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Eastern Europe 2006 Day 04 - More Budapest

We spent this entire day in Budapest, which is the capitol of Hungary. This country has been around in one form or another since 1000 AD. It used to occupy a much larger area, and once part of the Hapsburg Empire along with Austria. Like most other countries in the region, its borders were redrawn after the end of WWI.

Budapest is much larger than Prague, with about 1.7 million people. It's much more spread out, and feels quite a bit busier as well. The people working in the shops and tourist places were a bit more impatient (or rude if you prefer) than in Prague, since I guess they don't depend as much on tourist money.  Most of them seemed to speak some English, although very reluctantly and with disgusted looks. Hey, what do they expect? Hungarian isn't related to the rest of the Indo-European languages, so why do they expect tourists to know it? I did try to learn some basics, but once you get past hello/goodbye, I'm tapped.

We spent the night in the Tulip Inn, which is part of a chain. The room was OK, although it was on one of the noisiest streets I have ever heard. In the morning, the group got back on the tour bus for our guided city tour. As in Prague, the city tour was a great way to get an introduction to the highlights of the city. Of course, since you are trying to see the whole city in just a few hours, you can't spend much time anywhere. This was particularly true on this tour, since we had a VERY strict guide ;)  She had some good info though..


So, here's a few shots of random streets, just to get a feel for the place...



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Our first stop on the tour was Heroes' Square. I really want to come back to this part of the city sometime. Our tour guide gave us 10 minutes here, (Yes, I did say 10 minutes), which was not nearly enough. In addition to the Millennium Monument in the pictures below, there are also a few different art museums here, along with a zoo, amusement park, botanic gardens, other museums, etc. You'd probably want a bit more than then 10 minutes though.

The Millennium monument was started in 1896 to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of the city. The guys on the horses are the leaders of the seven tribes that founded Hungary.



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The next big stop on the tour was the area of Buda Castle, known as castle hill. Unfortunately, we weren't given enough time to actually see inside anything, but the views were cool. I really liked the intricate tile roofs on the church...  Ah yes, there was a fun little cross-cultural experience up here as well. By this time on tour, lots of the people were dying for a visit to the loo, much to the chagrin of our tour guide (she only allocated 15 minutes for the whole area!). The only public toilet up there was a pay toilet however, which is a fairly common occurrence in Europe. However, this one was way more fun than usual.

Picture the scene, if you will. It starts with a line of about 50 people, slowly moving towards a very old, very small building next the monument with the guy on the horse below. Once you get closer to the building you can see that there is a huge crowd of people inside the "lobby" of the building, working their way through a tortuous series of turnstiles, being screamed at by two very fat Hungarian women. I would normally find this to be a bit funny already, but it was made even more so by the fact that the Hungarian women were shouting in Hungarian at a large group of old British ladies, who were trying to talk back to them in English. Har.  So, even better, as you enter the building, you notice that the lobby looks directly into the two bathrooms, which don't happen to have any doors! Yes, there were a bunch of guys standing in front of the urinals doing their business in front of the screaming Hungarian and British ladies. (BTW, the ladies were screaming at the British ladies for taking too long and holding up the line). Sooo,  there's basically no way in hell that I'm going to pee in front of a crowd of ladies, so when I finally made it through the turnstiles, I headed for one of the stalls in the bathroom, opened the door and found..... yes, an old British lady!  WTF!  Yes, the Hungarian ladies' solution to the slow line was to send some of the women into the gents, while the guys were in there with tackle out, peeing.  So, after some hasty apologies, and a quick demo to the lady on how to actually latch the door, I finally got to go.  It was a bit wierd, but it makes a great story.


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The tour guide said that this was probably the oldest building in Buda, but I couldn't really confirm it... Lots of buildings claim to be the oldest in town.

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So the bus tour wrapped up around lunchtime, and we were given the rest of the day to explore.   I walked all over the place looking for a place to eat, and finally ended up at a tapas restaurant ( I was having Hungarian food for dinner..) After lunch, I headed over to the Hungarian National Museum, since museums are where all the cool kids go. The exhibits were actually pretty nice, with some great background history of the country, even though the majority of the signs were in Hungarian. However, about 30 minutes into my visit, the power went down in the whole museum, and they kicked everyone out. I didn't even try to ask for my money back, since the cashier had some serious attitude anyway. Oh well..

Next stop was St. Stephen's Basilica, the largest church in Hungary. It's a pretty impressive church, both inside and out, and seems like it should be much older than it is (finished in 1905).     More of this on the next page...

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