Days 18-22 Beautiful, Romantic, Historic Budapest

​It’s way too early!! We had to get up at 3:00 AM in order to catch a pre-arranged taxi at 4 AM to go to the train station to catch our 5 AM train. Pretty certain that we could buy coffee on the train so we didn’t buy any in the train station. We had some breakfast items with us, but no coffee. Guess what … we could not buy coffee on the train (because there wasn’t any) so it was a verrryyy long 9 hour train ride. 

The sunrise from the train was beautiful 

Someone was lucky enough to catch some Zzzzzzz’s 

We had really good seats until about 3/4 of the way through the journey when two not so nice guys decided to sit across and facing us. Unfortunately, they were headed to a concert in Budapest and were on their way to getting well oiled. They had a 1.5 litre soda bottle full of vodka and juice and a cooler full of beers. About 30 minutes into the ride they started playing music on their phone of the techno band they were going to see and started thumping their heads. They were playing it so loud and generally being obnoxious and annoying to all the other passengers. Bill was “sleeping” and Andrea was pretending to be preoccupied on her iPad to avoid eye contact. Eventually, the couple behind us started fighting with them and they got into a verbal altercation. Other people on the train also asked them to turn down the music. That just made them get drunker and louder. When we arrived to our final stop, which was the end of the line, we all got got up to leave and there was a rather large suitcase stuffed between two seats (a storage place for heavy bags). The dirtbags saw it and asked in broken English if the bag belonged to anybody and no one claimed it so they said they would take it to the office. What they REALLY did was take it outside,  rip the ID tag off and started going through it. We tried to get as far away from them as possible. Later on when we were trying to figure out where the UBER meeting point was we saw a young couple frantically trying to explain to the train porter that their bag was missing. Andrea walked up and asked them if they were on train #251 and they were and she showed us a picture of their bag and we recognized it and told them that the two guys said they were taking it to the office but apparently it never made it there.  We  felt so sorry for this couple. They were on holiday and it was all their clothes. Not sure whatever happened to those two guys but there are cameras on the train so hopefully they found them and the couple got back their "lost luggage". 

After a quick “Bolt” taxi ride (we used Bolt on the advice of a local who said  taxi drivers would take you all over the city to up the fare) to our hotel and finally had coffee at 2:30 in the afternoon. We headed out to do a quick tour of the city and eat dinner at a  lively German brewery. Andrea was so excited to get German food but it was more of a tourist trap than anything else except the bachelor and bachelorette parties frequenting there made it quite amusing. Check out this guys drawers and the massive yard of beer. 

 

A yard of beer! 

The next day, Sunday, we headed out to tour the city. Budapest is a typical beautiful European capitol city. At first glance, it’s comparable to any other capitol city… Paris… Milan… etc. But, when you peel back the layers of the onion, you begin to get the real unique feel of this extraordinary place. 

The Danube River splits Budapest down the middle and it is not by chance. At one time the city was actually two cities, Buda, and Pest. The story goes that it combined because of a son and his ailing father. Back then, the only way to navigate between cities was by boat and one day the boat was not working, so the son could not reach his ailing father. Being an engineer, he proposed a bridge to connect the two cities and from there the idea morphed into combining Buda and Pest to be one. The city still retains a bit of individual flavor for each side. Buda is on a hill with the ancient castle and all of the trimmings. Pest is more of the commercial district with trolleys, shade trees, and the real European feel.

Our first stop for the day was the Buda castle.  World War II resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Buda side. The German Nazis occupied the castle buildings and structures, and as the allies closed in they literally bombed the place to oblivion to force the surrender of the Nazis. Unfortunate … but necessary to defeat Hitler. Even now the reconstruction of the extensive castle grounds continues from pictures and other architectural drawings of the way it was prior to the war.  It had a very informative museum that we enjoyed touring and there was the most famous room, St. Stephen Hall,  in which  renovations were completed in 2021.  We walked around the castle grounds and saw a magnificent views of the city. 

Statue of a noble man, but to the right is the tombstone of a deceased knight, found in the church we will later tour 

The following pictures are of St. Stephen’s hall. St. Stephen, later King Stephen, is the founder of the Christian state of Hungary. After he was buried his grave was opened and his right arm was detached and preserved. For a long time it was held in the Buda Castle where they built a chapel to house it. Every August 20th it is ceremonially carried in a procession around town for a celebration appropriately named “St. Stephen’s Day” 

The castle plaza 

Replica of the Crown Jewels, the original is in Parliment and heavily guarded 

Full dress of a Hungarian Knight and Hungarian woman’s habiliment aka dress. 

Matyas Fountain outside the castle depicting the Kimg of Hungary and his hunting party. 

Touring of the castle grounds and great photo stop over looking the Danube

We headed back up the hill and toured the Matthias Church. Read the history of the church here.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Church?wprov=sfti1# 

These are replicas of the tiles used for the roof. 

These are the main doors, guarded by two angels. 

After the church, we  toured the Hospital in the Rock. This was originally a cave that was transformed into a makeshift hospital during World War ll and then during the cold war was retrofitted to be a nuclear bomb shelter with all the decontamination apparatus. While it was very interesting they spent a lot of time talking about the Hiroshima bombing and how the hospital was a makeshift bomb shelter and dove deep into the destruction of Hiroshima and the virtues of never again having an atomic attack. A strange place to get cranked off on that particular commentary but nevertheless worth the tour. 

