I think my mom wanted to go to church in Budapest, but I was the devil on her shoulder that said that we didn't have much time in Budapest and I didn't want to waste it by going to church. Now that I've written that out and read it back to myself, I really do sound evil.
Anyway, the only thing we had scheduled for Sunday was a boat cruise up the Danube in the afternoon. We didn't have anything scheduled for the morning so we just started walking. We walked down through Vaci Utca, which is the fancy shopping street just a couple of blocks away from our hotel. From Vaci Utca, we walked down parallel to the Danube and then decided that we should walk across the Szechenyi Ianchid (otherwise known as the Chain Bridge) like everyone else was doing. I really wasn't sold on crossing the river to walk around the Buda side of Budapest because when I planned the trip, I was thinking it was going to be a transportation nightmare, but I'm glad we got to walk around there.
This is the view from our hotel, looking down the street toward the river:
You can see the Elisabeth Bridge, too:
This is part of Vaci Utca, the main shopping street:
Look! It's another statue!
This is the view of Buda from Pest. The large building is the Royal Palace.
The tall spire in the distance is Matthias Church, and the smaller pointy cones are the Fisherman's Bastion in front of it.
And this is Gellert Hill, which is just on the other side of Elisabeth Bridge (we didn't go here, but it has more statues on it and some baths).
This is the main bridge, Szchenyi Bridge, that connects Pest with Buda, specifically Castle Hill.
Before you get on the bridge, there's a small park. Don't ask me what this building is or who these statues are of. Why in the world did I take so many pictures of statues?
Look at these lovely ladies at the beginning of Szchenyi Bridge!
This is looking down the river. Gellert Hill is on the right, and in the middle of the picture is Elisabeth Bridge.
Side note: Budapest is separated into Buda and Pest. If you're looking north up the river, Buda is on the left side, and Pest is on the right. They're still all considered one city, but I think the name thing is a historical thing.
Anyway, Buda is home to Castle Hill. The popular thing to do is to take the funicular up the hill, but me being cheap and seeing that there were stairs up to the top, decided I should further torture my mom on this trip by making her climb the steps with me. She wanted to stay down at the bottom, thinking that I would only be on the hill for a short while, but I convinced her to come with me.
Another side note: I made my mom do a lot of stuff on this trip. When our family travels (as in, me, Brian, and the kids), we pack our days full of things. We figure if it's the only time we're going to travel to this place, we might as well go-go-go the whole time we're there so we can see everything. My mom does not travel that same way. I will admit that I was a little self-serving and I think I nearly pushed my mom to the brink with my travel enthusiasm. I also made her walk nearly everywhere, though a good deal of our walking through Vienna was mis-steps in my map reading. The bad news is that my mom might have not been too thrilled with me a lot of the time, but the good news is that we walked off a lot of those desserts and pastries we ate, right?
Back to the story...
We walked up the stairs and used Rick Steves' guidebook to take a little tour around Castle Hill. First, we came to the offices of the President of Hungary.
Then, we came upon the Turul bird. From Rick Steves': "This mythical bird...led the Hungarian migrations from the steppes of Central Asia in the ninth century." As you can see, the view from the Turul bird statue of Pest was pretty cool.
The building in the distance with the red dome is the Parliament building.
This is Szchenyi Bridge with St. Istvan's Basilica in the distance.
This is looking further down the river:
Next, we walked around the Royal Palace. One thing you learn from history in Europe is that a lot of things have been rebuilt due to the wars that have happened there. The Royal Palace is no exception. Rick Steves' says it's a historically inaccurate version that was rebuilt after WWII. Historically inaccurate or not, it was a grand building that had a top spot on Castle Hill. It houses a couple of museums now that we didn't go in to.
The guy on the horse in front of the Royal Palace is Eugene of Savoy, who helped the Hungarians defeat the Ottomans.
Just around the corner is another statue of King Matthias hunting. King Matthias must have been a well-liked man because his name is mentioned all over Budapest, including the large cathedral you'll see a little bit later.
Next, we walked into the palace courtyard. Not much going on there. We walked around the palace, too, and saw a little bit of the palace gardens.
Don't ask me who this guy is.
I only know who this guy is because you can read his name at the bottom. He's Gorgey Artur. He was apparently a Hungarian military guy during the mid-1800s (thanks, Wikipedia, for that information).
This is the view down the street of Matthias Church. We got there right at noon and heard the beautiful bells playing. The church looks spectacular, but once again, it's be rebuilt several times in its 800-year history.
Right behind Matthias Church is Fisherman's Bastion which offered great views of Pest, this lovely statue of St. Istvan, and this medieval guy with his falcon. Don't ask me.
Once again, I made my mom walk down lots of stairs to get down to the bottom of Castle Hill and back over the river. She's such a trooper.
I stopped along the Szchenyi Bridge on the way back over to Pest to take this picture of Castle Hill. The tallest spire there is Matthias Church.
Look! It's another statue!
On the way to check out St. Istvan's Basilica, we decided to stop for some ice cream at a little stand on the street. They had yummy flavors and the prices were decent - only $1.10 for a cone. We found out why the prices were so decent when the lady started scooping our cones. She started out with a normal scoop, and then she completely leveled it off to put it on the cone. It was the smallest scoop of ice cream I've ever had. The lady was so meticulous about leveling off the scoop it bordered on perfectionist status. Now, if you know anything about my mom's side of the family, you know that they're pretty generous with their dessert portions, especially ice cream. There's a large serving of dessert, and then there's the Hamnett size. A Hamnett size of ice cream is generally a good 4 scoops, so here my mom and I are, with our itty bitty ice cream cones wondering what just happened. We just sat there and stared at them. It took us all of 2 seconds to eat them.
