Budapest

Well, I’m getting this up a little later than I had planned, but last week we had our trip to Budapest, Hungary. Budapest is such a beautiful city! There was quite a bit that was similar to Vienna, but overall there was a different feel to the town. The Danube runs right through the middle of the two towns, Buda and Pest, and they are connected by the Chain Bridge (among other bridges). On thing that I found very interesting about Budapest is that instead of cleaning up and rebuilding everything after the wars, they have left bullet holes in buildings, and created countless monuments to war victims and such. They also managed to keep their “Hungarian-ness” so now, visiting the country, you are still able to see, feel and taste their culture. I decided to do something a little different this time. Instead of writing everything I did, I'm going to take you on a picture tour of my stay in Budapest.

The money (Forints) was really fun - like playing Monopoly... they didn't have "dollars and cents" - we dealt in thousands!

The week in Budapest was perfect - nice weather and beautiful fall colors.


We took a tour that took up into the castle district ... they were so beautiful!

Hungarian, or Magyar is a very interesting language. It's not similar to anything else! I felt completely helpless. My Germanic and Romantic language skills did not serve me well at all.

There were quite a few homeless people sleeping in parks and other areas. Walking up these stairs it felt like I was intruding on someone's home.

Backyard community laundry. It was somewhat run-down but it had a nice feel to it.

Watching the sunset from the castle district on the first night in Budapest while writing in my journal. It was so beautiful! I took a series of pictures about every five minutes. It was great.

This was beautiful little walking path along the castle wall. The beautiful view of the city and the fall colors came complete with cannons.

This is the beautiful Chain Bridge over the Danube. The way everything was light up at night was potentially more amazing than the buildings themselves during the day.

This is a rather interesting Synagogue. It was designed/built by a catholic man who had never been in a synagogue before. It looks just like a cathedral, except that where there should be crosses, there are Stars of David.

"Whoever saves a life is considered as if he has saved an entire world."


Holocaust Memorial - each leaf has a name on it.


This is one of the bombed out buildings - you can see the bullet holes in the side... the largest being in the middle of the wall just between the two cars. The inside of the building is not much more than an empty shell.


We were going take these stairs down the hill, but they didn't go very far...

The stairs we ended up taking...


Sunrise on the Danube. Beautiful! What more can I say? It was such a great way to start out the day.

The train station built by Gustav Eiffel - also known for designing the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately the train station is not kept up quite as well as the Tower. It was pretty awesome though.


We found a mini zip-line at one of the parks we went to. It was really fun, but we were pretty worried about scraping the ground as we went.

Rebekah and I on the bridge just before we went to Margret's Island. It was so windy!! The island was really cool though. There were so many wonderful trees and we stopped to climb quite a few of them.


One of the spectacular trees that we climbed. This one was just perfect for sitting, swinging, and/or reading in.

I don't know what this was for... it was just standing out on the side of the road. Weird.



We hiked up to see the "Lady Liberty" on the hill and on the way we passed a little waterfall. It is actually part of some monument and the waterfall is man-made... but it looked pretty cool anyway.


Up on the hill with the Lady Liberty statue, we found a line of huge machine gun/cannons. Of course, we had to stop and take pictures on them. They were kind of scary.


It was really cold up on the hill and so we stopped for some hot chocolate in an amazing little cafe. The whole place was done in a very modern design. It was very sleek and artsy feeling. They were out of hot chocolate, so they brought out some hot carmel. It was wonderful! We enjoyed our hot carmel so much, so we decided to order some chocolate cake. It was so good! I've never had anything like it! It looked amazing and it tasted better than it looked!


On the way back to Veinna, we passed seemingly endless fields of windmills. They were so beautiful.