Budapest

I had no idea Budapest was formed by three cities.  Apparently a hundred years ago (ISH😃) the cities of Buda, Pest and smaller Obuda joined to form Budapest.

Budapest is like a greener, kinda cleaner version of Prague.  It’s a very interesting city and easy to navigate via public transport (except when you get shaken down by the “revenue officers”.. More on that later).  I was thinking that I haven’t driven in so long I might not recall how to!  Public transit is where the US is light years behind! Whether it’s s Chinese subway or a Hungarian street car, so far they’ve had us covered!  Of course, sometimes we’ve had to deal with cram packed transportation while carrying giant backpacks but, truly it’s been terrific and cheap.

Of course hungary is where we had our first shakedown of the trip… We were Riding the Hungarian subway, trying to find a station to store our bags for our departure day and we happened across 3 “revenue officers” who informed us it was offensive to use a ticket more than one time.  Well…. We’ve been in so many places with so many rules we didn’t think it mattered as long as it was one trip(which has been typical on this trip).  As a matter of fact, the machines didn’t seem to care when they scanned it and I can’t read Hungarian so here we had a transport ticket with multiple stamps (from transferring between one metro line and another in the stations and asking the info desk lady for help… Well anyway, they couldn’t speak great English and I couldn’t speak any Hungarian…. We figured out they wanted 8000 huf’s fine per person even though I had a literal wallet full of unused tickets as I’d bought a 10 pack earlier.  When I told them I didn’t have 24000 huf (about 100$) they offered to walk to the atm machine with me… Well that sounded like a terrible idea as I didn’t really know if these were real enforcement or just scammers… Then they revealed that Apparently mailing in the fine is an option too… But the fine doubles.  I liked that idea the best and kinda figured we’d just become fugitives in Hungary (or call grandma for bail money when they stopped us at the border and threw us in jail!  Who knows how that would have worked with them wanting our passports… After I insisted I didn’t care about the double fine they realized the gig was up and decided it was ok to take 8000 huf as 1 person fine and let us go… At that point we’d argued for 20 minutes and I just wanted to get on with our day so off we went 8000 huf poorer (28$).  I expect they split that and went on about their day harassing tourists and I still don’t know if they were legitimate.

All in all I’m completely surprised it took this long for us to run into this sort of issue.  As the old saying goes, ignorance of the rules doesn’t make them not apply (or something like that).  The girls kept chanting/singing “Adventure he said, it’ll be fun he said” as we rode the escalator away…

That phrase has become our theme for this whole trip, every time something strange  happens, or things get a little sketchy or whatever is amazing, someone always seems to say it.  I expect that memory/saying will live in our family forever.

Our plans changed again and we’re actually flying to Greece this evening (Monday) instead of tomorrow since the flights were about 30% cheaper and the timing is better (a full day isn’t wasted flying).

So far staying flexible has worked out well for us.  When we do this again, I’ll do that part much the same except… I’ll have hotels and city locations pre scouted.  Spending a whole meal (usually breakfast the day before) on a restaurant wifi trying to figure out which part of Athens you want to stay (and can afford) hasn’t been the best thing ever.

We took another hop on hop off tour bus and once again, these things seem to work pretty well for our style of sightseeing.  Sure we could ride the trams or walk between a lot of the sites for cheaper but, these busses are very convenient and relatively educational.  These particular busses had live guides as well.  Heck they even included 2 boat tours per ticket.  So we cruised the Danube for an hour and that was pretty amazing.

They have a GIANT parliament building on the banks of the river

The parliament, castle, riverbanks and citadel is part of a unesco world heritage site and I understand why!

It’s hard to compare places we’ve been but Budapest certainly impressed with the architecture and picturesque setting.

Many restaurants are starting to include a standard service charge 10-13% and it seems like the service is worse… Of course we quickly learned everywhere else in the world apparently orders drinks and food immediately and then sits for an hour after the meal where we Americans typically sit before and order drinks seperately.  I figured it’s culture until it occurred to me that they don’t have/sell appetizers

Hungarian breakfast btw (8$)

Our hostel was an interesting one, after a few days of shared bathrooms and all the joy they bring, I booked us a place with a “private external bathroom” I couldn’t picture it untill we got there but basically they had a seperate toilet and sink that were public, and you had a lockable shower toilet combo space that was private.  It worked well.  But I swear no where in Europe so far believes in air conditioning!!! Or fans… sheesh, I expect it kinda with what we’re paying for accommodations but literally nowhere has aircons.  Restaurants, stores, subways, trains, nothing!!  It’s been cooler feeling in Budapest than Prague but as Americans I don’t think we realized how nice it is to cool of in ac even if just for a few minutes.

I guess it’s hotter than average here? They were handing out these water bags in the street for free.

I haven’t written about it but, hearing about the war damage/reconstruction in much of Europe has been interesting.  like the bridges on the Danube,  they were all dropped during the world wars, many buildings were also apparently destroyed.  They were *mostly* rebuilt to blend in though so it’s hard to tell unless a tour guide points it out.  It’s still wierd to walk through some of these places and think “this castle has stood for 500 years and a king ruled this place as his home”

It really hit me when we were looking through the Buda castle, it’s built on a huge hill for tactical reasons, you could see the angles of the holes in the walls they used to defend it, the layers of walls and their ever increasing height, the platforms behind them to house the defenders, it was just really, really interesting (to me, probably not the girls)

In the movies or pictures you see some things like castles and castle defense and think “huh” but, until I actually saw it in real life, I’m not sure I ever grasped that this was real and critical to survival.  (Unfortunately my phone doesn’t have any decent pics)

As we walked the tightly woven streets lined with rock buildings it snapped to me, the pesants really did live in the streets, in the cracks underground or wherever, and they really were in the castle for protection from enemies.  And the King really did build a giant majestic monument “because he could”.  These places weren’t built this way because Disney thought they’d be neat but rather because they functioned.  This is really  hard to describe, and I know I’m not doing a good job of it but hopefully I got some good video of it that might help.

We stumbled upon a beer fest on a square and of course had some beer as well as street food.  I had the best “chips” ever which were just really salty French fried potatoes done in circles, hard to describe but yummy!

The area is know for its “baths” and apparently there are thousands of mineral rich springs all over the area with corresponding bathhouses.  We were admiring a beautiful huge old building and decided to go inside in search of a bathroom only to find that it was a huge bath house! Kinda surprising!

We ate goulash (it was apparently invented in Hungary)

We also learned the hard way that goulash and goulash soup aren’t the same thing and neither are what we call goulash at home.

A castle tower

Saint Stephens basilica

The chain bridge

See the links of chain? I forgot how old this is but… It’s really old :)

A good shot from the chain bridge with the Buda castle in the background

Heros monument square

Inside the bath house

Lots of what we guessed were river cruise boats

That bottom row of Windows is probably all I’d be able to have if we ever did that

Obligatory selfie!

Yes I shot a pano on a moving boat! The parliament is that huge

Look closely at the roof colors on this church!! Amazing!  This is inside the Buda castle walls

Why is this steeple black? I dunno… But I’ll look it up when we get home :)

A pano from the castle walls

Sara feeding the dragon a gelato cone

Ignore the modernish hotel to the left & right and check out how the castle walls were built/falling and left alone to build a hotel

The Ruins of the castle jail (dungeon)

A fountain for Heros in the castle

I want one of these… Whose gonna help me make it, they charged for rides

We logged 16 miles and 80 flights of stairs in 2 days

PS that was 100% flip flop mileage in Prague and Budapest