Family fun in Hungary during school holidays

I have no little kids in my life ATM but water parks in the heat are always fun for families.
Was at one yesterday and people were enjoying themselves, throwing balls and even kids into the water...
The city park in Budapest has several kids days during vaires weekends during the summer.
Balaton is always a great place to vacation with the family although booking a room and eating there may set your budget back a bit.
Many families bike ride together but that would depend  on where you live, need a good bike trail that is safe for children to use.

The bike trails on the Buda side of Budapest are quite good but a bit steep maybe for younger children.

Budapest is extremely safe really and there are playing parks everywhere in every nook and cranny so just let your children play. Like Marilyn, I have no children, and yet I love watching children play in the park, another pleasure I am now denied because someone will accuse me of being a paedophile but there are so many parks and gardens in Budapest, in every nook and cranny there is a children's play park. There is Aquapark if you want to get them nicely soaked. junglepark near me seems very popular with the kiddies and I think parent!s arent allowed in you can get there on tram 12 or loads of different bus routes, 96 or 196 or 296. You can just go to the baths at Hozok Tere and sit in the park, Hozok Tere has lots of good places to sit and have a picnic and lots of good cycling routes across and through it and then go and get wet in the Szechenyi baths which is not expensive if you just want a swim not all the extras (just bring your own picnic hamper, it is more fun anyway)

There is a good swimming pool and stuff just at the end of near ujpest vasutallomas behind there it faces onto the duna/danube and they do loads of events for children during the summer, anns and I walked down there a couple of months ago and the subscription is not too expensive but they do day rates too, and put on lots of events for the kiddies.  I got a card of what the subscription prices are but it is not much, going from memory I think 900ft a day for an adult and half that for a child, I am probably slightly wrong but not a million miles out.

Go up st gellert hill, start at the bottom at adam clark tere and there are lots of walks up, and you can bike up but it is quite a climb up. but then you can whizz down wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee smashing old ladies out of the way on the bike ride down wheeeeeeeeeee.

Take the children's railway but that is a bit of a day out, but you can take the children's railway that is worth doing. You can pick that up from near Moscow Square and that will take you out to the top of the Buda hills, that makes a nice day out.

Lots and lots of things to do. Avoiding tourists is always a good game. Everyone was in Budapest for the Formula 1 so I spent the weekend speaking English and have only just about recovered to start speaking in Hungarian. Lewis Hamilton, good Stevenage chap like me, won, apparently.

SimonTrew wrote:

.....

Take the children's railway but that is a bit of a day out, but you can take the children's railway that is worth doing. You can pick that up from near Moscow Square and that will take you out to the top of the Buda hills, that makes a nice day out.

....Everyone was in Budapest for the Formula 1 so I spent the weekend speaking English and have only just about recovered to start speaking in Hungarian. Lewis Hamilton, good Stevenage chap like me, won, apparently.

For the children's railway etc, my village is on the other side of the hill from there and I can sometimes hear the trains squeaking from my balcony.  I can certainly see the Erszebet Kilato (Janoshegy lookout tower) from there.  So here's what you do (and I've said it before):

Get to Moscow Square, take the 22/222 bus towards Budakeszi, get off at the Syrian Ambassador's residence,  cross the road, walk through the "koz" (alley) to the road on the other side of the buildings turn right, walk up the hill.  Then you pass immediately on the right the American Ambassador's residence whereupon you are at the chairlift.  Take the chairlift to the top of the hill, get off, go up the tower (it's free), come down and then walk across the top of the hills to Normafa, then from there to the children's railway or the cog wheel railway.  Then either take the cog wheel railway down to Janos Korhaz and back to Moscow Ter or take children's railway all the way down, and return to Moscow on tram 61.

You can also do it the other way with variations.  Cycle to the cogwheel terminus, then take your bikes up on the cog wheel railway up (1x extra ticket for the bike), cross to Normafa through the forest (take a ball for a kick about on the park area there), come down to Szepilona (either on the access road or the paths in the forest), cross the road towards the station, then take the paths on the right downwards to the city.  Eventually you will come out on Huvosvolgyi along from Paszerati and you can cycle back towards Moscow Ter.

