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Published: September 20th 2010
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I think it was
Budapest that I went to for the weekend. However when the first things I saw in Budapest were a Zara, a Tesco and a bunch of chavs in Chelsea shirts, I thought maybe the plane had circled Heathrow for 2 hours and sent me back to London. However as the weekend continued, the real Budapest came to light and revealed itself as a beautiful and charming city but with a dark history of soviet rule and bloody struggles.
We started our journey in
Pest, the very flat east side of the
Danube river. The main plaza of
Deak Ferenc is full of tourist bus salespeople and beggers, so we start our way up the long, wide
Andrassy avenue, with beautiful buildings such as the opera house and the place known as the terror house where communists used to torture people. The avenue is known as the
champs ellysses of the east and with huge stores like
Gucci, it could easily be mistaken for Paris or even 5th avenue, Manhattan. No sign of a communist hangover here. The avenue ends at the huge
City Park, which begins with the impressive
Heroes Square with monuments to the founders
of Budapest and flagged by impressive galleries.
As we walked up the avenue, a festival was in progress with many pieces of art on display and kids activities going on. We stopped for some authentic street food of gyros, hmmm not sure if that is really Hungarian. We also saw some bad magic tricks being performed whilst eating lunch. It was time to move on.
From there we rode the metro back to
Buda, and took the
funicilar up the very steep castle hill. The massive Royal Palace takes up a good chunk of the walled hill area which has excellent 360 degree views of the surrounding lands, an excellent vantage point to defend a city that has been under siege for such a large part of its history.
Also on castle hill is
Matthias church, a 13th century catholic church with a coloured tile roof situated with a perfect vantage point and flanked by
Fishermans Bastion, which is a series of Roman style walls (although were built for decoration and never functioned as defensive walls) on the edge of castle hill.
We went to the
Castle labriyth on castle hill, a 1,200 metre long winding
tunnel underneath the castle that contained a series of dead-ends and circular paths with some very strange wall art. This labriynth was used to in the 1930s as part of the war-time defense program, the complex of cellars was converted into a shelter large enough to accommodate as many as ten thousand people at a time. Disfigured with concrete, it served as a secret military object during the Cold War.
Budapest at night is a spectacular sight, most of the 9 bridges over the Danube are spectacularly lit up, with the
Chain bridge standing out from the rest. After a dinner in Pest of goulash and sausages by the metre it was great to walk along the river and take photos of the lit up bridges, parliament houses and castle up on the hill.
The next morning was a trip to the thermal spa of
Gellert, a very elegant Turkish style bathing house built at the thermal springs of Gellert with numerous pools at different temperatures. I always find it weird sitting in a warm tub with 50 other people so after about half an hour we are out of there and climbing to the top of the
nearby hill containing the
Liberty statue, a female figure holding the palm leaf of victory, constructed in 1947, although this was a time after the war when the soviets took over and it was not until the revolution of 1957 that Hungary was an independent nation. We learnt this at the very Gothic parliament house where out the front there is a grave for the dozens executed by the soviets in 1957 during the revolution and a Hungarian flag with the centre ripped out, which was symbolic of the fact that the Hungarian flag used to have a centre that was a soviet symbol (it is now just green, red and white, ie the Italian flag on its side).
At the top of the hill we stopped for an amazing
chimney cake, a hollowed cake freshly baked so the steam rises up through the cake and looks like a chimney. Quality!
We walked back to our hotel admiring the many plazas and statues along the river before almost getting scammed to take a taxi to the airport. The guy tried the old dual currency trick, quoting a price in euro but then only accepting local currency at a bizarre translation rate, but you can't fool an accountant that easily and we found another cab driver who accepted the correct local currency amount. Overall, we were surprised at how easy it was to get around and how safe it was. A bit like Prague, Budapest is one of those nice "introduction to eastern Europe cities".
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