KönyvBár, a bookshop and restaurant that ended up being my favorite meal of the honeymoon (and one of Ryan’s favorites—although he preferred Italy’s adventurous fish dishes).

We sampled several traditional Hungarian dishes, including an insane lavender-garlic butter made from Hungarian lavender.

I honestly don't remember what this was, but it included cheese and it was amazing.

Dessert was a crazy combination of thick, crumbly cottage cheese, basil, rhubarb, and raspberry that was perfect for the hot day outside.

My favorite Hungarian dish, paprikás csirke: small, gnocchi-like noodle nubbins with chicken in a thick, paprika-based sauce, sliced peppers, sour cream, and maybe a hunk of tomato.

Karaván, a collection of no less than 15 food trucks with string lights and picnic tables strewn across the alley between them. This was where I had my second-favorite meal (yeah, it was a good day for eating)—a hunk of delicious bulgogi, kimchi, hot sauce, and black sesame seeds squeezed between two densely packed rice patties. It was literally a bulgogi onigiri-like sandwich, and I was so in heaven that we actually went back for the exact same meal on our last day in Budapest. No shame.

Hungarian hot sauce. We approved.

Meatology, which served every assortment of smoked meats imaginable.

One of our favorite haunts was a "ruin pub" called Szimplakert, which from the street looks like a foreboding, abandoned building that saw a less fortunate side of WWII. The facade is falling off, windows are broken or boarded up, and the entrance looks like a gaping black hole in a charred (i.e., from pollution) limestone frame. But a few steps inside takes you into a completely different world: There's a large, covered courtyard bordered by small room after small room, each interconnecting in a maze of quirky, cluttered, filled-with-antiques-no-one-else-would-ever-want details. Each room runs its own pub or wine bar: some are hookah joints, some sell craft beer, others only serve Hungarian wines, others have arcade games and bar activities. At the end of courtyard, the space opens up into a two-story outdoor area with steps to the second floor (more rooms covered in strange antiques and graffiti) and more outside bar options. People were sitting on ruined couches and inside antique bathtubs, others were sitting on top what might have been a stove in the early 1900s, and still others were perched on a kid's kangaroo ride, which might have been part of a carousel decades ago.

You can probably guess why this is called a "ruin pub," and given the fate of the Jewish District during both Nazi and Soviet occupation, it's unsurprising that hipsters have converged on these destroyed buildings to turn them into a symbol of perseverance and renewed life.

Central Café, which was built in the late-1800s and frequented by a considerable number of Hungarian poets, authors, and artists. We met a local historian there on our first day in the city. It served as the perfect backdrop for an 80-minute history lesson on Budapest, starting with the Carpathian Basin's first known inhabitants many, many millennia ago. We went through Hungary's golden ages and wars, its extreme wealth followed by poverty in economy and land after the Warsaw Pact, and its occupation by one unwanted regime after another. This lesson was one of our favorite parts of the entire day, and helped shape how we saw and explored Budapest for the rest of our time there.

We were in sore need of a latte.

Budapest's hip districts (all around the Jewish Quarter) features these neat side streets that have been turned into connected terraces for tapas bars, restaurants, cafés, clubs, and the list goes on.

Whiskers Cat Pub, which is exactly what its name suggests: a bar with drinks and cats.

So to be clear, not only does it have air conditioning, but it also has cats.

All their drinks were cat-themed (this one was a feline rendition of a bloody mary).

It had been almost four weeks since I'd had a cat in my lap.

One last shot of Whiskers. The cats were kept upstairs, where they had a system of cat-sized tunnels glass-bottomed lounge areas to get away from humans when they wanted to.

Originally, we were supposed to have a fifth day in Budapest—or almost. Our flight from Budapest to Fiumicino (the closest airport to Rome, which lies about 50 minutes outside the city center) was scheduled to leave at 6:30 PM. But after a nationwide travel strike in Italy, our flight was one of the only Alitalia flights not to be cancelled entirely; instead, it was moved to 10:45 AM.

