Budapest and la Cucaracha

My trip to Budapest was the last of the big city IAESTE trips for the summer, but I have plenty more traveling being planned for the fall. Six of us left from Vienna on Friday, meeting up with two others on the train (Lori and Ada, both from Canada with internships in southern Austria). The transition from Austria to Hungary was very evident, exaggerated by a quick change in weather. In Austria we passed a wind farm and little villages with upkept train stations. When we passed into Hungary the clouds rolled in and the buildings became grey, with many appearing abandoned. What were we getting ourselves into?

We arrived at the beautiful Keleti railway station located in Pest. As some of you already know Budapest is actually made up of 2 main parts Buda and Pest, divided down the center by the Danube.
This was the first, and only, old-fashioned covered terminal station I had ever been in. I thought it was really cool, like something out of an old movie (or Harry Potter). The only downside of the station was the fact that, like most things in Budapest, it was in serious need of repair.The hostel arranged through IAESTE Budapest was the worst place I've ever had the misfortune of sleeping in. The building was old and run down. The hallways looked like modern art, patched with at least a dozen different colours of tiles. I guess they just used whatever they had lying around at the time. The rooms were run-down and ours had cockroaches! Nothing like opening your bag in the morning only to see a few cockroaches come running out. All I thought was 'I hope they weren't crawling on my toothbrush, please God, anything but the toothbrush'.

After a hearty supper of bread and goulash served out of a 90L pot on the floor we headed out on a hike to the citadel on Gellért Hill where we could lookout over the city.

One of the focal points of the citadel is the large Liberty Statue. Szilvia, my Serbian/Hungarian coworker said people in Budapest refer to the statue as the 'bottle opener' due to its shape.
It was raining a bit, as you can see in the photo, but just enough to cool us off. We could also see the city below. Thanks to the darkness and the rain, all my photos turned out blurry. This photo I stole from Ada.
After the citadel some people went to the bar but we decided to walk back, hang out with the cockroaches, and get some sleep because we were dead tired and it was already well past midnight.

The next morning we went on the BudaQUEST, basically a tour of the city in small groups with some trivia questions we had to answer. Our group gave up on the trivia pretty quickly deciding instead to just see as much as we could.

After a bad start we were about to declare a mutiny and go off on our own when our tour guide 'Csabi' (a common Hunagrian guys name pronounced 'Chubby') brought us to the Fisherman's Bastion. It was like nothing I have seen anywhere else. It was almost fairy-tale-esque with seven white towers perched on the hillside all carved out of stone. In the courtyard there was a statue of St. Stephen, the first King of Hungary, below which there was a man with a falcon.

For 500HUF (€2 or $3) you could hold it. When Ada and Lori were up holding the falcon it just sat contently, staring at the camera. When I held it it did nothing but stare me down, I think it was planning an attack, deciding how to kill me and make off with my body before its trainer could react. The falcon's name was as menacing as it's stare, "Chirpy". Needless to say I survived Chirpy's death stare to live another day.
From the bastion we went to Buda Castle just a few minutes away where we sat to eat a lunch of buns and cat food (aka pâté). The castle was built during the time when Hungary was part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and it was easy to see. It was one of the only majestic Vienna-scale buildings in Budapest. Too bad it was heavily destroyed in WWII, with the remaining interiors gutted and burned by the communist government in the 1950s, because they symbolized the lavishness of the old Habsburg 'regime'. However, the exteriors have been mostly restored and the gardens were we sat to eat were very nice.

A statue in the gardens of Chirpy. From there we walked throughout the city stopping at a street festival and some other important buildings. One building we passed along the way looked really aqukward, like it was going to fall over, but none of us could really understand why.

That building is also a perfect example of Budapest. Beautiful, but chipping away, in desperate need of refurbishment.

In the subway (the second oldest in the world, second only to London) there was a really creepy advertisement for the Hungarian circus.
We took the subway to Heroes' Square, with its centre piece, the Millennium Monument. Now, step out of your North American mindset and figure out what a 'millennium' monument built back in 1896 would commemorate.
That's right, apparently the Kingdom of Hungary (Magyar in Hungarian) was founded in 896AD! by these guys, the heads of the seven Magyar tribes.

Heroes square is also the gate to City Park.

