So the train to Budapest was delayed two hours sometime early in the morning. Lena and I slowly got ourselves ready in our tiny sleeping car and laid on our beds as we watched the Hungarian country-side slide by. We finally got off the train and made our way to the hostel. Budapest's architecture is a lot different from Prague's. There are many more tall buildings, not necessarily modern, but newer than Prague's classic old European look. Budapest is also a lot bigger than Prague and the streets are a lot wider. It is split by the river Danube into Buda and Obuda on the west bank and Pest on the east bank. The city was united many years ago, and we thought it was interesting that they used to be two cities.
The hostel was the best hostel we have ever stayed in. It was in one of Budapest's many tall buildings near the river and had its own kitchen! The room we stayed in had 9 or 10 beds in it, with three up in the loft. Lena and I were the only ones in the room for the first night, so we took two of the loft beds. We put our stuff down and decided to walk around. Budapest was still absolutely freezing, but was a better than Prague (at least I wasn't shivering the whole time).
Across the street from our hostel we found a nice shopping street and we sat down to eat breakfast. The money in Budapest is especially confusing because one U.S. Dollar is about 188 Hungarian Forint, so we were spending thousands of Forint, and that just seemed outrageous to us. We left the cafe and discovered a Christmas market in a square down the street a little! We looked around for a bit and decided we would come back the next night and do our shopping then. Next we walked across the Danube, via the Chain Bridge, to Buda. Buda is set on hills, so we took a journey up the hill to the top where Buda Castle (which used to be a castle, but is now just a museum) and Matthias Church are located. They both had amazing views of Pest to the east and to the west had amazing views of the rest of Buda (mostly homes). There was a little village on top of the hill, called the Castle District, and we walked around it for a while, enjoying the views.
After our journey to Buda, we decided to save money on food, since we had a kitchen, and we went to buy stuff for dinner for two nights and a little something for breakfast for the next two days. We went to a little mini grocery store and bought some pasta, cereal, yogurt, popcorn, water, and wine. It was the most inexpensive four meals for two anyone has ever bought (the wine was around a whopping 80 cents), and it was a little bit of a struggle to buy because way less people in Hungary speak English than we were used to in other countries. We finally got out of the store and made our way back to our hostel, where we cooked dinner and drank some wine. We had bought a tiny bottle of Absinth in Prague (come on, you know we had to) and decided to take a swig of it to see just how strong it was while we were in the safety of our hostel. Turns out, Absinth is extremely strong. After one swig each, we felt like we had had about 4 shots of normal liquor. I was sick, so I couldnt really taste or smell things, but I could feel the burning death of the Absinth. Needless to say, by the end of the trip we never finished the Absinth and I poured the rest of the devil drink down the drain.
The next day, we had our lovely breakfast in the kitchen and began our tour of Budapest. First we went to see Dohany Street Synagogue, the second largest synagogue in the world (the largest being in New York). From there we walked over to St. Stephen's Basilica, which is named after Stephen, the first King of Hungary, and whose mummified fist resides in the reliquary. The cathedral looks a lot like St. Paul's Cathedral in London and is beautiful.
Next, we headed to Hungarian Parliament, and on our way we found a square that had a memorial remembering the rule of Communism when the Soviets had control of Hungary, another statue of an American soldier who did something important for Hungary during a war, an old building which used to be the national bank and acted as a kind of stock exchange (I think), and the headquarters of one of Hungary's most prominent broadcasting stations. Parliament was absolutely beautiful, even more so than English Parliament. Across from Hungarian Parliament was the Ethnography Museum, so we went in to learn about Hungarian culture. We saw some beautiful clothing and artwork that are part of Hungary's history and decided that we needed to find some homemade cloth to buy and make into something.
We then headed up one of the main streets in Budapest where, conveniently, most of the attractions are located. We saw the Opera House, which is very ornate, with lots of statues decorating the building. We saw the Terror House, which is where the Soviet Secret Police took people to interrogate them. Once a person went in to be interrogated, they almost never came out, and the bulding is now a museum where people can see how these victims were treated and learn about the communist regime in Hungary. Lena really wanted to go in, but I knew if i went in I would be upset the whole day, so we didn't. Next came the Oktogon, a big octagonal shaped intersection where the buildings surrounding are full of nice stores. After the Oktogon, came the embassies. Down this end of the street, there were many, many embassies from various countries of the world. The tall buildings ended and beautiful, large suburban homes lined the street.
At the end of the street is Heroes Square, with a big monument in the middle. Next to the monument are the National Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, and behind it is City Park. City Park is home to an outdoor Hungarian Bath, which resembles a large man-made lake, but was of course drained since it was winter. Farther back in the park is Vajdahunyad Castle, which was built during the millennial exhibition in 1896 out of cardboard and wood, but was so popular that they re-built it with stone . Inside the castle grounds is the statue of Anonymous. The statue is of a hooded figure hunching over writing something, and no one really knows who this statue is. There is another bath farther back by the castle, and it is one of the many indoor baths open year round that uses the natural heat from thermal springs. We didn't go in it because it would have been much too cold to walk around with wet hair. These baths are part of the reason we want to come back to Budapest during the summer, when we can use the indoor and outdoor baths and walk around the large city without being frozen.
After all this we had a late lunch in a cafe and resumed our walking tour of Budapest. We walked around some cute street and just wandered for a while. Everything is beautiful in Budapest, so we were happy to just bide our time and enjoy the sights. After semi-aimlessly wandering for a while, we made our way back to the Christmas market near our hostel. There were so many awesome booths with homemade pottery, cloth, jewelry, food, and other trinkets. We got some delicious mulled wine to try and warm up as we did our Christmas shopping. I got a lot of stuff and we bought this delicious cinnamon bread that seemed to be a specialty of that region of Europe.
After cleaning out the Christmas market, we went back to the hostel and ate our dinner. By this time, all the beds in our room were filled and we had a full house. As we were watching the news (which conveniently was showing a special on Istanbul, our next stop) in the living room area after dinner, a young guy sat down and we started talking to him. He was an American from somewhere in the mid-west who was on break from his year abroad in a small town a few hours north of London. The peolpe who were running the hostel came to tell us that later there would be a wine and club soda party in the hostel lobby and we just hung out talking until it was time to go down there. The party consisted of two Hungarians who worked at the hostel, two Australians, us three Americans, and was joined for a short time by two Brazilians and a guy from, I think, Poland. It was a cool experience to be in the company of such a diverse group of people, so we hung out for a while talking, and once we were ready for bed we went upstairs, packed for our last stop on our trip and went to sleep.
The next morning we got up, made our way to the airport via a subway train and a bus, and got on our flight to Istanbul!
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