Day 38

Budapest

The view from the window this morning

When we don’t have a lot of time and a lot of ground to cover we are inclined towards public transport, particularly in the big cities as they usually have a bus or tram that does the city circuit. If you get on one of these buses, ride around the circuit you get a feel for the city and choose what you want to see. Yesterday we didn’t need to do that as we had our freindly tour guide and a small enough area (the castle is only 1 mile long and 1/4 mile wide at its widest) to cover on foot.

Today we wanted to venture down into Pest. Budapest is a town divided by the Danube Buda (largely residential and Castle district) on one side and Pest (pronounce Pesht) on the other. Pest has the city centre, business, shops, monuments, museums etc. and it covers a huge area so we made use of this handy little bus

As a  hop on hop off bus it’s not exactly the public transport which would have done the same thing for cheaper but it was reasonably priced, I could get a 24 hour ticket at the information centre nearby our hotel, you get a audio guide so you know what you’re seeing and, as you can see, is easily identifiable. When you hop off at one spot it’s good to be able to see the next one coming, today was not the day to miss the bus.

It was only –5˚, we’ve had colder this trip, but today was the only day I’ve suffered from the cold because at one stop we had to wait. The hostess underestimated our waiting time, her ‘couple of minutes’ before the next bus was actually 45 minutes. Standing still in the cold is a killer. I got cold, painfully cold. We stayed on the bus through quite few stops while I thawed.

this is what we saw

the Palace we walked around yesterday – good to see it in perspective from the Pest side.

 

The Danube has 8 bridges that are either new or reconstructed since WWII, the retreating Germans destroyed all the bridges. This one is the Chain Bridge that was designed and built by two Englishmen (baby brother to London Bridge).

 

Parliament House, that fills our hotel window view & is lit up so spectacularly at night. modelled again on London’s houses of Parliament (I think I said Westminster Abbey yesterday). The architect admired the British building on the river etc.

 

Don’t know who this guy is but of course MGM could not resist making a new friend…

Doesn’t look too thrilled about his new Aussie mate does he!

Of course we HAD to do gishy cake today

This is an Hungarian treat Rákóczi túrós. Pastry base, cottage cheese, meringue y-u-m + the Hungarians do coffee well. This is a Dopio (double espresso)  which seems to be available routinely and is very very good (I had two over the course of the day).

St Stephen’s Basilica – huge and beautiful, and very nicely we didn’t have to pay to pray. Most of the churches in Venice we had to pay to view. I understand that these big buildings have huge running costs but usually I just want a quiet spot to pray. It’s nice when that spot is stunning but I often used to just go outside and pray for free.

Hero Square

 

and some more pics from today VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL