Sunday 30 March 2008

Budapest - Part 2

The next day we took the historic M1 Metro line to Hösök Tere (Hero's Square) and walked through Városliget (City Park) to the Szechenyi fürdö (thermal baths), where we spent a couple of hours leaping from one hot bath to another and walked away feeling relaxed but in dire need of a drink of cold water and a liberal application of moisturiser.



After a cleansing shower back at our hotel room, we headed back in the direction of the Danube in search of a bite to eat and stumbled through some of the street markets that had sprung up over the weekend. In actual fact our timing for visiting Budapest was very good, coinciding with the Budapest Spring Festival, resulting in markets such as these with excellent local food and crafts (and even demonstrations of the local music and dancing).


We continued to the river and headed towards the impressive Országház (Parliament House), the largest building in Europe when it was completed in 1905 but perpetually blackened from polution since it was built with porous limestone.


Behind the Parliament building is the Néprajzi Múzeum (Cultural Museum), which we wandered through learning about the costumes and traditions of the local people. Like our experience at the National museum, we again walked away feeling as through the Hungarians have had a pretty tough time of it.


Since we had planned to visit Castle Hill at night to see the city lights, we then crossed the Danube and headed back South towards the Budavári Sikló (Funicular) which we would catch to the top.



Along the way there was plenty of impressive views across the river.



Last but not least we walked around to the Halászbástya (Fisherman's Bastion) to compare the views from there.


We didn't stay too long, knowing we would be coming back the next day during daylight, and hot-footed it back to our hotel, stopping along the way at the Markets for some delicious grilled chicken with paprika (yeah, it's a Hungarian word, apparently) and potatos.

1 comment:

Sean_grove@hotmail.com said...

Hey Mark and Linda, glad you liked our recommendation of Meza Restaurant its excellent food there - we went twice! :-) Budapest looked much colder than when we were there last October. Looks like u guys had fun!