We came upon this creepy statue of the 12th century chronicler "Anonymus" it is apparently good luck to touch his pen.
The highlight of the park, by far, was the Széchenyi Medicinal Baths. The cost of admission was covered by IAESTE, but it was less than €5. For that price we got access to every pool, hot tub, and sauna in the place.
The place was like a paradise fom ancient Greece or Rome. The three outdoor pools were heated a bit, making them far warmer than any swimming pool at home, let alone the river, but the trainees from Central America and the Mediterranean were shivering! We weren't allowed to bring a camera inside, but I found this photo online.Inside there were large rooms with baths of varying temperatures, we went on a tour sampling each one then moving on. There were rooms with 38°C pools, a basin of icechips to take into the hotter saunas, a 15°C pool to give old men heart-attacks upon exiting the hot saunas, and much much more. Some of the rooms had huge plaster domes (seen in the picture of the front of the building), and some had carved stonework making them feel like old Turkish baths. However, this place could really use a few million dollars in renovations. Some of the domes had nets below them to catch falling flakes of paint (and chunks of plaster?).

Here we are in the lobby all relaxed and soft from the mineral water which feeds the baths. From left to right is Anon (Hong Kong), Lori, MA, me, and Ada. As you can see I had a very international weekend, spending almost all my time with Canadians.
After the baths we went to a Hungarian restaurant where we got an amazing meal of schnitzel, beef, and lamb on potatoes and sauerkraut. It was one of the best meals I've had in Europe. That night we went to a bar on an island in the Danube called 'Cha Cha Cha'.

There was really nothing planned Sunday so we (the 4 Canadians) decided to tour on our own and see the things we missed the day before.

Randomly Lori had heard that Budapest had the largest European synagogue. So, we tracked it down. The Dohány Street Synagogue was big, but no where near as large as most European basilicas or cathedrals. However, every surface was meticulously decorated. The highlight of the visit: wearing a yarmulka (yamaca).
In the back there was a small graveyard and a large 'weeping willow' memorial for the 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed in the Holocaust. Most of the leaves on the willow bear the name of someone who died in the holocaust.

From the synagogue we walked to St.Stephen's Basilica, one of the most impressive churches I've seen so far. As it was Sunday, the there was a mass going on so we could only enter by the side aisle, but we still managed to get some great pictures. I have to admit that the cool picture of the dome is another one of Ada's.To get a good idea of the size of this place, click on the photo below to get the full size version. In the bottom corner you can see people standing. This place was awe inspiring with every surface covered in gold and frescoes .In Europe you see more bronze busts than you could shake a stick at, but this one was different.

On the Danube promenade there is a unique memorial, "Shoes on the Danube Promenade", to people killed in WWII for attempting to save Hunagrian Jews by giving them Swedish passports. They were shot on the promenade, falling into the river. The shoes are made out of cast iron in styles from the 1940s.
The Hungarian Parliament is loacted on the Pest side of the promenade only a few meters from the shoe memorial. The parliament was surrounded by portable fences and police, a reminder of the protests which occured there last summer.
We walked back to the chain bridge, which was finished in the year 1849, making it the oldest permanent bridge across the Danube in Budapest. Like ALL the bridges which cross the Danube, it was bombed in WWII, and later rebuilt. The bridge was closed to traffic and instead had a sidewalk sale with vendors selling delicious food, crafts, and souvenirs.
We spent 1000 HUF (€4) on one of these desserts. It was like a large tubular cinnamin bun, but instead of cinnamin, we got a vanilla flavoured one. According to Szilvia they normally cost 200 HUF and we were ripped off, but I still think it was worth it.
From the market we made our way back to the train station, stopping in for a tour of the State Opera house. I'm still amazed by how the outdoor ceilings in Europe can be as elaborate as those inside. The picture below is of the roof at the entrance to the Opera.The Budapest Opera looked very very similar to the Vienna Opera (a relic of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire again) just about half the size. However, it was far nicer, with much more detail and gold in the auditorium. Too bad that, unlike in Vienna, subtitles are only available in Hungarian!
My last photo from Budapest, a mix of the old and new. Hungary has only been a member of the EU since 2004, and since then has made major improvements and seen lots of growth. Give it ten years and it will rival Vienna in beauty (and hopefully cleanliness).
This weekend my friend Pat will be in Vienna, so I'll just be showing him around. I hope to get to the catacombs beneath Stephansdom and the giant ferris wheel at the Prater so I might have some cool photos to share.

Work has started to slow down and become a little repetative. Hopefully things will change soon, if not I'll ask for some extra work or just help out on other projects when I have nothing else to do. We got a new trainee at ECHEM this week named José from Portugal who will be here until April. Thats all for now, remember to post a little comment, it's nice to know who's reading.