With Kids - Budapest - page 49

NEED TO KNOW
An ever-growing number of hotels in Budapest offer babysitting services, but try to
book at least six hours beforehand.
Most car-rental firms have children's safety seats for hire at a nominal cost, but book
them in advance.
High chairs and cots (cribs) are standard equipment in many restaurants and hotels,
but numbers can be limited; request them when booking.
Come Rain or Shine
Raining cats and dogs? Our select committee of under-10s chose the relocated Palace of
Wonders , the Széchenyi Baths and the Hungarian Natural History Museum as their favourite
wet-weather venues.
Too hot to trot (or do much else)? They tell us to head for the playground on Margaret Is-
land, the nearby Palatinus Strand or the cool underground corridors of the Buda Castle
Labyrinth .
Hands-on Learning
The Hungarian Natural History Museum has a lot of hands-on activities on offer, including a
stunning Dinosaur Garden and a new interactive exhibit on Hungary's natural world called
the Variety of Life. The Palace of Wonders was custom made for hands-on learning, and the
Transportation Museum also has a lot of show-and-tell explanations from enthusiastic at-
tendants. The granddaddy of museums for kids, though, is the Hungarian Railway History
Park , with vintage locomotives to clamber about, and carriages and trains to 'drive' via a
high-tech simulator. It closes in winter, though.
Culture
Not many museums here or anywhere are suitable for the very young, but the Museum of
Fine Arts has an excellent program in which kids are allowed to handle original Egyptian
artefacts and create their own master works of art. The Hungarian Agricultural Museum has
all kinds of stuffed animals (for real) and mock-ups of traditional ways of life like hunting
and fishing. The Vasarely Museum might be adult themed, but the wacky art - which seems