Our Many Moons of Honey: A Hop, Skip and a Jump Through Budapest

So we spent a total of 36 hours in Budapest on our way to Serbia. In no way do we consider ourselves experts of this city as is the case in our previous entries J . While we didn’t get to visit the usual tourist sites: baths, communist graveyard (this one M regrets deeply but S will show him pictures from her previous visit) and really 9/10 of the city, we did walk a lot seeing some of Buda and some of Pest. Overall this eastern European city left a decent impression on us. It’s a grand city compared to cities we visited up to this point. You can really see the wealth that was accumulated during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as the communist influences that followed.

The Buda castle has magnificent views of Pest from across the Danube river as it sits atop the foothills of the Alps. This view includes a great view of the beautiful and impressive neo-Gothic parliament building which is the biggest on the continent.

The section of Buda around the castle has a very Austrian feel with narrow coble stone roads and certain architectural features that remind us of Vienna. Also this is where we found the 700 year old Matthias Church which has a great mixture of Baroque, neo-Gothic and modern elements, such as it’s Zsolnay tiled roof. Pest on the other hand, has the grand avenues and buildings that we mentioned before. Like every European city nowadays Budapest also has a large pedestrian street which offers shopping, squares and overpriced cafes.

As mentioned in our food post we enjoyed most of the meals we had. One thing that needs to be mentioned is that the locals that do speak English are not very enthused about doing so. A few of them were quite annoyed by it including our Best Western hotel staff. Go figure.

Not really much else to say so we will leave you with a few shots of what we did see.

The motherland is next….

Parliament: a neo-Gothic building that stretches 300 yards (274 m) along the danube, has a main dome that rises 315 feet (96 m) and contains 700 rooms, 10 courts, 29 staircases, 12.5 miles (20 km) of corridors