Besides all the stresses that come with a travel strike (e.g., not being able to check into our flight, or even to contact Alitalia about it), we were bummed to lose time in Budapest. We arrived at the airport very early, only to find that not a single Alitalia employee had shown up to the check-in counters. Instead, there were half a dozen contractors who had no clue how to log into the system, find travel itineraries, check luggage, or print boarding passes. (This was obviously not their fault—the airport wasn’t prepared for a strike of this magnitude.) We were second in line to check our bags, which took well over an hour to do (and keep in mind that there were probably a hundred customers behind us), which made the entire flight even more stressful than it had to be.

But after arriving at Fiumicino and haggling with aggressive taxi drivers for a 2.1-mile drive into the Roman countryside, we pulled into QC Termeroma…and were beyond grateful for the strike and all the changes it brought with it. If we’d arrived at this paradise of a resort at our original 9:00 PM, we wouldn’t have had time to do anything but sleep. (The next morning’s flight was an early one.) But once we rolled into the hotel courtyard at 1:30 PM, we knew the strike was our blessing in disguise.

A brief introduction to QC Termeroma: It was built over Portus Traiano, a complex built by Emperor Traiano in 100 AD. It features several Tuscan-style, two-story adobe complexes with Spanish tile roofs and huge, shuttered windows, all spread across expanses of grass and trees that were so green Ryan couldn’t believe they were real.

Cobbled paths led through trees and tall hedges to small openings that were tucked away, feeling so private that you’d guess you were in someone’s backyard—and each of these openings featured covered lounge areas, water stations, or floating beds—or shaded lounge chairs, heated pools, jacuzzis, foot spas stations, or waterfalls.

In all, we found ten above-ground bodies of water of varying temperatures, some with waterfalls, some with bubbles, and all heated to an enjoyable temperature.

(Just floating and chilling.)

There were rest areas, many of which were covered; and one of our personal favorites was a gazebo with floating beds hanging from chains, where we stretched out next to each other and dozed until two resort employees stopped by and asked if we wanted to be sprayed with lavender mist. (What?) Turns out the mist was delightful, and put us right back to sleep.

But here comes the real treasure of the place: Underneath it all lay an underground network of more than 20 different Roman and Turkish spas.

There was every type of sauna, from 0% humidity to exactly 100%; there were saunas with burning tea leaves, with ice baths in the middle (that was my favorite; I could keep my legs freezing cold while the rest of my body sweated out a month’s worth of toxins); there were long stretches of scalding hot water that you had to walk through to reach an equally long stretch of ice water, which people paced between until their feet went numb; there were two long walls of shin-deep water, where you stand beneath waterfalls with so much pressure that it pulled my ponytail out of its band.

There were traditional hot tubs and high-powered jets (which were so violently strong that they turn off automatically after 30 seconds), there were showers that were so blisteringly hot that I accidentally screamed and Ryan had to quickly turn them off again; and there were stations for luxurious foot baths with all sorts of perfumed lotions.

The lower level of our hotel room, which had a private patio with plenty of bougainvilleas.

And can we talk about this bathtub/shower.

What I particularly loved about this entire resort was the requirement that guests wear provided bathrobes and slippers around the entire (sprawling, grassy, paradise-like) complex, even the café.

Ryan watched several episodes of House of Cards like this. My favorite part was when he lost his grip and dropped his phone on his face.

The only area where you were allowed to wear normal attire was the restaurant, which—after an entire afternoon of lounging, dozing, and spa-ing—we had dinner. 

Ryan and I recently flipped through our photos from this particular dinner, and can’t for the life of us remember most of what we ate that night.

There was an interesting dollop of some sort of whipped cream-like, savory substance with saffron, pickled something, and maybe some clover...

...and Ryan had some form of veal...

...and I know I had gnocchi in squid ink with piglet ragout (sorry, piglet), and for dessert Ryan had a dreamy tiramisu while I had fruit sorbets that had been frozen back into their original fruit coverings (like plum, apricot, and banana)—but when it comes to exact ingredients, we have no idea. We were in heaven, and it was the perfect birthday dinner.

I won’t go so far as to say we “roughed it” for even a day during our honeymoon—we were so incredibly thankful to enjoy some amazing hotels throughout our stay—but we agree that it was a stellar idea to spend our last night on our honeymoon in (by far) the nicest hotel of our stay. We slept beautifully, and woke up the next morning feeling refreshed for an entire day of flights from Fiumicino to Detroit and back to Raleigh, and another set from Raleigh to Tampa and on to Phoenix.