Well, our marriage, anyway! Our honeymoon continued in Budapest. I still get dewy-eyed as I’m working up this post, three months later (oops!). It was awfully romantic!
We used Civitatis again for two free tours as a starting point for getting to know the city – as we did in Prague the week prior. I don’t know how the “free tour” model can be profitable, but I don’t have to worry about that. I just needed to give the guide a big fat tip each time so I didn’t feel bad about how much I got out of each tour.
This time we met up with a rather crazy Hungarian guide who spoke very good Spanish. The tour started at ten in the morning but I think if she could have fed us all a bunch of local liquor and dragged us tottering around, laughing at her Dad Jokes, she would have. She also gave us great advice about restaurants, “ruin bars”, spas, and even a Hungarian face cream.
Orientation tour
Do you know it’s two cities – Buda, and Pest? (I didn’t!) Buda is on the west bank of the Danube, and Pest is on the east. Buda is poshy and more residential, but with a big castle and cathedral on the hill overlooking the river. Pest is the city, bustling streets and tourists and restaurants and life, including the Jewish Quarter.
Ramon took the Jewish quarter tour which focused particularly on World War II. More Jews were taken from Hungary than from anywhere else, and the guide attributed it to collaboration among the government ranks at the time. There are several beautiful synagogues and many moving sculptures throughout the Jewish Quarter. For those who worked to save Jews from being sent to camps, their efforts could never be enough. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported and the great majority were quickly gassed upon their arrival at Auschwitz.
Shoes on the Danube
A river’s-edge sculpture honors over 23,000 people, 20,000 of whom were Jews, murdered here during WWII. Night after night in the dead of the winter of 1944-45, a group of fascists took Jews living in ghettoes and others down to the banks of the Danube, made them take their shoes off (to be resold!), shot them and pushed them in the river. The evil is grotesque and almost too much to get your head around. Cops raided the fascist group in January of 1945 and set free that night’s targeted people. The cops are lauded as heroes to this day. A month later, the Soviets liberated Budapest.
In the tour Ramon took, the guide highlighted the efforts by Swedish, Spanish and Italian diplomats to shelter Jews in embassies to try to save them from the camps. But the monuments depict how their efforts were miniscule against the threat.
The scale of loss in WWII and from Hungary in particular defies any attempt at understanding. But it’s not horrible enough to withstand politics, apparently. The current Hungarian government erected a monument to the “brave resistance” of the government during WWII, despite ample evidence of collusion with the Nazis and strong homegrown fascism. The current government seems to be rewriting history to suit their own narrative. Hungarians are readying to vote for president, and one of the U.S.’ own political slimeballs, our illustrious VP, has gone there to boost the dictator’s chances for a renewed mandate. Lies are clearly more than okay with him.
Monumental Budapest
There are seven bridges across the Danube in the city, and we crossed some on foot and others, we floated underneath (it’s great that the array of evening boat tours can be very inexpensive, but I’ll caution that I don’t recommend the wine on board). The architectural styles seem similar to, but less flashy, or at least less colorfully painted, than Prague. Even without that, there were buildings and vistas that kept us looking up.
Grandest of all is the Parliament, which sits on the edge of the river, looking grand and imposing. It is the second largest Parliament building in Europe, after the one in London – in very much the same style.
Extraneous Z’s
Extra z’s were littered around as if they were seventeen for a forint (the currency!)
Bisztro? Wikipedia explains that Hungarian has 44 letters (actually our tour guide told us this too) and some of them have two letters – a “digraph” – like cs, sz, and zs – and I am nerd enough to have loved all the z’s. There’s no shortage of k’s, either, so I felt right at home.
Let it snow, baby!
We were lucky enough to have a winter wonderland that refreshed itself every day we were there with more snow. I haven’t seen that much snow since… can’t remember when. I loved it, I slipped around in it, even fell on my tuchus in it, and I’d do it all again, happily.
Especially now, as winter turns to spring here in Madrid and I know a long summer is on the near horizon, I would take this snowy winter wonderland anytime. It was peaceful, gave us good reason to get hot chocolate, and looked and smelled so clean. No place looks worse when covered with fluffy white snow.
Heading to Buda
On the other side of the Danube, the art and architecture of Buda Castle and Fisherman’s Bastion made for a great walk and a ridiculous number of photographs. Like Prague, the history and the beauty were overwhelming and 360-degrees around us. So were the crowds, which we were plentiful here, if not quite as densely packed as in Prague.
