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| Our hotel, The Three Corners Hotel Bristol |
10/11/2014
We lost a day flying so it's 10/11 here :). Mom's super happy because she's been wanting to come to Budapest for at least 5 years.
Our hotel has free breakfast, so it was pretty sweet to wake up and go downstairs for some nice piping hot food. They had an assortment of cheeses, yogurts, granola, breads and coffee/tea. Angel made a really nice sandwich for us with four different types of cheese, liver pate, ham, bacon, and tomato. Tea was freaking awesome! They had Pickwick brand tea in Strawberry, Peach, Cherry Yogurt, Rosehip, etc. I tried a bunch of the flavors and Strawberry is to die for. I had two cups of it, when I vowed I wouldn't drink too much because I'd have to find a bathroom later (bathrooms here cost money, about 150 florints, and we couldn't find an ATM for the better part of the morning).
We walked around in the morning, as our ultimate goal was to end up at the Great Central Market. Along the way, we saw:
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| Hungarian National Museum |
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| Great Central Market |
Angel: I didn't break any this time. Gold star for me!
Jen: That's because you're forbidden to touch them! Verboten!
Outside of the Great Central Market is the Danube River:
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| Liberty Bridge |
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| Chapel on the Rock |
From the other side of the Danube (the Buda side):
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| View from Chapel on the Rock |
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| Wicked spray paint job! |
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| Buda Castle |
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| Chain Bridge |
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| Parliament Building (where they store the Crown Jewels) |
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| Another view of Buda Castle |
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| Shoes on the Danube |
Shoes on the Danube is a memorial of WWII and all the lives that were lost. The army used to line up Jews along the river and order them to take off their shoes before they shot them. The bodies fell off the embankment into the river, and floated downstream.
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| Parliament Building from Pest side |
Mom got roasted pig knuckle, again very tender, though not as much as the pork belly:
And we both got libamaj. *sigh* Delicious HEAVEN. Each entree was THREE pieces of foie gras with polenta, arugula, and pumpkin puree, which Angel loved. I never thought I'd see the day where Angel liked anything pumpkin (besides pie), but she scarfed that baby down.
Angel: I'm proud to say that I took one for the team and finished off one piece of Jen's foie gras since she was too wimpy to finish it.
Jen: Took one for the team???!!! I let you have it!
Angel: Yeah right. Fat liar.
To walk off our very cholesterol-inducing lunch, we walked to Hero's Square:
...which took an hour in very hot weather (who knew Budapest would be hot in October??). Just our luck that the weekend we chose to come, there's a marathon with 20,000 runners participating. We had to dart across the streets whenever there was a gap between runners, and got dirty looks for it too. Hey, we weren't the only ones doing it! There's also an Oktoberfest going on, complete with roasted pig:
Or was it cow? As the carcass was so large.
And a Chimney Cake festival, where the lines were friggin long just to get a chimney cake. This is a Hungarian pastry that apparently a lot of people are very fond of:
The Chimney Cake festival was held in Vajdahunyad Castle, which was originally put up as a temporary structure for the Millennium Exhibition between 1896-1908. It was originally built of cardboard, but taken down and replaced with more permanent materials:
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| Anonymous Statue...no really, that's what it's called |
As the park is really, really, really far away from city center, we took the Metro back (that, and it was waaaay too hot for us to walk back). The metro system here looks like it hasn't been updated in fifty years. There's a ticket counter where you buy the tickets. It's 350 florints per person to ride one-way, 300 florints if your stop is within a 3-stop radius. Ours was 4. Damn.
Dad wanted to go back to the hotel, so we gave him a map and off he went with Mom. Angel wanted to hunt down fabric shops that she'd pre-mapped. Most of them are along Terez korut between the Oktagon and Blaha Lujza ter, but surprise, surprise, every one of them was closed! Sensing a theme in Europe? It's Saturday! But, in Budapest, most stores close for Saturday and Sunday (note to self: don't come to Budapest on the weekends). Supermarkets are open, as are restaurants. So we went into supermarkets to look for Tokajs, as the sweet dessert wine is a Hungarian specialty. I used to love drinking it when I was younger, and I wanted to taste it in Hungary. When in Rome, that kinda thing...
The supermarkets here are Spar, Tesco, Aldi. There's an Aldi right next to our hotel. We bought a 2010 Tokaj there for 1499 florints (less than 5 bucks, baby!). I chose it based on color; it was a deeper amber. There are some cheaper Tokajs--dude, some are 499 florints! Two bucks! Two bucks! You can't even get a Charles Shaw for that much anymore! But the cheaper ones are lighter in color, and I worried that it wouldn't be as sweet. Mom, Angel and I drank the entire bottle after the ballet tonight. It was delicious, though I got a little drunk. Lightweight, I know :T
We bought tickets to the Merry Widow ballet at Erkel Theatre some three months ago (Hungarians really like their opera and ballet. To get good seats, you pretty much have to buy on the day it goes on sale, usually three months beforehand. We had seats in Row 6, smack-dab in the center).
Here's the theatre:
I'll try to get a better shot of the poster tomorrow, as we took the above picture when everyone was streaming out of the theatre. I read the synopsis, which is why I wanted to go to this particular ballet. Rich widow, lost love, pride getting in the way of happily ever after, what's not to love? The principal ballerina was Asian, which was a welcomed surprise. They danced fantastically, the costumes were gorgeous (glittering ice-blue cloak, crystals dripping everywhere). Hungarians really dress up for the ballet (no jeans! no sneakers! black! black! black!), so we felt completely under-dressed. I felt slightly awkward about it, but nobody made a fuss, so it's all good. Mom recognized the tune to Blue Danube in this ballet (it was originally an opera by Franz Lehar, translated to ballet some 70 years later). I googled it and the Blue Danube is by Johann Strauss II in 1866, so it's really odd that they sound so much alike. As a side note, Strauss's stepdaughter asked composer Johannes Brahms to sign her fan one night, and Brahms not only signed it, he drew the first few bars of the Blue Danube and wrote underneath: "Alas! Not by Johannes Brahms." :) It really is a lovely melody.
At the end of the opera, when everyone's clapping for the dancers, the Hungarians clap in sync. It goes faster for encore. That's pretty cool, and also something I never saw before.
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