La mia avventura ungarese (My Hungarian adventure)

Not meaning for this to become less and less about Italy, but this past weekend I traveled to Budapest, where my friend Hannah is studying abroad, with my friends Natalie and Cassandra!  Natalie, Cassandra, and I have a motto when we travel together: "gangbusters".  As in, we "gangbuster it" when we travel.  Really meaning, we have no shame about multiple guidebooks, see as much as we can while maintaining a healthy balance of quality vs quantity, and try as hard as possible to do the most genuine and original things of the city we are visiting.  Normally this just applies to our day trips to Italian towns, but in Budapest we had 3 whole days.  Therefore, our weekend was so packed and we did so many cool things, I am just going to have to list it below:

-Budapest Synagogue:  The biggest synagogue in all of Europe, built in a revival Moorish style, so it has some awesome minarets.  Also, unlike a lot of other synagogues, it is pretty decorated on the inside.

-Buda Var (Buda Castle): Budapest is actually two separate cities divided down the middle by the Danube.  My friend Hannah lives in Pest - this is the flatter side, a lot more city-like.  Buda, on the other hand, is hilly and feels older with lots of twisty historic roads.  So we walked up the hills to reach the castle, which has now been transformed into the Hungarian National Gallery.

-Fisherman's Bastion: a lot of the sites in Budapest are actually pretty new - this medieval-like wall with turrets and statues is actually no more than 150 years old or so.  But you get awesome views of Pest, Parliament, and the Danube...and also get to feel like one of those French soldiers in Monty Python.  The Bastion was apparently named for the guild of fishermen that defended this part of Buda in the middle ages!

-Vorosmarty Christmas Market: the Hungarian christmas market in the middle of Pest!  Kind of like a German christmas market, with all the cool booths selling traditional food, crafts, bags, etc.  We all came away with a Hungarian souvenir (mine was a traditional blue-dyed apron) and also ate the most incredible kolbasz (sausage) of our entire lives.  Perfect sausage with the perfect dijon mustard.  And then of course we had to drink some hot spiced wine.  And then of course I had to buy some hot-coal-oven-fired dough thing covered in cinnamon sugar, which solidified this meal's position as one of my Top 5 Food Experiences of All Time.

-Rudas Baths: On my other Top 5 list, that being the Top 5 Coolest Things I Have Ever Done.  Budapest is actually a city of baths - they have a ton of these thermal mineral baths, like the Roman baths, that have been around for centuries.  So one night we went to Rudas baths, especially notable because the building was built during the Turkish occupation of Budapest in the 1500's - so we got to bathe like the Romans under an Ottoman dome.  The air inside was heavy and humid and smelled like sulfur and minerals, and the water felt almost thick.  There were 5 different baths of different temperatures - we even made it into the one that was 42 degrees celsius!  I cannot even explain how cool this was.  And no pics were allowed, so search "Rudas baths Budapest" to see where we were.

-Gerbeaud historical coffee house:  Another favorite Hungarian concept: coffee houses!  Apparently coffee house culture was big in Budapest even before it arrived in Vienna and Paris, so Budapest really is THE original.  Now don't get me wrong, I love Italian coffee and bars, but there is definitely a difference between taking an espresso in 5 minutes at a bar and sitting down with a big cappuccino or latte in a coffee house.  Gerbeaud is one of the oldest in Budapest, so of course we had to make a stop.

-Parliament: A seriously impressive building, also on the newer side, but especially impressive because they actually screwed up the building material.  They built Parliament with a really porous material that is literally destined to be dirty until the building crumbles.  I kind of liked it though, it added some quality (and gloomy) character to the place.

-Basilica of Szent Istvan (Saint Stephen):  Honestly, this should probably go on my list of Top 5 Coolest Things too.  Because, while the Basilica itself is just ok, we went there with a purpose: to find the "Holy Right Hand" of Saint Stephen, as in, this sounded like one of the weirdest and coolest reliquaries we could imagine.  So after wandering through this huge church, we finally made it into this little chapel in the back that had a little gold box.  And of course the room was so dark (yes, this stereotype of doom/gloom/greyness in Eastern Europe seemed to hold pretty true) we couldn't see anything at all.  But before we could get too disappointed, the nice Hungarian guard told us to stick a couple coins in a slot off to the side, and a light turned on in the gold box...AND WE SAW THE MUMMIFIED HAND OF SAINT STEPHEN!

-Paprika restaurant:  Wouldn't be a real trip to Hungary without some goulash.  And it was delicious.

And our final act in Hungary before our 4 am departure Tuesday morning?  We went to the movies.  Because in Hungary, they aren't dubbed, at least not all the time.  So we enjoyed Twilight a bit too much, mostly because it was in english and we got to eat popcorn and m&m's.

So we caught our taxi the next morning at 4 am, and it was waiting at our door even though we came downstairs 5 minutes early.  And this was after we had grabbed 3 other phone numbers of taxi companies in our sleepy delirium before leaving.  Obviously, I have been living in Italy too long, because the efficiency of this taxi nearly brought us to tears of joy.  Ah, to be in a country where transportation is actually reliable...

Anyway, pictures are already up on my flickr page.  And I would hereby assess Budapest as one of Europe's most underrated cities - it is totally worth the trip!