I figured out how to remove unwanted people from my pics just for this blog post. Can you tell which ones I altered? I did nothing but remove shoulders, backs, folks who weren’t going to get to see themselves on this blog, nor would they have cared to! But still I feel weird about it, like I’ve Altered the Historical Record in some important way.
Is this how Instagrammers make travel appealing, by buffing up the pics? Viewers daydream about these magnificent places like the Amalfi Coast or Prague, without understanding just how crowded these places have become.
That’s not how we decided on our own trip, though. Ramon was eager to see Prague, having heard about it, and I wanted to stretch out the trip and add another country. I preferred one I’d never been to before (which is arguably as stupid as deciding on vacation by looking at Instagram touch-ups!) I was choosing between Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest. (Actually I wanted to choose all three – imagine adding four new countries to my life list in one go! But that would have been ridiculously unfulfilling, too much travel and no enjoyment.) I chose Budapest (I’m a little embarrassed to admit) because I wanted to try real goulash. Also, there was a seven-hour direct train ride from Prague to Budapest that appealed – just watching the countryside go by (including those two other countries that are not yet on my list!), reading, drinking tea and flirting with my (*gulp*) husband!
Uphill climb
You can get up to Buda Castle and the Bastion walking, or on a tram. We did both, because we liked it so much up there we went up a second day. Walking across one of the bridges put us at the foot of the steep hill leading to the Castle, and before we headed up we visited a local antiques shop while waiting to take the tram, full of little pieces of history. Lace antimacassars, kitchen implements, and remnants of water sports! Apparently those were the events in which Hungary excelled in the Olympics – swimming and diving and water polo. They weren’t swimming in the Danube in winter, I’ll wager!
Okay, I cleaned up the edges of the boat canopy AND erased the cranes over the castle. Someone stop me before I edit again! I feel like I’m cheating!
Finally we got to the front of the line to ride the tram to the top. You can see it in the pic below, the vertical lights nearer the right edge of the photo. And below, the old-timey tram itself (not entirely unlike the one at Monserrate in Colombia!)
This pretty tram car lifted us back up to the plateau of Buda Castle and the Bastion, but this time we focused on a fantastic art museum and the snow-covered compound. You could spend three days just exploring the libraries, gift shops, food stands and the views.
Spa Day
I went to such a beautiful spa to sit in the hot springs one day, and it’s one of many – so make sure if you go to plan some you-time. The pics I’m showing are just the monumental facades and mosaics (which the attentive among you will already know I’m mad for). Bring your flip flops and bathing suits to Budapest, friends! And a big fluffy towel.
But I didn’t take my camera in to the massage room or the baths – which are massive and diverse. There are “You are here” maps everywhere, because otherwise it would be easy to lose yourself. There are at least two dozen different pools of different temperatures and sizes. Dry and wet saunas (very much plural), some with gigantic salt crystals that affect how the air feels and smells while you bake. Another one is a beer soak – you soak yourself in beer while drinking beer or some such nonsense. I don’t get it but it seemed quite popular. Surely the civilizations who’ve used these waters (and lagers?) for millennia could tell us the relative benefits of each configuration.
But my favorite was the big outdoor pool, which is really three big outdoor pools at different temperatures. Fountains within the pools let you angle your achy shoulder or neck underneath strong jets of very warm water. All the while you’re feeling the winter air on your face. It made me think a bit of the big pool at Glenwood Springs, though this one had loads more statuary!
Statuary – all sorts
Budapest was not light on statues. There was the standard Man on Horse trope, the Idealized Woman Doing Something Admirable trope, and the Ferocious Lion Guarding the Entrance trope.
Wacky and whimsical
From abstract art to a bowing Shakespeare, from Empress Sisi to gallivanting children and pets, from a mega full moon to a wee tiny musician about the size of my forearm – there were loads of unexpectedly lighthearted sculptures.
No slouch on food and drink
As mentioned above, we got some of our best meals from the recommendations our tour guide provided. We ate well and fancy the last evening in town, at Negro Mangalica. Everywhere we looked we could get goulash and langosh (which looks like pizza but with a buttery deep-fried crust). Handmade noodles reminiscent of carb-heavy spaetzle I used to get in the employee lunch break room at the Sonnenalp. A range of spritz-y drinks (“fröccs!”).
We can’t wait to go back – I, for one, want to try a bunch more fröccs.
