The bus looped along the Ringstrasse, built after Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the old city walls torn down in 1857. It opened in 1865, lined almost immediately with museums and ministries all competing to look the most important, a habit the city never quite broke.

Off the bus near Stubenring, Field Marshal Radetzky was still on his horse, unveiled in 1892 and important enough to have his own Strauss march, one that still gets an airing at both the Vienna New Year concert and Austrian football matches. Behind him, a double headed eagle still guards the old war ministry roof, the empire long gone, the bird apparently under contract.

Lunch was schnitzel at Figlmüller, self declared home of schnitzel since 1905, where portion control has never once been attempted. The schnitzel arrived, then kept arriving well past the edges of the plate, one lemon wedge looking distinctly out of its depth.

We ducked into Krah Krah in the old Jewish Quarter next, a pub with over sixty beers on the list that still bothered to chalk up its priorities for the day. Soup of the day. Beer. Nothing else offered, nothing else required.

Coffee in Neubau arrived under a structurally ambitious amount of whipped cream, in the kind of café that explains why Viennese coffee house culture made UNESCO’s list in 2011, an entire city officially certified for sitting still.

Gelato followed, because the day apparently required a third dessert, chocolate from Zanoni and Zanoni, scooping from the same Stephansplatz corner since the early eighties. A quieter wander past the Naschmarkt in Gumpendorf gave us a fountain and rather more elegance than we had energy left to properly admire.

Dinner was back in Erdberg at Schwabl Wirt, the sort of rustic, wood beamed, red checked Gasthaus that never updated its decor and never needed to. Whole fish and rosemary potatoes on one side of the table, a well earned wine and beer on the other, and for the first time all trip, not a single Jägerbomb in sight.

After dark, the old town finally looked like the postcard. The Plague Column on the Graben glowed gold and white, built by Emperor Leopold the First as a two for one thank you, first for ending the 1679 plague, then for surviving the 1683 Ottoman siege. A few streets on, Stephansdom stood floodlit, its tiled roof finally getting the spotlight the daytime version never quite manages.

One last tram rattled past pastel buildings near Rossau on the way out, Vienna’s parting gift before the airport and one final Irish coffee, the same order that started at lunch in Budapest and quietly followed us the whole way. Prague gave us the history, Budapest gave us the party, Vienna gave us the excuse to do very little and call it culture.

Three cities, one trip, and more Irish coffee than either of us will admit to. Next up, this newsletter finally goes to the source, the UK, the original castle destination, England alone counting close to fifteen hundred of them and Wales adding several hundred more just to prove a point, and food that is, quite simply, top tier. It is the sort of place you can visit ten times and still leave feeling one castle short.

Your resident castle and cardamom enthusiast,
Arpita

Somewhere between bar two and bar three, my friend introduced me to the Jägerbomb, Jägermeister dropped straight into Red Bull, named with a bluntness I respect, no poetry attempted. We also picked up several new best friends of assorted nationalities, all toasted with total sincerity, never to be seen again. That, I have decided, is the actual point of a pub crawl. The bars are just the venue.

We started the next morning, heroically, at the Széchenyi thermal baths, a vast mustard yellow palace that has been quietly boiling visitors since 1913, discovered when an engineer drilled for drinking water and hit scalding mineral water instead. Proper locker rooms, endless outdoor pools, and enough steam rising off the water to make last night’s Jägermeister diplomacy look, from a distance, like deep relaxation. Genuinely one of the best things we did all trip.

Then a cruise down the Danube, orange tea in hand, past Buda Castle on its hill and the Parliament building doing its best impression of a building that knows exactly how good it looks. It is the third largest parliament on earth, built to a height of ninety six metres on purpose, a nod to Hungary’s founding in 896 and its 1896 millennium celebrations, apparently even the architecture here needed to make an anniversary card of itself.

Lunch was at Aszú Étterem, named for Tokaji Aszú, the golden wine Louis the Fourteenth reportedly called the wine of kings, the king of wines, while Queen Victoria had twelve bottles delivered a year, one a month, devotion or dependency, history is unclear. I had duck breast cooked a perfect rose pink, and, against all protocol, an Irish coffee instead of the wine. No regrets.

Dinner was proudly, unapologetically Hungarian at Paprika Vendéglő, pork medallions under bacon and mushrooms, the plate perfumed with the spice on the sign outside. Paprika came from the Americas long before it came to Hungary, arriving by way of Ottoman trade routes and quietly taking over the national cuisine so completely that everyone now assumes Hungary invented the pepper. It did not. It simply committed harder than anyone else.

