After a quick metro ride and an easy hotel check-in, we hop out to explore Budapest at night. Wow! The Danube river cuts the city in half so the spectacular illuminated buildings and bridges reflect off the water. And I thought Moscow was amazing at night! Interesting bit of trivia... before a bridge was built to span the river, Budapest was two separate cities - Buda on one side and Pest on the other. The founders sure put on their creativity hats when they came up with the name for the new combined city. The Szechenyi chain link bridge is one of the prettiest ways to cross the river - especially when it is lit up at night.
We love Budapest! There are enough tourists around to not feel out of place, but the city hums with a energy from the university, political center and businesses. It feels like we're in the middle of the Budapests' daily life instead of being a huge tour group overwhelming the city like we were in Prague. Brian votes this place as his favorite city on the trip so far (excluding Loveland of course).
We love exploring the food markets when we travel and Budapest has a great one: clean, organized and housed in a majestic building. Can you imagine shopping for your groceries here instead of schlepping through Safeway or Hy-Vee? If only we had access to a kitchen so we could take advantage of all that produce and interesting spices. Guess we'll have to be satisfied with grabbing a few breakfast snacks at the stands.
We've had breakfast and the sun is out so let's start exploring the very photogenic Budapest sites.
Hero's Square
Hungarian Parliament
Doesn't that blue sky improve these building pictures? It sure makes walking around them much more pleasant. Hooray for sunny days! We've realized that we've become major weather wussies. All that Colorado sunshine spoils us too much so we now have a hard time dealing with gloomy, dreary weather.
Here Brian gets all artistic with a combo bridge lion and parliament shot at dusk.
Europe is obviously very heavy with history and we find memorials everywhere. This one is on the bank of the Danube river. The bronze shoes remember Jews who were ordered to take off their shoes and then were executed on the waters edge. A quiet and sobering display.
Budapests' bridges, buildings and statuses come alive at night (figuratively... not literally... although that would make an interesting Pixar movie). Gorgeous! Brian enjoyed playing with the settings on our cheap camera to try and capture some of the sites at night. We met an older east-German couple on our cruise who told us that back in the days of the Soviet Union, when they couldn't travel freely to the west, that they considered Budapest as their Paris. Now we see why - it definitely rivals the other European city of lights.
Who knew Hungary makes some awesome wine? We do now. We find a great little wine bar to explore some tasters. The place oozes charm with it's brick walls and bronze chandeliers (although maybe they could rethink that honking speaker system). We arrive in the late afternoon so we mostly have the place to ourselves while the bartender walks us through an 'intro to Hungarian wine' sampler. We could have spent hours here... oh wait... I guess we did.
We're starting to see the end of this journey as we only have Austria and Italy to travel through before we board the cruise to Florida. After all that planning and all these miles it's hard to believe that this incredible adventure will be coming to an end soon (ish).
"Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport." - unknown
Hungary Food
Paprika is the most famous Hungarian spice and it comes in various levels of heat and smoke. We will definitely be making some additions to our secret chili powder mixture. Did you notice my new scarf?
What do you do with all that paprika in Hungary? Make Chicken Paprikash! All those nice warm spices are stewed with chicken making a delicious sauce to dip the spaetzle in. This definitely goes on the 'figure out this recipe' list.
The other classic dish in Budapest is goulash: basically a beef and veggie stew with paprika. The stew was tasty but I loved this cauldron-over-the-candle serving dish cause it kept the soup hot all through dinner.
We can't explore the Jewish Quarter of the city without also exploring some of their food as well. We wander into a cafe for a late lunch and discover a soup called jokai-bableves: a bean and smoked sausage soup topped with sour cream. Delicious! Fire up the Google search engine for that recipe too.
We've been walking by the strudel stands in all these eastern European countries waiting to get to Austria - cause strudel and Austria just seem to go together. But we can resist no longer. Notice how I'm waiting patiently for my piece?
There are so many flavor choices... I go with the carmel-apple. Tastes like mom's apple pie (almost). Dang - should have gone with the pumpkin and poppy seed.
European breakfast buffets are way better than American breakfast buffets because of Nutella and fresh croissants.
A traditional Hungarian dessert: Gundel Palatschinken. Basically a crêpe filled with a walnut mixture and topped with chocolate sauce. Tasted better than it looks in the pic - the heat lamps on the patio really messed up the lighting. Yes, Brian made us eat outside on the cafe even on a chilly evening.
A better choice for dessert in Hungary is to have a small glass (or two) of their sweet wine. Delicious! Did I mention that we liked the Hungarian wines?
Or maybe we were just enjoying a change from all the German and Czech beers. How will we fill our empty glasses in Austria?
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