The Budapest Great Synagogue is perhaps the world's most beautiful. A moving sight for me.
Budapest is backpacker fun. Budapest has lots of history. Yay. These truisms are about as well worn as the goat pen at a petting zoo…
If it was the new friends who made my Northwest Anatolia trip so special, it was seeing two old friends who made my recent five-day trip to Budapest so memorable. These friends were also international students in Ankara: my Danish friend Jakob, who was in town at the same time for an engineering conference (he is a chemical engineer), and my friend Kate, a Hungarian who used to live in Ankara because her mother worked at the Hungarian embassy there.
Now Kate had to be in the village where she also lives and where the school is, so she could prepare for the upcoming school year, so I had to stay at the authentically named Hungarian hostel, Casa de la Musica, for the first three nights.
The first two evenings I meandered the streets of Buda (the hilly side with the castle, think fairy tale Europe crossed with middle class suburb) and Pest (the flat side with most of the museums and nightlife) with Jakob after his daytime conference activities were finished, the last two days I stayed with Kate in her apartment on the Buda side. The cool thing about staying with a local at the end of a trip, as I did, was that I was able to familiarize myself with the city with fresh, traveller’s eyes.
Jakob and I on the Chain Bridge
I hit the biggies before that though, straight tourist style: the fine arts museum, the Museum of Terror (not torture! This one is about the mass interrogations and imprisonments carried about by the Nazi puppet government and, after the war, the Soviet-styled regime, a must see!), Fisherman’s Bastion, the Opera House, Andriy Avenue (their Champs Elysee), etc., and – of course – a traditional Hungarian bath.
The cool topper to the trip was going around with Kate the last two days. Kate is an English teacher in a traditional Hungarian high school. The students learn traditional arts and crafts such as felt making. She knows what a
Chain Bridge at night
traditional Hungarian house looks like and why they are built that way, which came in handy when we went to the nearby village of Szentendre, she also led me to possibly the finest Langos (friend dough) place in the country, a hole in the wall I would not have found on my own!
Check out the rest of the photos here.