Monday was our designated shopping day. Even though we didn't go to church on Sunday (oh, the shame!), we didn't buy any souvenirs. We tried to be on our best behavior!
Our hotel was very close to the main tourist/expensive shopping area (Vaci Utca), but I'd read about this place called "The Great Market Hall" ("Nagycsarnok", for those of you that speak Hungarian) that was supposedly a 3-story indoor farmer's market and souvenir place. We started our day with our typical breakfast buffet and were out the door by 9 a.m.
Side note: I don't really like doughnuts. 4 years of doughnuts every Friday in seminary basically killed my desire for them. But, our hotel had these chocolate-covered doughnuts staring at me from the buffet, so I had to try one. Oh my, so much better than American doughnuts! They were like a cross between a regular doughnut and a cake doughnut and not so sweet. On the other hand, I decided to try some Kefir. That stuff tasted like sour cream gone bad. The other oddity on the buffet was peas with bacon in them. For breakfast. Who eats peas for breakfast?
Anyway, Rick Steve's map to The Great Market Hall was wrong, so we wandered a few streets before asking some nice lady store owners where to go. (BTW, halfway through our trip I started forgetting Rick Steve's name and started calling him Steve Jobs. So, if you see me reference Steve Jobs, know that I'm talking about Rick Steves, and not Brian's idol.) We finally made it to the Hall and it was my dream come true. We weren't even there for the produce, but it was all lined up so prettily and it looked so good. Beautiful yellow pears, light yellow peppers, huge Anaheim chilies, rows and rows of brown eggs... If I lived in Budapest, I would be there all the time. Even though there were meat stalls interspersed with the produce, it didn't smell bad (although there was some nasty looking meat going on - lots of internal organs of various animals).
Alas, we were there for the souvenirs, not food. We went up to the third floor and walked around the entire thing looking at everything. Hungarians are very good at hand-painting and embroidering. They had beautiful handkerchiefs, table runners, table cloths, and shirt embroidered with flowers. They had wooden (and real!) eggs painted with flowers. Oh, and did we shop! We got out of there 3 hours later and went back to our hotel for a bit and to put our things away.
I couldn't convince my mom to go to either Memento Park or to a bath house. Memento Park is a collection of statues from the Communist area, but it's a bit out of town and the trip would have taken a good chunk of our day, so we decided not to go. On the other hand, we had plenty of time to take in the baths, but my mom was too self-conscious. $10 says there were plenty of old men in Speedos at the baths that would have put her to shame, but it is what it is. I'll just have to go back to Budapest sometime...
In the afternoon, we wandered down Vaci Utca and then decided to board the orange line (M1) to Heroes' Square. We got off the subway at Hosok Tere just in time to see the end of some sort of ceremony with a South Korean dignitary. We didn't ever figure out what the deal was, but there was a police escort of 3 black cars with South Korean flags, and there were members of the Hungarian military lined up in front of the largest statue in the square.
Have I mentioned that Hungarians love their statues? Everywhere you turn, there's a statue of somebody or something. They even have a statue of George Washington!
Anyway, since it was getting quite warm (25 degrees Celsius), we sat in the shade of the largest statue and read Rick Steves' commentary about all of the statues. It turns out Hungary has been pretty crapped on for a long time. The Ottomans, the Nazis, the Communists... Things have not gone well for them in history. It was all pretty interesting.
After reading about the statues, we decided to walk around City Park (Varosliget). You can see Vajdahunyad Castle from Heroes' Square. It was built for the 1896 Millennial National Celebration from temporary building materials, but the Hungarians loved it so much they rebuilt it to last. Inside the gates is a Renaissance castle that's built to look like a famous castle in Transylvania. On the left side is a Benedictine chapel, and further down on the right is the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture (which I'm sure is fascinating, but something we skipped out on!) We also saw a monument (yes, another statue) to Anonymous. Did you know that Anonymous is a real person? You learn something new everyday! Anonymous was a member of King Bela IV's court who wrote the first Hungarian history in the middle ages.
The little lake across the street from the castle. You can see it's a popular place to be, even on a Monday afternoon.
This is the Benedictine chapel:
Up close of the castle, including the little sign outside that advertises the "Anonymous Restaurant".
We walked out of the castle complex and saw the Szechenyi Baths across the street. They looked nice from the outside, but I just had to imagine what they looked like on the inside because it was still a no-go from my mom.
We were about to board the subway again to go back in to town when an emergency struck. I went a whole 11 days without paying to use a toilet, but when you gotta go, you gotta go. I paid 100 forint (50 cents) to use the bathroom, and it was money well spent. It was actually one of the nicest public restrooms I've been to. There was a seating area with a flat-screen TV, and the stalls were nice and clean. It was pretty weird having to insert money into the turnstile so I could get in, though.
Here's a view of the subway coming in. No joke, the subway cars looked like a throwback from the Communist area. Definitely not sleek and modern.
We made it back to town and back to our hotel, where we sat and thought about what we wanted to do for the rest of the evening. We ended up going back out to a little sandwich shop for dinner. I had the grilled cheese sandwich, which had at least 3 types of cheese on it that I couldn't identify if I tried. We only saw orange cheese once on our trip. Every cheese was white, so who knows what it was that I ate.
We got back to our hotel room again and started packing to go home when I decided we needed to go back out again one last time for desserts. I had seen this bakery on Sunday that had several kinds of cake in it, and I wanted to try some. Luckily my mom was in the mood, so off we went. It wouldn't do to just try 1 piece of cake - we got 4 pieces of cake to share! I don't even know what they were, and the ladies at the shop didn't speak English, so we couldn't ask if any of them had alcohol in them (Rum is a popular thing to put in to cakes). See that brown round cake? We each took a bite and declared that it had to have alcohol in it because it just didn't taste right. It tasted like a really strong butterscotch disc. The prices were very decent at the bakery - 4 types of cake for 895 forint (less than $4.25).
It was late by the time we finished eating our cake and watching another German/Austrian version of the X-Factor/America's Got Talent (really, we got hooked on those shows on our trip. We didn't get many English-speaking stations, so we had to watch something we could kind of understand, and that was talent shows). I went to bed at 9:30 in preparation for a long day of flying.
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