Budapest: Day 3

Saturday, February 16

So turns out Budapest is humungous and trying to walk around to all the places on our list was impossible, so we scored a deal on a Big Bus Tour.  Basically this bus takes you all over the city and you can hop on/off whenever you want.  There was also commentary for places we went passed, which was very helpful because we never had any idea what we were looking at!  We started a joke that the theme of the trip was "What's that?!".  Some of the places we went on the tour were the Shoes on the Danube Promenade (memorial for Jewish victims of WWII), the Citadel (in Buda-on a hill with the Liberty Statue and what I'm assuming was a fortress because weapons are displayed outside it), the Castle district (in Buda-very neat building that I can't identify and the Royal Palace-much better view from down below near the river) and the Jewish Quarter (there is a fee to enter it, so we saw it from the outside while enjoying a Bailey's coffee).  My favorite part of the tour was the magnificent views of Pest and seeing the old buildings in Buda.  For lunch we ate at a buffet-style cafe in the Castle district.  I could only identify a few things in the line, so I chose what I thought was a fried veggie balls (told you, they fry everything) and rice with veggies.  The balls ended up to be meat, what kind of meat I cannot say.  I said chicken, another girl said fish-maybe tuna and another thought it might be lamb.  It was pretty tasty so I moved on from the mystery.

Shoes on the Danube Promenade

 

Chain Bridge

Operating large weapons at the Citadel

Citadel- Liberty Statue

Fisherman's Bastion

Matthias Church

After the tour we stopped back at the weekend market for dessert.  I got hot wine (tasted like cider!) and a cheese strudel-pastry type thing.  Both were delicious!  I tried a poppy-seed strudel, but had to spit it out.  It honestly tasted like dirt.  The market was super crowded and it was getting cold, so we headed back for a relaxing night in the hostel.  Two girls went to the Turkish Baths, but two of us didn't bring our swimsuits so we stayed back and had a few Hungarian beers.  We had dinner at a gyro place up the street from our hostel. The pita included meat, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, some veggie I couldn't identify, tzatziki sauce and chili sauce.  It was probably the best gyro pita ever. 

We had to be up at 3 to catch our 6 am flight so we called it a night after dinner.  When we left at 3:30 people were still raging hard down in the hostel bar!  We experienced sketchy cab ride number two on the way back to the airport.  The cab driver took a lot of alley roads and I was convinced at some points that we were going to be kidnapped.  He also drove just like the first one, passing cars even when cars were coming at us head on!  I was very relieved to get to the airport in one piece.  My morning quickly took a turn for the worse when I realized I had booked my flight back to London for March 17, not February.  Ugh!! 61,000 forints (Hungarian currency) later, I had a flight home on the correct date.