worth it, wondering whether a city you haven’t seen in a thousand travel posts is actually worth the flight and the planning: it is. It really is. Go before you feel ready. Figure it out when you get there.

Budapest will meet you where you are.