Day 49: Budapest

We started the day with a great hotel breakfast: meat, potatoes, breads, coffee, juice . . . we had it all. Well-rested and well-fed, we started walking north in Pest. First stop was Parliament, but we couldn't get in unless we waited for a few hours. We opted for walking towards the St. Stephen's Cathedral instead.

It was hot today, 90 at 11am, so we stopped along the way for a drink in a park (turns out we were right by the MTV Budapest building). Eventually we got to the St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is huge and ornate. We half-climbed, half-elevatored to the top dome for a panoramic view of Budapest.

The special draw was a chapel holding St. Stephen's holy right hand. If we read it right, he was the first king to be canonized. You never quite get used to seeing the 1000 year old body parts in churches. If you blinked, however, you'd miss it. You had to plug the meter for the light to illuminate the hand's display case.

Our next stop was the House of Terror. This was a great museum. It chronicles the Nazi and then Soviet occupation of Hungary and is located in the former headquarters of both their secret polices. Scary stuff. Makes us both wonder about Kevin's ancestors that didn't leave Hungary.

After that heavy experience we did a 180 and headed to the Szechenyi Baths (recommended by my bud Rick Steves). Before we got there, however, we had fun using the metro. We bought two tickets and headed for the validater machine to get it punched, where there are two metro workers to ensure you do. The machine wouldn't punch Brooke's for some reason, so the worker wouldn't let her through and was giving us a hard time.

We walked back to the ticket counter and were getting frustrated when a local Hungarian guy came out of nowhere to our aid. He spoke to us in English and asked us to follow him back to the metro workers and spent a few minutes talking/lightly arguing with them on our behalf. They eventually conceded and let us through. We thanked the man, and he apologized for the workers and told us to enjoy our time in Budapest.

This was a pretty surprising 5 minute experience to us. Later we read in one of our books that 1) metro workers are notorious for not speaking English, being rude, and picking on tourists and 2) locals are extremely nice and go the extra mile to make sure tourists enjoy their city. Dead on.

We eventually reached the bath, which was a perfect way to beat the heat today. It's basically a public pool (well, $15 to get in) that is fed with natural heated spring water. The bath we went to had 3 big pools. One was basically a giant hot tub, one a lap pool with normal pool temp, and one in between (where we spent most of our time).

The rest of our day was spent walking around Pest getting some happy hour drinks and dinner. We sampled our first Hungarian wine, not sure what it was called, but it was a pretty good glass of red wine for about $3 from a ultra-modern bar by our hotel.

Tomorrow we'll go one step further with the Hungarian wine. The plan is to take a day trip to Eger and the Valley of the Beautiful Women, one of the main wine regions in Hungary. It's a two hour trip each way, but it'll give us a chance to explore Hungary a bit more.

PS - Alright Prince Fielder with the Home Run Derby victory!