Two of our friends from Chicago planned to visit Prague, Vienna, and Budapest and asked if we’d like to join. Since neither Remy nor I had ever visited Budapest, we tagged along for that. We had a couple of days with just the two of us and then a couple of days with our friends. During our first day we climbed up Gellért Hill to the Citadella. It’s the kind of walk that doesn’t seem like it’ll be too bad, but then you start going and realize the path is a steep vertical climb and involves a million switchbacks. You can see the entire city from the top and, in addition to the Citadella, there are monuments and statues along the way. After dinner we went to a ruin bar. These are bars opened in formerly abandoned buildings. They’re fun, kind of haphazard looking, and very popular. The next day we walked along the Danube River including by the Parliament building, which is based on London’s Parliament. The building in Budapest was designed to be one meter wider and longer, just because. We looked into a tour but decided against it and headed to Margaret Island instead. It’s in the middle of the Danube and has ruins of a Franciscan church and monastery, a Dominican convent with the grave of St Margaret, and a 12th century church. We rented a bike-car contraption to traverse the island. That evening we had dinner at a traditional Hungarian restaurant with an exchange student that Remy’s family hosted when we was younger. He then took us Heroes’ Square, with statues of the founders of Hungary, and City Park.
We met with him the next morning to leave Budapest and visit a place with Hungarian homes from different eras, which was a nice way to learn more of the country’s history. We stopped at another uber traditional restaurant where I finally had some goulash. Once back in the city, Remy and I had some bad timing luck. We arrived at Central Market Hall, the city’s big indoor market, just after it closed for the day. We then crossed the river to Gellért Hill Cave to visit a chapel built into the side of a cliff. We got there just as a service was starting, though, which means we couldn’t take a tour. We also visited the Basilica of St Stephen and just missed being able to see the Holy Right, the mummified right hand of St Stephen. After those misses, we wandered around until it was time to meet with our friends for a boat cruise down the Danube. We did another tour the next day, this one a free walking tour of the city that covered some of the same ground we already saw but with more context and history. We also went up to Castle Hill, which towers 170m above the Danube and is home to Budapest’s main museums and medieval monuments. It’s the location of the city’s old town, the former royal palace, the Fisherman’s Bastion monument, and Matthias Church. It sits atop a 28km-long network of caves formed by thermal springs. Within these caves is the Hospital in the Rock, which we visited next. It’s literally a hospital built into the side of a cliff and was used extensively during WWII. Our final stop before heading to more ruin bars in the evening was The House of Terror museum. The Fascist Arrow Cross party was headquartered in the building during WWII. The space was used by the equally repressive communist party in the decade after the war for similar purposes (i.e., a place where prisoners were held and tortured). It includes exhibitions detailing the fascist and communist regimes and their impact.
