We arrived in Budapest without any problems. We headed to the Kempinski Hotel, which is supposed to be the best hotel in all of Budapest. I have stayed at the Marriott, Intercontinental, and Sofitel in Budapest previous. Of the three, the Intercontinental is my favorite of all due to it’s location, breakfast buffet, and size of the rooms.

The Kempinski is a very nice hotel. The service staff was excellent and the breakfast buffet was superb. My only complaint was that the rooms were a bit too tiny. It seems like if you are positioning yourselves as the premier hotel in Budapest and charging rates correlated with that – your rooms should be larger.

The staff at the Kempinski was happy to see us and told us that for the past five days they had basically been empty due to the ash cloud disrupting all of the flights into Budapest.

We checked into our rooms and headed over to the US Embassy Building.

The US Embassy gave a very interesting presentation on the history of Budapest along with some of the current issues that Hungary is facing. I never realized that an Embassy would be so keyed in to the local scene. I thought they were there in case you got into trouble while traveling or to issue visa to the US.

After that, we headed to a church where you could go to the very top for stunning views of Budapest for about $3.

We headed down to the Spoon Cafe Lounge for dinner. It is situated on a docked boat down on the Danube River at the foot of the Chain Bridge, right across from the Intercontinental Hotel.

The cuisine was exquisite. We had a full course meal there that was about the best food I have tasted in Budapest.

We stayed there late into the night and finally headed back to our hotel heavily jetlagged.