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...
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.
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.
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.
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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