Anyway, 6:15 am arrived on Thursday and we piled into an OK Taxi for the ride to the airport. We landed in Vienna and then got on another plane to Budapest. Once it Budapest, we navigated public transit to downtown. The transit system is nice. However, it is also super annoying. You have to have exact change, in change, to buy a ticket. ATM’s give you giant bills that you can’t use to buy tickets. We had to stop in a shopping mall and buy bread in order to get change to buy tickets. Eventually we did make it and the Happy Flat owner showed us our happy flat for the weekend. It was nice and very large. We then made our first trip to Iguanas, the Mexican restaurant.
If you live in the US and you like Mexican food, you won’t realize how much you miss it and want it until you can’t have it. Sofia has no Mexican. None. The one semi-Mexican restaurant in the entire city just closed, so we are without. Therefore, we were really excited.
After gorging ourselves on chips, salsa, enchiladas and such, we made a reservation for dinner the next evening before heading out to explore the city a little bit. We saw the parliament building and the chain bridge. We then finally figured out how to make it to the Shoe Memorial. From 1944-1945, the Arrow Cross Party would take Jews to the banks of the Danube, make them take off their shoes and then shoot them into the river. The memorial has several pairs of shoes made of iron that are made to look like shoes from that period.
We then headed to the shopping district. After some shopping we, headed back to the apartment and got ready to go to dinner. At some point I mentioned that Budapest was the city where Katy Perry’s “Firework” video was shot. Hence, we made sure to watch the video when we got back to the apartment. It is sort of an odd video since fireworks shoot out of people’s hearts, however, it does not look like they are coming from her heart. Anyway… That night we found a nice restaurant for dinner where I had pumpkin stuffed pasta.
The next day, we got up and went to take a tour of parliament. The Hungarian parliament building is the third largest in the world; however, you wouldn’t know it from how much they show you on the tour. The inside was beautiful. The dome was amazing and the wing that we got to see was really nice. We also met a nice girl that was studying abroad from Tulane.
After the parliament, we walked across the Chain Bridge to the Buda side. We took the funicular up to the top of the hill to Buda Castle. It is now a series of museums. We didn’t go to the museums, but we did find the square where “Firework” was shot and we did some reenactments. Then S got a brief archery lesson from a guy with “gorgeous blue eyes” (she was, of course, really only interested in archery) before moving on to St. Mathias Church and the Fishermen’s Bastion.
St. Mathias is a large church with an amazing tiled roof. We asked about going in, but it is being restored, so a lot of it was closed, so we moved on to the Bastion. The Bastion was built between 1895 and 1902 and was named because fishermen used to be in charge of guarding that stretch of wall during the Middle Ages. It is straight out of Disney. Turrets, white stone, and great views. We then walked out down the hill, past a brick synagogue, and down the river to take a picture of parliament from across the river. We then walked back across the Chain Bridge to Pest and headed to the Great Market.
The Great Market is a huge indoor market where you can buy a lot of food. It was mostly meat, but we got some great strawberries and one stand sold really great dried fruit. Upstairs, there were stands selling Hungarian souvenirs. I bought a blue hand-painted egg that is traditionally hung on a tree for Easter. We then started walking back towards the apartment. We walked past the Dohany Street Synagogue. Since it was Friday, it was closed, but we looked at the outside and into the courtyard. We made it back to the apartment and got ready to go eat Mexican food… again.
We left a little early to go take pictures of the Chain Bridge and Castle Hill at night. They were really beautiful. We then went and ate chips, salsa, quesadillas and jalapeño poppers. It was delicious.
The next day, we visited St. Stephens Basilica. It was named in honor of the first king of Hungary (King Stephen, obviously ) and you can see his mummified hand in the back chapel. However, it cost 200 Forint to turn the light on. I only had 100, so I couldn’t really see it. However, the inside of the church was beautiful. The dome is 96m tall, the same as the parliament building dome. The 96m refers back to the fact that Hungary was established 896 AD. It took 54 years to build and was completed in 1905. The inside has a lot of gold and is pretty bright, due to the many windows around the dome.
We then began to walk down Andrassy Avenue towards Heroes’ Square. Our route took us past the Opera House and the House of Terror Museum (which I went to later that day) and through some really nice neighborhoods. Heroes’ Square is dominated by the Millennium Memorial, which depicts the leaders of the seven tribes that founded Hungary. It was supposed to be done in time for the 1000th anniversary in 1896, but didn’t finish until 1900. There were also some rulers from the Hapsburgs present on the sides, since Hungary was part of the Austrian Empire when it was built. However, the square was damaged in WWII and when it was repaired, the Hapsburgs were replaced.
