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I have written here about a visit I made not long ago to Budapest with Little Sister. You might wonder why we chose to go there again so soon. The answer is that we were undertaking a new travel experience: dental tourism. The cost of dental work in Ireland is extremely high. Our most convenient comparison is with the UK, and we typically pay 50-60% more than our nearest neighbours. Yet UK residents often find it makes good sense to get treatment in places like Hungary, where prices are so much lower that the travel and accommodation are more than covered by the savings, and there is an element of free holiday about the whole package. I do not propose to write a piece about dental tourism, but I mention it because our programme in Budapest was shaped by dentist's appointments and, to a lesser extent, by recovery time. Because of the fragmented schedule, I make no attempt to construct a chronological account.

Anyway, on with the report.

This was the second time LS and I went to Budapest together, not too long after our first visit. I had also been there on an earlier occasion with Herself. So this trip did not have a great deal of the shock of the new, but more of the comfort of the familiar. While we were not averse to new experiences, we did not set out with any intention of marking off extra boxes on a tourist checklist. There is something very easy about revisiting a city that you know and like, a sense that you can enjoy it without feeling that the trip is wasted if you don't include A and B and C in the programme. We did, however, give ourselves a couple of tourism imperatives for the week: to climb Gellert Hill and to visit a spa (that's only A and B; we didn't burden ourselves with a C). And because it seemed suitably perverse in a week of dentistry, we determined that we would seek out some good dining experiences.

We chose to rent an apartment for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that as we were undergoing a lot of dentistry we wanted to have a good deal of control over our environment -- things like having breakfast when we decided on it, and not needing to accommodate housekeeping schedules. When we started to check possibilities, the second reason emerged very quickly: we found that we could rent a two-bedroom apartment for about half the price of two single hotel rooms (420 euros for seven nights, and we could have found cheaper).

The apartment we booked was on a quiet street off Andrassy ut, less than 100m. from Octogon -- a very good location. The two bedrooms were large, if you counted them together: one was enormous, and the other was a single room with ideas above its station. LS won the toss, and got the good room. There was more equality in the large living area: I got the blue sofa and she got the red one. We had little reason to fight over the television, as only one of the 67 stations available was English-language, and that was Sky News. There was plenty in German, a couple of Italian-language channels, and all the rest were totally incomprehensible to me -- possibly all Hungarian but, for all I know, we might have had a mixture of Central European and Slavic languages. Anyway, Sky News is not much of a window on the world, so I was glad I had brought books with me.

Not far from the apartment we discovered a coffee house that we liked, the Grand Cafe Octogon. It was comfortable, the coffee was to our taste, meals and snacks were available at modest prices, and the clincher was that the staff were very friendly: on our second visit we were greeted with a smile of recognition. It became our local, and we visited it frequently. Several times, after dining elsewhere, we repaired there for our post-prandium. It adds greatly to the enjoyability of a visit when you get that sense of connection with an establishment, when you are asked "how are you today?", a question which recognises that you might today be a little different from how you were yesterday, and that you have an individual existence: you are a person as well as a customer.