We closed the trip at Byblos, a proper Lebanese and Levantine restaurant tucked into the middle of Budapest of all places. Shrimp, spiced sausage, a pot of Moroccan tea poured from a great height, and, only two countries into the trip, a small unexpected pang of homesickness for Dubai.

One of the pub crawl wristbands, I noticed the next morning, already had our next stop printed on it. Vienna was next, and after two cities that had shown us their wilder side, I assumed it would be the sensible one of the trip, all waltzes and good posture. It was, mostly. But even the best behaved city on the itinerary had a surprise or two tucked into its coffee houses, and that is a story for the next letter.

Your resident castle and cardamom enthusiast,
Arpita

Prague Castle, for the record, is not one building. It is a whole walled complex up on the hill, palaces, gardens, courtyards, a former monastery, the sort of place that clearly could not decide what it wanted to be when it grew up and simply became all of it. Right in the middle sits St Vitus Cathedral, gothic spires stabbing straight up, a golden mosaic worn soft with age over one of the side doors, and inside, a stained glass window by Alphonse Mucha that stopped me mid step and mildly inconvenienced several tourists behind me who had places to be.

The day had actually started a few hours earlier though, over breakfast at Café Savoy, which bills itself as a café and is really a small gilded opera house that happens to also serve chlebíčky, those little open faced Czech sandwiches piled with everything from ham and egg to smoked salmon, each one dressed up like it was auditioning for a magazine cover. I ate several under a ceiling so extravagantly frescoed and gilded it looked personally offended by anyone who dared eat a plain slice of toast beneath it.

From there it was cobblestones the rest of the way, the kind that photograph beautifully and betray your ankles quietly. Old Town Square eventually delivers you to the Astronomical Clock, where a genuinely alarming number of grown adults gather every hour, phones aloft, to watch a skeleton pull a rope, twelve apostles shuffle past two tiny windows, and a rooster crow the whole performance shut again. The mechanism dates to 1410. We are all, apparently, still not over it, myself very much included.

Charles Bridge is next, thick with baroque saints in blackened stone keeping watch over the river like a very stern, very silent welcoming committee, and it delivers you straight into that first view of the castle on the hill, the one every postcard has already ruined for you and somehow still gets you anyway.

Back up at the castle, past the cathedral, comes the changing of the guard, noon sharp at the first courtyard, full band, full ceremony. The uniforms, worth knowing, were designed by the same costume designer who won an Oscar for Amadeus, which feels about right for a city that treats pageantry as a mild inconvenience it puts up with rather elegantly.

Then, because apparently one cannot walk fifty metres in this city without meeting a snack, there is trdelník, the sugar dusted chimney cake spinning on rollers on every second corner, filling the whole street with the smell of a fairground that got a serious upgrade. Here is the bit nobody tells you when they hand you one still warm, it is not actually Czech. Slovak and Hungarian roots, no Czech grandmother has ever made one at home, and it only became a Prague tourist favourite in the early two thousands. In other words, a very good pastry with a slightly fictional backstory, much like most of us on holiday. I had two, purely for research.

Lunch was goulash and dumplings at Kuchyň, a sausage that needed no help from anyone and a beer that arrived before we had properly finished reading the menu, and by evening we had graduated to Anonymous Bar, a proper speakeasy behind an unmarked door, candlelit, gold masked faces painted on the walls, and within about four minutes of arriving, gold masked faces on us too. The cocktail list clearly does not believe in restraint. Mine arrived pale peach and floral, an actual sprig of baby’s breath perched on top like it had wandered in from someone’s wedding, while my friend’s turned up a deeply suspicious, glowing green, the kind of drink that looks like it might grant a wish or a hangover, possibly both.

Somewhere between all of that we also met King Kong. Not the actual King Kong, a bronze one, life sized, reclining rather smugly in a public square beside two enormous gold spheres that a nearby plaque insists, with a completely straight face, are art. It is called, with admirable and slightly alarming honesty, King Kong Balls. I have no further comment except that Prague contains multitudes, and evidently a sense of humour to match mine.

And then, the next morning, a train from Praha hlavní nádraží, that grand old station with its Art Nouveau hall and gilded figures holding up the ceiling as if they, too, had somewhere important to be. Thermal baths, a cruise past a parliament building lit up like it knows exactly how good it looks, a walk between Buda and Pest that I am fairly sure turned into a pub crawl at some point, though the photographic evidence has mysteriously gone missing. That one needs its own letter, properly told rather than squeezed in at the bottom of this one.

So consider this the cliffhanger. Prague fed me exceptionally well and let me leave with my dignity mostly intact. Budapest, from what I remember of it, had other plans.

Your resident castle and cardamom enthusiast,

Arpita