We have just returned from a weekend away in Budapest for Sarah’s hen do. We had such a fun filled, heavy drinking and memorable weekend.
The hen do was booked through a provider Chillisauce which saved us loads of time. They provided a price for the apartments and all activities and each person could pay for themselves directly through the website where we could also find the itinerary, how much money we had left to pay, participants etc. Each person had their own log in so you could restrict access if you needed to. On top of this all we needed to pay for was flights and a little bit of spending money!
We booked the No1 lounge at Gatwick to start the holiday to chill out and have a few Proseccos and some lunch before the flight. This was a nice surprise for Sarah and saved us money when we worked out how much we would have spent on food/drink in the airport otherwise.
When we landed in Budapest we were greeted by our guide for the weekend Kriztina at the airport where we had a minibus waiting for us. I could not recommend Kriztina enough, she was a fantastic guide, friendly, helpful and she made our weekend very fun and run smoothly! We finally got to our apartments to check in. Chillisauce had booked for us to say at the 3* Maple tree apartments. The apartment we had was a modern and clean, great value for money, large apartment with balcony. (We had requested Kat at Chillisauce to try to get us a balcony room which she did). The beds were surprisingly comfy. The only thing was that we needed to pay $5 per night for air con which was necessary as the room was so hot! The coffee table was a bit wobbly but held our drinks so I can’t complain. I would say the apartments weren’t great for a hen party that wanted to have a night in with music and drinking as we had to pay a £40 pp deposit for the room for behaviour and if we had 2 noise complaints after 10pm you would lose your deposit. (This was fine for us as we just went out anyway).
Our first evening we took a walk to the local town from our apartments. This was about a 20 minute walk and we managed to find a noodle bar for dinner which was sooo good! We then headed to a beer gardens (dressed up with moustaches) for a few drinks and a laugh! The drinks were very cheap out here with Beer being the same price as lemonade!!
On the first morning we got up, got ready and then headed to Corvin Plaza for some lunch. We found a restaurant called epic burger and got ourselves a burger (bigger than my head) with a drink for roughly £5 which was a bargain!!
After we had eaten our guide met us at the restaurant and sent us down to the Wine bikes in taxis she had organised. The bikes were much better than expected! We had a wicked time and the rose wine was quite nice! This had to be our favourite activity and the one we kept taking about (even if our bums did all hurt the next day) - A must do!! We got to see the sights of Budapest whilst having fun and drinking and there was an AUX cable on board so we could blare our music out whilst peddling along, occasionally stopping for photos at the sights.
In the evening we had cocktail making. This was a great evening in a private location. The staff were nice and our guide even went out and got us bar snacks on our request. We were given a welcome cocktail to start and then watched the bar man make 2 cocktails which we all had a taste of. Once we’d seen the demonstration we were able to make one cocktail chosen for us and a cocktail of our choice. We had a great laugh and got very drunk!
From here we stopped off for some street food to line our stomachs before carrying on with the bar/club crawl. This was a funny night and we were all very drunk! The old ruin bars were pretty cool and the drinks were flowing nicely. Upon arrival of bar 1 we were given a cocktail from our guide. We were taken to Szimpla and Ellatohaz which are good ruin bars then we ended up in Doboz where we danced the night away (maybe more swaying and staring aimlessly from the amount of alcohol consumed!)
After waking up and feeling extremely hungover we headed to the lovely open outdoor baths. They were not as hot as expected, at between 24-26 degrees, and it was a bit of shame the weather was a little windy as we got cold when we got out of the water (we used the sauna to warm back up) but overall the baths very pretty and very relaxing – The perfect end to our weekend.
We headed to Liszt Ferrant Square for some dinner where I had a very tasty steak with spinach potatoes and garlic sauce! This was definitely the best food I had eaten all weekend and had so much flavour!
Budapest is a lovely location for a hen party or even just for sightseeing. It is a pretty and unique looking city with lots to do. The weather was nice when we were there in August, warm but not too hot! I would love to go back and do some more sightseeing as we missed the whole section along the river and it sounds like it would be very beautiful there over winter. We didnt really know what to expect of the trip as we had never used Chillisauce before but the whole trip exceeded our expectations and we had the best time!