Conquering Budapest with my camera

We are back in action with the camera and Ron was barely directionally disoriented at all today so I am calling this a successful site-seeing day! We both really like Budapest. Sometimes I feel like I’m in Paris and sometimes I feel like I’m in an upstart young city that’s trying to assert its particular style. There’s construction everywhere – I’m told by numerous tour guides that it’s slow going but continual. Here’s a couple of shots from today. In the second one, in an arty silhouette, Ron is eating a doughnut!

We saw the House of Terror, which is a museum in the old secret police building, dedicated to telling the story of the Nazi regime in Budapest and the subsequent Soviet secret police regime. Very visually interesting but I got confused in there. My history limitations are causing problems so all I can tell you is that once the Soviets came in there were constantly shifting groups that were always arresting each other. I think. Lots of people were arrested and there were gulags. I hope you don’t all judge me when I say the one salient detail I take with me from the combined Hungarian and Polish sites is the caloric difference between Auschwitz and the Gulags: 300 calories vs. 500 calories. I don’t know why these are the things that stick in my head.

Here’s a couple of cool buildings we walked by today. One reminds me of Paris and the other of Barcelona.

We walked from our apartment to the Heroes Square area and saw the above pictures en route. Our destination at Heroes Square was Vajdahunyad Castle, which is supposed to be a 19th century castle, made in a combination of Gothic, Romanesque and Baroque styles. It would look at home in Disneyland:

I do A LOT of research for these trips. We head out with a painstaking itinerary I have mapped out, with day by day sites, grouped by walking distance and prebought tickets to any crowded sites. So it’s always a mystery to me how we are still, somehow, traipsing around cities, lost, checking our maps, making snide comments to each other about who is or isn’t an idiot. Vajdahunyad Castle presents a fine example. I marched us out there – and it took at least an hour, given that I sent us off in the wrong direction from our apartment. And once we got there, we could not find the castle entrance. Lots of people milled about and looked at the castle but no one went in. A guard finally told us there was no castle to enter but I knew I had notes to indicate otherwise – could I be that wrong? It is sometimes really hard to have faith in myself as we travel.

But we did spy the Hungarian Agricultural Museum right in front of us – it looked like the castle entrance. And so we paid our 2,400 forints ($8.51 – can they do something with the currency??) and went in. Indeed the Hungarian governmental decision was somehow made to plop a farming museum into the shell of the castle. I myself might make it a castle museum but that’s probably why I’m not in charge of things. Despite the crowds outside it was absolutely empty. We wandered the rooms just admiring the grand staircases and chandeliers. I could not help doing a little bit of farm work and so there’s this:

Our last stop was the Hungarian Opera House. We got a little tour and then we got to see/hear ten minutes of opera, which is the exact right amount of opera for me!

Here’s a last shot for my friend Jill. Let’s see if she’s reading this blog. Here’s your dentist…looks legit.