Budapest

Our train ride from Vienna to Budapest was five hours and generally followed the Danube River, which touches both cities, but the five-hour ride fit right in with this marathon stretch of our trip--overnight train, five-hour train, seven-hour train, five-hour train, six-hour train, four-and-a-half hour train . . . all in about a week. Until this week, we had taken our time (by my definition) and built in a lot of Mediterranean beach towns, but this stretch was a bit too ambitious. It left me pretty exhausted and nursing a rough cold.

What struck me the most about Budapest was that to this day, it still seems to show some of its Soviet-era past--much more so than our next destination, Prague. I do not mean this in terms of Soviet stars and hammer-and-sickle emblems everywhere. Rather, this showed in the "concrete block" architecture of many of the buildings and in the economic status of many residents that, while not desperately poor, did not seem quite as well off as many of their European counterparts. The entire day was characterized by a dull gray sky, but something about that felt appropriate for the place.

Also, the currency, the Hungarian forint, made things a little more fun here. We felt like kings because we dropped thousands of forints all over the place. To know the price of something in euro, just divide by 280. So my 4200-forint dinner was about €15. I changed €10 with our apartment's owner so that I could get 2500 forints to pay our cab driver the next morning. We made it rain.

Another big difference was getting further away from familiar languages on the linguistic continuum of Europe. In Spain, I could understand a lot and read almost anything. In Portugal, southern France, and Italy, I could read quite a bit and pick up the gist of things. In Austria, I knew some important German words. But when it comes to Hungarian or Czech, the languages of these two stops, neither of us could read or understand a word, which can make thing a bit interesting at times.

We stayed in an apartment north of the Chain Bridge, so we started out by working our way south down the river. First, we passed Parliament, an impressive structure that is the largest parliamentary building in continental Europe. It was built in anticipation of accommodating the representatives from the (as envisioned) vast Hungarian Empire. At the time, Hungary consisted of three times the area it occupies today. The whole Hungarian Empire thing didn't work out so well (so much of the space lies unused today), but hey, the building's nice.

Next, it was on to the Chain Bridge and Buda Castle. Originally, Budapest was two cities, Buda on the west bank, Pest on the east. But over time, their identities merged into Budapest. This area was neat, and I really wanted to return to shoot the bridge and castle at night, but I found myself too exhausted to make the trip.

From Buda Castle, we stayed on top of the hill on the west bank and walked over to the cathedral and the rest of the Castle District. Then we crossed to the Pest side to visit Budapest's synagogue, which is one of the largest in Europe and contains a very well done memorial garden dedicated to Hungary's Holocaust victims. During WWII, the Hungarian government resisted Nazi pressure to turn on its sizable Jewish population, but after Hungary fell, that protection was gone. The garden features a silver weeping willow tree, the leaves of which are engraved with the names of victims.

We ended our tour with a walk to the cathedral and a quick trip out to the Heroes' Square and Vajdahunyad Castle. Then we had dinner in our neighborhood and tried two Hungarian specialties: goulash (beef soup) and paprika chicken. After that, we called in a night early because we had a 5:30 am, 7-hour train to Prague the next morning.

Budapest was very interesting (album here), and it was neat to see a real Eastern European city, but I do not think I would plan to return because there is another eastern city called Prague, and Prague is awesome. (See next.)