On the River Danube

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

I don’t recall ever waking up at 2:15 in the morning, but we had to leave the hotel this morning at 2:45 a.m. to head to the Athens Airport for our 4:25 a.m. flight to Budapest. We stayed at the Holiday Inn by the airport in Athens last night, to save some time, unfortunately for us they do not operate their shuttle at that time of day, so instead of free transportation to the airport we had to take a taxi, which because of the hour cost us nearly 30 Euro. It did save some time and money over traveling from the center of Athens however, and even more so for Sue and Granddad who both were headed home later today. We had a short connection in Warsaw, Poland on our way to Budapest. We arrived in Budapest around 8:40 a.m. From there we took the airport mini bus (about which I read in our Lonely Planet book) directly to our hotel, the Intercontinental (got to love those employee rates!). It was more expensive than taking the buses/metro, but still only cost about $20 American, and was definitely worth saving ourselves the hassle of having to figure out the busses/metro and locate our hotel on our own.

Luckily when we arrived at the hotel at about half past nine they had a room ready for us already, and let’s just say that I couldn’t have been happier with the accommodations. We had a third floor room with a king size bed (a luxury we haven’t had often thus far on the trip), a proper shower (I am not going to miss the showers in Greece), and a million dollar view overlooking the Danube and over to central Buda. But we didn’t want to waste any time, so we were out the door shortly after 10:00.

There seemed to be a lot of sites clustered on Castle Hill on the Buda side of the Danube, so we decided to make this our first stop. It was a beautiful walk over the Danube to the Buda side of town. We weaved up through beautiful European streets to the top of Castle Hill. Once atop Castle Hill we found the Fisherman’s Bastion and Matthias Church. The Fisherman’s Bastion was built in the early 20th century and is host to in my humble opinion some of the best views of Pest, especially its sprawling Parliament building, which is gothic in style, and is the largest building in Hungary. Adjacent to the Fisherman’s Bastion is Matthias Church, which is under constant restoration both inside and out, but features a spectacular colored tile roof.

After touring the inside of the Church we walked towards the other end of Castle Hill, stopping to grab a quick lunch. For lunch Tim had a hot dog and soda and I had a sandwich and soda which cost us 1300 Hungarian Forints, which converted is less than 6 US Dollars. It’s impossible not to love the prices in Eastern Europe.
After lunch we went to the House of Royal Wines. Our main intentions for going here was to taste some wines, but we decided to tour the “museum” which I will go ahead and say right now, I would definitely recommend giving a pass should you ever visit Budapest. It was definitely not worth the money, but we did learn that at least in the past, wine was one of Hungary’s biggest exports (we didn’t even know Hungary produced wine!). We also got to see some restored royal wine cellars from the 15th and 16th centuries, and got thoroughly freaked out by the creepy medieval wax statues that were lurking around every corner. After completing our tour of the museum, we decided that the tastings were too expensive, which was later affirmed when the wine at dinner was less than two dollars American per glass. From the House of Royal Wines we walked over to the Royal Palace, which is home to a couple of museums, we did not enter the museums, we only admired the Palace from the exterior. After a bit of a walk we headed back towards Pest and our hotel.

We stopped just briefly at the hotel before heading to the Central Market. At the Central Market we ate a strudel and purchased some fruit to eat for breakfast the next couple of days at the hotel. Leaving the Market we walked down Vaci Utca, a pedestrian street lined with restaurants and touristy shops to try and locate a place to have dinner and watch the soccer games later. We identified a couple of options before we headed back to the hotel.

Back at the hotel we turned on the soccer and I promptly fell asleep, as did Tim. We were completely exhausted having been up since 2 o’clock this morning and having walked the equivalent of several miles throughout the day site-seeing. After the afternoon soccer games were over we headed back out and down Vaci Utca to find some dinner. Along this touristy strip the restaurateurs essentially attack you offering you all sorts of incentives to dine with them, I found it a bit overwhelming, and honestly if a restaurant has to mug and bribe people on the streets in order to get patrons, I’m not really interested. We finally sat down at a restaurant that we had passed where no one came and attacked us as we passed by and where there were plenty of people eating and where the food on the table looked and smelled amazing. I ordered the traditional beef gulyas (goulash), which was delicious, and had a couple of glasses of the house red, which cost as I mentioned before less than 2 US dollars per glass.

After we finished dinner we walked down to a sidewalk café that we had spotted earlier that had multiple TVs out, that we were certain would play both of the soccer matches that were on tonight (Germany vs. Ghana and Australia vs. Serbia). We joined a couple at a table and conversation ensued. Jören is from Germany, and his girlfriend, Živka, is from Macedonia, but they are currently living in Bratislava and she was visiting Budapest for a conference. We watched the soccer games together, they were glad Germany won, and we were glad Australia won even though the still will not advance and talked about all sorts of things, we just thoroughly enjoyed each others' company. After the game we went for a stroll together before heading back to our respective hotels, but made plans to meet tomorrow at 7:00 for dinner.