Celebrating abroad: results in Budapest

With results flooding straight into our email inboxes this week, my friends and I thought it best that we were in the most comfortable place possible when we received them, so we flew off to sunny Budapest for a few days!

It might not be top of most people’s lists of places to visit, but the Hungarian capital is a total holiday haven for students for a whole number of reasons.

Artistically speaking, the buildings are positively gorgeous; a beautiful mixture of old-school Gothic architecture with waves of more modern influences. The classical thermal bath-houses are a definite must-see - a lot of them even have regular swimming pools now too.

For the Historians among us, the city has a super interesting background too; from the still firmly intact Buda Castle to the constant call-backs to the country’s former-Soviet past. Statues of all sorts of interesting figures from Hungarian war heroes to Ronald Reagan are dotted all around the city.

 Even our apartment building was just a joy to look at

I even have a personal connection to the place too, which felt stronger as I was wandering around the streets. My mum just so happens to have been born in Budapest, and she fled the city and the country as a young child during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, so it was fascinating to be able to see how far the city has come in all that time.

Not to mention that the wobbly currency makes everything insanely cheap. A fancy meal out set me back less than £10, including wine, whilst an evening out in one of the many awesomely-decorated ruin bars (exactly what you’d expect them to be) proved even less expensive than a night at our own dearest Jesters.

 Riding bikes around a city as gorgeous as Budapest is definitely a sure-fire way to stave off the nerves from results!

The cherry on the cake was, of course, being able to share such a beautiful city with my friends, and all of us receiving our final year results together whilst enjoying the sun was a definite highlight. Ultimately, everyone emerged super happy and pleased with what they achieved too, which was a total relief.

Returning to Southampton was somewhat bittersweet, very much missing the joys of such a glorious foreign land, but pleased to be back somewhere familiar, if only briefly.

My time here is very gradually coming to an end, with now barely even a week left to gather everything together before moving on.

I guess that makes it time to finally cross off the last few things from the Southampton bucket list then!

Ben