Yesterday was our last day in Budapest. We woke up really early and walked to the city park which was about three miles away. The weather was so perfect. On the way to the park we stopped at St. Stephen's Basillica. We had walked by it many times and the building is beautiful so we decided to go in. The inside of the church was magnificent. I don't even know how to describe it.
Everything was covered in paintings and marble and gold. It would be incredible to attend a service there.
Eventually we made our way to the park. We saw some duckies:
We saw a cool castle that had a moat and a spikey gate:
(That was totally a drawbridge at some point.)
Not sure what this is but it was on the castle grounds and of course it's beautiful.
Then we decided to do one of the hop-on hop-off bus tours. We got to sit on the top of an open double decker bus and learned a little bit about Budapest's history as we drove around the city.
We decided to hop off at the market and walked around inside. The bottom floor was all meat and produce and the top floor was snack and souvenir stands.
We went up top and Julie ordered some Hungarian Goulash which was actually really delicious.
We walked around the souvenir stands and saw some super wierd things. It was all the kind of stuff that when you buy it, you get home and think, "why on earth did I buy this?!"
Apparently cats speak in different languages too because we saw an apron that was covered in cat faces and it said "miaoooo" (instead of meow) hehe.
We hopped back on the bus which took us over the bridge to the Buda side of the city. We went all the way up the hill and saw a very Cinderella-esque church
While we were at the top we had a glass of wine and took this award-winning picture:
*cheers*
Also, I noticed that all of the Hungarian men are huge. The are very tall and muscular and a little scary. While we were riding the bus we passed a neighborhood and some guy was in his yard just casually doing pull ups on a bar hanging from a tree. I guess that's why.
Anyway, we hopped back on the bus and rode back to the Pest side where we ran into someone familiar!!
We thought, that kind of looks like Ronald Reagan, and it was! The memorial is in honor of Reagan's major role in ending communism, and the people of Budapest are forever grateful. What a cool dude.
Our bus tickets came with a free river cruise (woo!) so we did that around dusk right when the city was starting to light up.
The parliament building gets me every time.
We started talking to the young couple in front of us and figured out that they live in Atlanta and the girl went to FSU!! They were so much fun and we chatted with them for the whole two hour cruise. Afterwards, we all went to a really cool bar that I failed to take any pictures of. Ugh.
Overall, Budapest is definitely one of my favorite places that I have ever been. There is so much to do and, as you can see, it is a stunning city. Hungarian is a crazy language and the people don't speak much English but it wasn't too hard to get around. We both hope to come back someday. Hungary left us hungry for more, ha!
This morning we woke up at 5:30am and headed to the train station. We had already bought our tickets but the station was so confusing and we finally made it on to our train with literally one minute to spare. Whew. Now we are on the way to Vienna, Austria!
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