Where's my cat and pigeons.....ok, here's the pigeons, here's the cat thrown in......as for the Formula 1, what a silly boring sport, round and round, blah-blah blah-blah.  Well done Lewis Hamilton for going around in circles.....ZzzZZzzz.....Yawn Yawn Yawn....

fluffy2560 wrote:

return to moscow square....

It is not called Moscow Square any more though is it.... Széll Kálmán tér these days. Otherwise spot on. I never know if I should be very specific or just be a bit vague on purpose because half of the fun of exploring is to find these things out for yourself so I erred on the side of caution. Not saying you are wrong, you are spot on, but I was being a bit deliberately vague.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

return to moscow square....

It is not called Moscow Square any more though is it.... Széll Kálmán tér these days. Otherwise spot on. I never know if I should be very specific or just be a bit vague on purpose because half of the fun of exploring is to find these things out for yourself so I erred on the side of caution. Not saying you are wrong, you are spot on, but I was being a bit deliberately vague.

Always remember it's Moszkva Ter, not SK (who?) Ter.   

I'm against being Hungarian PC on that front.  It's a personal vendetta against name changes for no reason.  Ask an older Hungarian (>say, 50) how they navigated around the city when they were teenagers.  It's fundamental for some people.

When I lived in Nelson Mandela Drive......move to Thatcher Road and please no, I'm not moving to Donald Trump or OV Koz.

Fluffy2560 wrote:

Where's my cat and pigeons.....ok, here's the pigeons,... .as for the Formula 1, what a silly boring sport, round and round, blah-blah blah-blah.  Well done Lewis Hamilton for going around in circles.....ZzzZZzzz.....Yawn Yawn Yawn....

You are doing it all wrong with the pigeons old bean, you are supposed to keep them in lofts andthen they may come back home some time, you have to keep the cat in the bag and not let it out, otherwise, your champion racing pigeons are never gonna get beyond their first race are they? Don't you know anything?

Formula 1 does seem to me extremely boring too but some people seem to like it. Never really seen the attraction meself. Why people would pay so much money to watch cars doing what cars do is entirely baffling to me. Scalextric is quite fun though, especially when you have the old triggers with a rheostat usually the copper got oxidised so they would spin and spurt and your throttle control was next door to zero and all the cars would fall off the track. That was much more fun than Formula 1.

(contributor deleted as off topic)

fluffy2560 wrote:

Always remember it's Moskva Ter, not SK (who?) Ter.

Splitting hairs now Do you mean Moszkva tér?

Hmm, went to Szechenyi last summer and it was 4,800F a head.
Not exactly cheap and not really suitable for little kids.
Sort of boring for them to have a soak. More for the old folks and tourists.
I found a nice new place to swim but keeping it under my hat for now...
They are in the middle of a huge new redo so next summer I am positive their prices will increase.
Even so, yesterday I really not only witnessed balls a flying , I saw kids a flying!
Some dude was throwing small children into the pool.
Nice, like we all wish to risk a broken neck by having a 75lb. kid land on us!
The life guards here are totally useless but I've mentioned that before after a little 8 year old girl drowned at one pool here.
Oh well, people had a little "crimp" in their day.
I actually was and still am in shock over it.

I really don't have a clue what kids do here for fun when off of school these days.
Parents usually have to go with.
In my day we did stuff on our own and parents just told us to be home when the st, lights were turned on.
Same here in Hungary in Budapest when my husband was a kid.
He did allot of stuff that was ultra dangerous that he never told his mother about,  would of
given her a fit if she had known.
Me too, we did dangerous stuff as kids and never told our parents in case they made us stay inside and not play with the others.
It's a wonder we didn't die as kids with some of the stuff we did.
can't really recommend kids riding a winding 2 lane mountain road with no sidewalk without a helmet at age 9 or climbing the scaffolds on the rebuilding of the Budapest bridges. Guess walking alone as a little girl down the wash and collecting tad poles is now a no-no also  going swimming alone with another 8 year old not knowing how to swim yet going into the Danube for a dip is not a good thing for parents to tell their kids to do. Good thing some old dude was out in his small boat or my husband wouldn't be here today...Got recused when he went out too far and couldn't get back to shore.
My baby bro and I would join older kids and collect soda bottles for the refunds, All fun and games until my 3 year old bro fell and cut an artery in his hand, was fun watching the blood rise 10 feet in the air.
My father used to always tell us to go play on the freeway, not sure if he was joking or wanting to off us.
Guess I am not one to actually to be in charge of a group of children after all...