From the square, we crossed into the City Park. It is a very large and nice park that contains Vajdahunyad Castle. It was originally built from wood in 1896 and was meant to display different architectural styles (romantic, gothic, renaissance, and baroque) that were present in Hungary for the millennial exhibition. However, since it was so popular, it was rebuilt from stone and brick and became a permanent addition to the park. Most of it is an Agricultural Museum (which we didn’t go through), but we did go into the Church of Jak. The church was originally just for display, but was eventually made into an official Catholic church.
From the Castle, we walked around the park a little more and saw the Széchenyi Medicinal Bath. It is fed by 2 thermal springs, and while I didn’t go (since spa-type activities are not really my thing), my travel companions really liked it. After perusing the park, we went to the Museum of Fine Arts, which is right by Heroes’ Square.
I went to a special exhibit on mummies. They used 3D imaging to reconstruct their faces and determine cause of death. It was actually really interesting. I also made it through most of the upstairs galleries. I really liked the painting of the Centaur at the Village Blacksmith’s Shop (http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/arnold-b-cklin/centaur-at-the-village-blacksmith-s-shop-1888) and I definitely saw some paintings worthy of the Ugly Renaissance Babies website. For example, did you know baby Jesus had a six-pack? Or that he was really hairy?
After the museum, my friends went to the baths and I went to the House of Terror Museum. It was really busy, since I was going on the 10th anniversary of its opening and admission was free. It was also really well done. It focuses on the history of fascism and communism in Hungary in the 20th century and is a memorial to the victims of the regimes. The building was used by the Nazis and Soviets as a prison and police headquarters.
The museum is interactive and well thought out, but most of it is in Hungarian, so you have to grab the typed info sheet at the entrance to each room. The Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, only 1 year before their defeat, though the Arrow Cross party was present in Hungary before that. However, once the Nazi’s got there, they wasted no time. 440,000 Jews were deported in only 3 months, most of them to Auschwitz.
Most of the museum focuses on the 40 years of communist rule. The museum has interviews with people imprisoned in Gulag camps talking about the horrible conditions they endured there. 5000 people from Budapest alone were taken to these camps. In the basement of the museum, you can see the prison cells where the AVH (the Hungarian version of the KGB) held and tortured “criminals.” The cells are tiny. They didn’t have beds and I only saw one with a toilet. I even saw one cell that was about 2 feet wide and 1 foot deep. The museum has pictures of people that were held in each cell hung up, so you can see who was kept there. It was really horrible.
After finishing at the House of Terror, I walked back towards the city centre. I decided to go across the Chain Bridge and down the Danube so I could take a picture of Paliament at Night. It was worth the long walk. The building is beautiful. On my way back, I wiped out on a pipe barrier that had fallen over (that I clearly didn’t notice) and got a large bruise on my let and some weird looks from the 50 or so people that witnessed my clumsy moment. After recovering, I went to the shopping street for a little while since my friends still weren’t back from the Baths.
That night we went and got Thai food before going to check out the original ruin pub. Ruin pubs are placed in buildings that are falling apart and condemned. The owners get them up to code, but don’t redo the walls or anything like that, which leads to a really interesting atmosphere. It was very cool. We went to a couple of other pubs in the area as well, but these were smoky, so I was done.
The next morning, I got up early to walk to the Holocaust Memorial Centre. It is definitely not close to any other museums, but it was worth the walk. Once again, it was very interactive and well-done. They even had 4 or 5 families that you could follow throughout the museum to see if they survived or not. I think 4 were Jewish and 1 was a Roma family. You could watch interviews from survivors as well. They interviewed 3 Roma women about their time in Auschwitz. It was incredible. Since they weren’t Jewish, they weren’t immediately killed. However, they had to help move bodies and dispose of them. 1/10th of the Jewish victims in the Holocaust were Hungarian, which considering that Hungary is not a very large country is pretty horrifying. I also learned that the Birkenau revolt was largely led by Hungarian Jews. The museum was really good, but also really sad.
On my way back up towards the apartment, I went to the Dohany Street Synagogue. It is the largest Synagogue in Europe and the inside is rose-colored with blues and gold with nice dark-wood balconies. The courtyard outside, is where over 2,000 people that died in the Jewish Ghetto in WWII are buried. Normally, cemeteries are not allowed to be on the premises of synagogues, but this was an extraordinary circumstance. The complex also has a couple of small museums and a really great memorial tree that looks like a weeping willow made out of metal.
After the synagogue, I just walked around and saw more of the city. I crossed a different bridge downstream from the Chain Bridge and walked back up along the Danube and I grabbed a quick sandwich before getting back to the apartment to catch our shuttle to the airport. In the end, it was a great choice for a long weekend, even if I did have to hear my friends singing “Firework” over 500 times.
