Hungary

Hungary is the odd one out in Central Europe. While its neighbors speak Slavic or Germanic languages, Hungarian (Magyar) is a Finno-Ugric language with almost no useful similarities to anything nearby - it's closer to Finnish and Estonian, though even those connections are pretty distant. The Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century from the Ural region and have been stubbornly doing things their own way ever since.

Budapest is the showpiece - a city that's actually two cities (Buda and Pest) split by the Danube and connected by spectacular bridges. The Parliament building looks like it was designed to make every other parliament feel inadequate. There are more thermal baths here than in any other capital city in the world, and the ruin bar scene in the old Jewish Quarter turned abandoned buildings into some of Europe's coolest nightlife spots. Outside Budapest, the Great Hungarian Plain stretches out flat and endless, Lake Balaton is Central Europe's largest lake, and the cuisine is built on paprika, sour cream, and pork in quantities that would terrify a cardiologist.