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

Hmm, went to Szechenyi last summer and it was 4,800F a head.
Not exactly cheap and not really suitable for little kids.

Yes it was just a suggestion. In normal countries you would rebuild it over the winter so that it was available in the summer, but this is Hungary, not a normal country

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

In my day we did stuff on our own and parents just told us to be home when the st, lights were turned on.

En ís, me too. My parents would go off to work and we were not allowed back in the house until the streetlights were on (and in Britain in the summer that means about 8.30pm or 9pm) and "just go out and play somewhere".And we did. I suppose I was a bit lucky in that I have a twin brother, not identical - he is tall and handsome and clever - but that you have a ready made playmate, it also means you learn literally from day 0 that you are not the only person in the world, and I am glad of that. We would play football or go climbing trees or ride on bikes or make a go-kart out of an old pram or whatever it might be that day, digging up worms or whatever. I feel very sorry for the next generation that are glued to their ipads or whatever and never climb a tree or go swimming or whatever, what fun we had in our summer holidays! And in theUK the summer holidays are six weeks, from mid july to early september, in Hungary they are much longer.You knew when you would be getting out of school, that is when you had a "back to school" sale and "you will grow into it" when your mum buys you shoes and a blazer two sizes too big. I am only five foot eleven and I am the shortarse of the family, the rest of my family are all over six foot tall, "you will grow into it"

Oh it is such a shame now with all this scarediness of paedophilia and whatever that children are not allowed to play and explore like we did. Don't get me wrong, kiddy fiddling is disgusting and vile and I cannot use words stronger on this site, but most incest etc is conducted by members of the family not by TV celebrities. It is just the father who - his daughter and is not on the telly, does not sell newspapers. You are far more likely to be murdered by a member of your family than by some stranger, but humans have a very skewed idea of risk.

SimCityAT wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Always remember it's Moskva Ter, not SK (who?) Ter.

Splitting hairs now Do you mean Moszkva tér?

Mein Gott, you are right.  I've disgraced myself by not even spelling it right. 

I feel like a cabinet minister who doesn't even know the nationality of his own wife. Everyone makes mistakes some more than others. I imagine he's not going to get any sauce on his spring rolls tonight.

Yes, one has to watch the kids like a hawk these days.
We were taught to not talk to strangers, take candy or treats from them or get into any strangers cars.
Still good advice.
My friend in school, we shared the same BD and felt like soul sisters, used to always say crazy stuff like,"Incest is best".
I now wonder what was going on in her family since she took her own life at age 33.
My sister was very much into the artist groups in school and was in the same class and my friends brother was and she even said he and his crowd were,"odd", believe me she was on another planet herself most times so they must of really been odd.
Her father had a break down and was placed in Camerillo mental hospital when she was a child, my friend that is, also her mother had several break downs.
My friend would sometimes go nuts after eating a potato chip, like one only! Said she was about to blow up. One of the smartest kids in our school, too, her brother was super smart also, was the Valley Victorian of their school.
He got on stage to give the graduation speech to all the grads and parents, this was during the Vietnam wars years.
He got up there and started to call their school principle a murderer  and baby killer because he had been in the military.
Teaches and other adults ran over to him, he jumped off the stage and took off across the yard, think he got away scot free but that was a grad speech to never forget!
Her step-dad used to shoot off his gun through the family living room up to the sky.
good thing it doesn't rain much in Ca.

This is why (see below) the name changed back to the original name, Széll Kálmán tér. And rightly so- the communists had no right occupying Hungary & making Hungarians lives a misery.

'The originally anonymous area became Széll Kálmán tér (Széll Kálmán Square) in 1929, named after the Hungarian prime minister Kálmán Széll. Following the Soviet occupation and the Communist takeover in the country, the square was renamed to Moszkva tér in 1951 under the Rákosi regime. Following the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, it was debated whether it should be renamed again to the original Széll Kálmán, but initially the name remained.' (From Wikipaedia).