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Europe » Hungary » Central Hungary » Budapest
August 1st 2010
Published: June 26th 2017
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Geo: 47.4984, 19.0408

This morning we caught up on email and Phil caught up on school work before we checked out of the hotel. Over the next week we will have Internet access from the riverboat, but I don't know how reliable it will be since we will be traveling through some remote areas of Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. After checking out, we took a cab to the Intercontinental Hotel which is the meeting point for our cruise. The Avalon hosts were there and invited us to join an afternoon tour planned for the sister ship, the Imagery, since we had time to go. The lobby area was full of bags for people on the Imagery, but our two bags were the only ones going to the Tranquility. They looked pretty lonely sitting there, but we were assured that they would be loaded on the correct ship. The bags were in our stateroom when we arrived later in the day.

We went along with passengers from the other ship for the Communist Tour stopping at just two places.

First stop was the Terror House. It is a museum built in a former prison telling the story of the brutalities incurred there during the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Perhaps hundreds of people were tried and executed there during that time, particularly during and after the 1956 uprising. It was all very disturbing to think what was happening there while people in the US were enjoying a time of post-war boom.

After visiting the Terror House we rode out of town a short way to see the Statuary Park. In 1991, when Hungary regained independence from the Soviet Union, most of the other former Soviet states were destroying their hated symbols of communism and the tyrants who led them. The people of Hungary decided to move all the statues and monuments to one place, rather than destroy them. They built this Statuary Park as a type of outdoor museum displaying some of the statues that were removed from the city.

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