Can it be there is only 1 week left of the group tour? It’s going by so quickly!
Today we left Eger at 8:30am, made one stop and arrived in Budapest at about 11:30am, yes, there was traffic getting into the city. Bojan took us directly to the Buda Castle area where we met our loca
l guide, Petar.We walked around the area, saw the castle grounds, wonderful views of the Danube and Parliament, and Fisherman’s Bastion. Then we had lunch on our own for about an hour and a half.
Instead of going to a restaurant CL and I found our way to a grocery store and picked up some picnic stuff, bread, cheese, fruit, drinks, and chocolate and settled on a bench in the park right across from the grocery store. It was great and I enjoyed negotiating around a Hungarian grocery store. It’s always interesting to see what is on the shelves and the different foods that are popular in other countries.
At about 2:30pm we all met-up at the park to continue the walking tour on the Pest side of the city. We got on the metro, went one stop, which took us under the Danube and came up near the very impressive Parliament building.
We walked through the banking district of Pest and to St. Stephen’s Basilica. The church was beautiful inside. We ended the walking tour at our hotel where Bojan was with the bus and our luggage.
We were on our own for dinner and CL and I went to place I had heard about while doing my research for the trip, and Etelka also recommended it…bonus, 2 thumbs up for this place so we gave it a try. The name of the restaurant is Fatal and it is not far from the hotel, it was located at 67 Vaci Utca. CL and I had the French onion soup, the bowl was big enough for us to share and it was scrumptious! But unlike the onion soup I am used to, this one was creamy….MMMMM! I am pretty sure the soup had both sweet and red onions in it. We also had a huge and I do mean HUGE garden salad, this salad could have easily fed 4 people. We had 2 beers to wash it all down.
We met with the “gang” back at the hotel around 7:30pm to go on the evening Danube boat cruise. Talk about magical, seeing Budapest lit up at night from the river was astonishing. It was such a pleasant evening sitting on the boat sipping champagne cruising down the river…what more could we ask for…it was brilliant!
Believe it or not, we actually skipped dessert tonight! But some of the cafes we passed looked like they had yummy cakes, hopefully tomorrow night we can taste some of them!
This was a great first day in Budapest!
Day 12– September 13, 2006 – Budapest, Hungary…Time to “Take the Waters”!
Today is a laid back day. We had a leisurely breakfast and met our tour-mates in the lobby at 9am for a walking tour. Ben handed out maps and a day ticket for the metro and trams. We left the hotel at about 9:15am and walked through the old part of Pest and then took the metro to Hero’s Square and then through the big city park and to the replica of a Transylvania Castle. We ended the tour at the famous mineral baths.
The bath complex is huge and thank God we had Etelka there to help us with purchasing the tickets and getting a changing cabin and towels (which seemed more like bed sheets then bath towels!). It would have been difficult to navigate through all that on our own. We soaked in a couple different indoor baths and I kept telling CL I knew there had to be some outdoor pools, since I had seen pictures of them! Etelka came to the rescue! She showed us to the outside pools.
It was beautiful and crowded! They don’t allow pictures to be taken, so my description will just have to do. Outside the 2 pools are really big, one is half circle shaped with a fountain spraying water and it is heated. The second outside pool is a very large rectangle that is not heated and used for lap swimming. The surrounding buildings are painted white & yellow with columns and arches and lots of hanging potted flowers.
CL and I spent about half an hour in the large outdoor heated pool and it felt great. It was wonderful to relax and float around in the water, and my muscles felt invigorated afterward! It was heaven! We were probably in the baths (indoor and outdoor) for a total of about 45 minutes/1 hour. Once we felt significantly “soggy” we climbed out of the pool and went back to the changing cabin to dry off and change back into our street clothes.
When we were finished at the baths we and another tour-mate tried to find the metro stop near the baths, but we walked right by it (it was in the park and we were walking along the street), and ended up walking back to the metro at Hero’s Square, it wasn’t very far. From there CL and I took the metro (we even managed a train transfer!) to Ráday Utca, which is a street lined with lots of outdoor cafes. Our tour-mate left us to go in another direction and CL and I walked down the street checkingout various menus. We found a nice café called Trattoria étterem located at Ráday utca 16.
We decided on an Italian place because we were both in the mood for pasta. For lunch we had: cold peach soup (I know, weird for an appetizer, but Ben said if we saw any cold fruit soup on the menu in Budapest to order it…and we did!), the Bangkok Hilton salad (which we order because the ingredients sounded interesting, but the name of it sounded more interesting!) it was a bit too spicy for me, but CL liked it and last, but certainly not least we had rigatoni with chicken and zucchini in a cream sauce, which was very good. As we had been doing we shared all 3 items and with 2 bottles of water the bill came to just under $20.
After our meal in such a pleasant setting we walked over to the Great Market. I was really looking forward to seeing this place and it was interesting, but the upper level is crammed with tourist souvenirs and elbow to elbow tourists. I got some paprika and 2 other small gifts, but there was nothing really great there. Except…the bakery on the ground floor that we found. Clearly it was a place that served more locals then tourists and the baked goods were wonderful, well, at least the cookies we bought there were wonderful! We got 6 small cookies for less then a dollar and they hit the spot after our lunch!
The plan for the rest of the day was to just do a little more window shopping and find a nice place for dessert tonight…who cares about dinner! We wandered around the main “tourist” pedestrian street and found a pretty outdoor café to sit at and have our evening dessert and use up our last Hungarian Forint (since the next day it’s onto Croatia!). We had it calculated right down to the very last penny, ooops, I mean Forint. But we had just enough to pay for our 2 desserts and 2 waters.
After enjoying our sweets and doing some people watching (there seemed to be lots of Americans at this particular café), we went over and walked along the Danube at dusk. We found the Shoes along the Danube not far from the Parliament building. It’s was between the Chain Bridge and Parliament and there is no sign indicating what this memorial is. So, you have to know what to look for. It’s a small stretch right along the grassy path along the river. The shoes are bronzed and it is the site where (I believe) Nazis shot Jews and let them fall into the Danube. Such a sad story.
After taking some pictures, we turned around and started walking back along the river and the lights on the Chain Bridge and the castle came on. It was truly a magical moment.
Some thoughts on the trip so far…In Prague Ben’s advice was to “Get Lost” and we happily obliged; in Krakow Ben’s advice was to “Just Be” and we did; in Budapest Ben’s advice was to “soak in the energy” and soak we did do! As Ben said Budapest is a very cosmopolitan city and I definitely have the big city vibe here, much the same as NYC. There is no “town square” per say like in Prague and Krakow, but there seems to be some pretty cool areas, the street we had lunch on being one of them.
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