Buda and Pest: Part 1

We arrived in Budapest on the afternoon of March 11, and since our apartment (yes, we are in a whole apartment! We have a kitchen!) was just outside the Castle Hill walls, we explored that area first. After dinner we witnessed the city's transformation to night, and how the lights illuminate the Parliament building on the Danube. Beautiful, right?

The next day we climbed back up to Castle Hill, past the St. Matthias Fountain, into the Budapest History Museum, to learn a bit about this interesting and resilient place. The Museum is in the castle, which has been rebuilt. It has been rebuilt many times, because it has been destroyed many times. Most recently, the Uprising of 1956 (against the Russians) and the Siege of Budapest (1944, Germans vs. Russians). The Museum, especially the basement and sub-basement levels, incorporate the excavated rooms and walls of previous iterations of this place.

That afternoon, we visited New York Cafe, opened 1896, a very fancy cafe in a very fancy hotel. It had a very expensive and very delicious pistachio hot chocolate.

On our second day in the city, we took a tour of the Hospital in the Rock, which did not allow photos. Suffice it to say that all the strife in this city necessitated a safe place to care for the wounded. This place was constructed from the natural rock formations under Castle Hill, and functioned through the late 1980s. By then, it was also a bunker prepared for nuclear attack.

We went inside St. Matthias Cathedral, a church whose colorful walls and ceiling demonstrates some marriage of the Ottoman influence in the culture.

After lunch, we visited another interesting house of worship, the Cave Church. This was a cave used for worship services, and also for monks of the Pauline order. That is until the order was expelled and the cave cemented over by the Soviet Communist regime. In recent years, it is open for visitors as well as services and the restored Pauline monks. 

Across the river on the Pest side, we walked Andrussy Utca (street) to see the Hungarian State Opera House and the House of Terror. We would return to both. At the end of the street, just before City Park, is Heroes' Square. The iconic statues show the Seven Chieftains of the Magyars and in the center, the the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

A quick look into City Park, and once past the ice-skating park (too warm now) is an eye-catching castle. Obviously, at the time, I was just thinking "Ooh a castle! And it has a moat!", but wikipedia informed me later that this was built around 1900 for the Millennium Exhibition. It is such a conglomeration of architectural styles because its parts are copies of other famous landmarks throughout Hungary. Just like Nashville getting itself a Parthenon.

Up next: Attempting to visit Parliament on a national holiday, donuts, a performance at the Opera, and more!