Only pic we got, the entrance,  no photos allowed inside 

There are water fountains everywhere to fill up your water bottles. Clean and cold! 

Enjoyed a cocktail in our hotel‘s spectacular rooftop bar before dinner and called it an early night. Loving Budapest! 

Magnificent Matthias Church 

Day two, Monday,  in Budapest started out with a trip back to the castle to watch the changing of the guards. 💂.

We particularly enjoyed all the foreign tourists crowding  to get video and pictures as evidenced by this video, listen closely and you’ll hear Andrea scolding them in the beginning of the video. 

We set our sites on the House of Terror museum after a quick walk across the famous chain bridge. The chain bridge is the oldest bridge in Budapest and was first built to connect the Buda and the Pest side. It was completely destroyed in WWII. 

 As luck would have it, the terror museum was closed on Monday so we quickly made our way to Parliament and bought tickets for a tour later that day. The transportation system here is so easy to navigate.  You can take the tram or a bus or the metro all with one railcar.  Bill’s age allows him to ride for free. We went to the Central Market where souvenir stalls outnumber everything else but still enjoyable and after that we hit the Hard Rock Cafe for the obligatory pin (#70!) and beer. 

Finding a toilet or WC is not too difficult, coming up with the money to pay for it is a challenge. Some are vending machine style others have attendants. Bill was particularly amused that one of the attendants wrote him a receipt for using the toilet. 

Pin#70

The central market has lots of paparika stalls, its a very popular spice in Hungary and is used in all the goulashes. 

Lots of meats to choose from 

Spices, even paprika in paste form

Andrea loves goose liver pate. 

Candy

Next, we headed down to Parliament for our 5pm tour. The tour of the Parliament building was a shining example of the Hungarian people’s intent to showcase their country with an absolutely spectacular Parliament building honoring their history and all of its many struggles and leaders. As with other eastern European cities, Hungary has had a rough go over the years politically and the last century or so has been no exception. The revolution against communism occurred in 1956 after the failed experiment. It’s really incredible that so many of the beautiful statues of landmarks were removed or destroyed by the communist in an attempt to erase any prior piece of history. Sounds a little familiar for us Americans, huh?! The tour of Parliament is a must see! 

One of the many protective gargoyles 

Main corridor 

The grand staircase, only members of parliament are allowed access to  these stairs. 

View of the Danube from Parliament

These cigar holders are all thru the hallways to be used while parliament is in session. 

The Chamber of Peers where the Hungarian National 
Assembly meets to debate and cast votes. 

The door with the maroon curtain is where the stenographers enter and exit from. 
Since there is so much happening they must switch out about every 9 minutes. 

Hall where statues depict every type of worker in Hungary

We ate at a local Hungarian goulash house and headed back to the hotel to get our laundry organized for the next days much needed laundry day. Yippee!!

Laundry day was just that: laundry day. Rode the bus to the laundromat, suffered a very long power outage, brought back mostly dry clothes, and had a relaxing rest of our day. Since it was our last evening in Budapest, we strolled the streets after dark to experience Budapest at night. They really go all out to  light the buildings along the Danube River after dark and it made a magical scene and memory.

After reorganizing our laundry Andrea took a quick walk around our hotel area and captured some interesting photos 

Secrets passage ways

Church doors that are guarded by the two angels (see previous photo) 

 taken from the outside 

Cool house on one of the side streets 

Budapest at night:

Matthias Church

Up top  the Fishermans Bastion with parliament in the background

One other comment… Our accommodations here were outstanding. We stayed at the Hilton Budapest in the Castle District. We were a little bit leery when we booked this last summer of this being an American chain in a foreign country. Turned out it was simply outstanding. Impeccable service. The properties were beautiful and our room in particular was five star. The rates were very reasonable we thought and it was very, very convenient to the sites on the Buda side as well as the bus stop to get over to the Pest side. Obviously then, we highly 

recommend this hotel.

Our last day in Budapest was spent finally touring the House of Terror Museum. This museum is essentially a chronicle of the different reigns of terror that have been used on the Hungarian people by the German Nazis and then after the war, the Soviet communists on their perceived enemies and bad people … all in an attempt to indoctrinate the country. Very sad. We were not too impressed by the museum primarily because it was all in Hungarian and all the exhibits were labeled likewise. Also, either we did the thing backwards or it was laid out in reverse. The worse thing though was the reign of terror that came down on us by the employees. Very rude, unhelpful and abrupt. When Bill accidentally touched an exhibit we thought the execution squad was going to take us out. It’s all an important message, but read a goggle article about that period and save two hours and $25. Also, no pics allowed! 

We managed to fit in Bill getting  his first haircut of the trip ($16+tip) and finally got a real haircut from a real barber. We ate a late lunch/early dinner at the oldest restaurant in the Pest side of Budapest (on the recommendation of a good friend who used to live here) for our last great meal in this most fascinating and beautiful city. Leaving on the 7:10 PM overnight sleeper train for the third and final part of our Balkans tour: Bucharest and Transylvania , Romania.