Life in the Old World: Budapest June 28-30

Our first order of business upon arrival in Budapest was to buy our night train tickets to Krakow. When we got there we started talking with an Australian guy and he said he had been there for two hours trying to buy a ticket! He finally got called and before he left he gave his ticket number which was a good 20 or 30 numbers before the one we had pulled so we were in and out under an hour. Thank goodness!

Our first day we visited Castle Hill, the Matthias church, the old palace and the Raven gate. After dinner we walked around for a bit and saw the Parliament building lit up at night. Beautiful!

Our second day we headed to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the morning. Amazing. World War II has always interested me and so I was looking forward to going to the different World War II museums and sites in the different cities we would be visiting. After lunch at a humus bar we went to the opera house for a tour and a mini one woman opera concert. The opera house is similar to the one built in Vienna. The requirement was that it could not be bigger than the one in Vienna so instead they made it more beautiful on the inside. In the evening we visited the Chain bridge.

The third day in Budapest we wanted to see the Parliament building but they had already sold out of tickets when we got there. So instead we went to the Nagy Vasarcsarnok, the grand market hall. We tried goulash and lágnos, bread deep fried in lard with a sour cream sauce, lots of garlic, onions and tomatoes. Yum! Next we went to the Széchenyi Medicinal Baths. Along the way to the baths we stopped in at Hero's Square and Vajdahunyad castle. The baths were so much fun! The water is supplied from two thermal hot springs, one at 165 F and the other 170 F. They have three different pools outside, each different temperatures and inside different dry saunas, wet saunas, and different pools with various minerals. It was fun to go around and try all the different baths and saunas. Our favorite was a menthol smelling wet sauna. I could've stayed in there all day it smelled so good!