Anyway, this was the view of St. Istvan's Basilica from where we ate our ice cream cones.
On the way to the Basilica, we stopped to take a picture by this guy. He's dressed as an old-school Hungarian police officer.
This is St. Istvan's Basilica up close. We decided not to go in because we'd already seen many a church on our trip already.
This is the Opera House on Andrassy Ut. Rick Steves recommends going on a tour there, but seeing as how we saw an opera in a pretty cool opera house already, we decided to keep on walking.
I did want to go on a tour of the Great Synagogue because it's the largest synagogue in Hungary and the third largest synagogue in the world (and I've never been in a synagogue so I was curious). As you can see by these pictures and from what we learned from our tour guide, this is not your typical synagogue. Its style is very much like a Christian church with the pulpits and the organ. Our guide told us that they practice their own form of Judaism there called Neolog Judaism, which most closely resembles Conservative Judaism.
Behind the big blue curtain is where they keep the Torah scrolls that they read during services. We learned that there are 100,000 Jews in Hungary. This particular synagogue has a regular Shabbat attendance of just 100 people(!) Their numbers are so low that in the winter that instead of heating the large synagogue for those 100 people, they use a neighboring smaller synagogue. During their two high holy days, their numbers swell to 4,000 people. I guess I was naive in thinking that Jews were more devout in their religion than that. Maybe he was just speaking of ethnic Jews when saying how many there were in Hungary.
After giving us a tour of the synagogue, we went out back and saw a couple of statues they have in their garden. This particular plaque on the ground honors those non-Jews who aided the Jews in Hungary during WWII, including a couple who set up an underground orphanage system to save the children.
This is the Tree of Life, shaped like an upside-down menorah. It has 4,000 leaves on the tree, each etched with the name of someone who died in the Holocaust.
This stained-glass panel is fairly new and was designed by a woman who is over 90 years old. It has fire on it, symbolizing the Holocaust, and a large snake, symbolizing fascism.
In the center courtyard of the synagogue is this small cemetery, which is a mass grave of nearly 3,000 people who died while living in the Jewish ghetto in Budapest during 1944-1945. They died of disease, hunger, and exposure. You can see that they have added headstones of those who they know are buried hear, but it's nowhere near the nearly 3,000 that are buried here.
After our tour of the synagogue, we walked back to the hotel to rest for a short 45 minutes before catching the boat for our Danube cruise. We booked our cruise with Legenda cruises, and it was a very nice little cruise. It was in a half-open boat so we could get good views out the side. They gave us a drink while we listened commentary on headphones about Budapest. It took about 30 minutes to go south on the river for a bit, turn around and head north again to Margaret Island. We chose the cruise where we got to stop off at Margaret Island for an hour to walk around.
We went up the Danube a little bit before turning around and looping around, then coming back up to Margaret Island. This is going up river, and that's the Szchenyi Bridge.
This is Buda, with the Royal Palace at the top:
These next pictures are of Gellert Hill. We didn't walk there when we went over to Buda, so I'm not sure what everything is.
That's the cave church carved out of the side of the hill, and bigger building to the side is the Gellert Baths.
This is after we started heading north up the Danube again. This is Pest, and the next picture is Elisabeth Bridge.
That's Buda on our left, and a view from the boat of the Szchenyi Bridge.
This is the Parliament building. It's made of limestone, and because limestone is a weak stone, there is always scaffolding on some part of the building where they are doing repairs. It's a spectacular-looking building, and one we meant to tour but never got around to. We got great views of it not only from Castle Hill but also from the boat.
That's Margaret Bridge with Margaret Island behind it.
This was our first view of Margaret Island. It doesn't look all that great from a boat. It just looks like a cement island covered in trees. (It's not cement - it's real, but it is anchored to the two bridges so it doesn't float downstream.)
That's Margaret Island to the left.
Margaret Island is an island in the middle of the Danube that is connected to Budapest by two bridges, but no cars are allowed there, only city buses. It's essentially a large park and was pretty busy on Sunday afternoon while we were there. We walked around and saw the koi pond, Japanese gardens, the water tower, and the remains of the nunnery where Margaret, whom the island was named after, was a nun.
That's the water tower behind my mom, who's making a weird model face:
The ruins of the convent:
We also saw this small little church on the way back to the boat.
Here's a few pictures of Budapest by twilight. This is Margaret Island as we were leaving:
The Parliament, again:
And Buda, on the right:
By the time we got back to the boat, it was nearly 6:30. It was getting dark so we got to see the city in twilight, and it really is pretty, especially seeing the Szchenyi Bridge covered in lights. We were back to shore by 7, and we walked back along Vaci Utca in search of a restaurant to eat dinner at. We found this restaurant on one of the street corners there and had a meal of gnocchi (my mom) and authentic Hungarian goulash (me). We were treated to some very awful clarinet(?) music by a guy who was trying to make money on the square. He brought his boombox with him to accompany him. He played mostly 80s music, and as we were finishing dinner, we noticed he was playing a Christmas song and we wondered if he knew he was playing Christmas music in September.
Sidenote: I loved the cafe culture in Europe. There are a lot of sidewalk cafes there, and most every restaurant had outdoor seating. People love to just sit and have coffee and a pastry and chat. To Americans, their service might seem pretty substandard. When you walk into the sidewalk cafe, you generally seat yourself. The waiter takes your order fairly quickly, but doesn't really visit you at all during your meal. They just leave you sitting there...and sitting there... You have to be proactive in flagging them down to get your bill. When you sit down at a restaurant there, don't expect it to be an in-and-out experience. They don't try to hurry you out to make room for other patrons.
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