We arrived into Budapest on Wednesday afternoon around 3pm and Alan took us straight into our driving tour around the city. Our first stop was the Fisherman's Bastion and it immediately set the mood as I fell in love with Budapest. As you can probably imagine, it was stunning! We also learned that Katy Perry's "Fireworks" video was filmed there which I thought was pretty cool...I am going to have to watch it when I get home since I was actually there!
We continued on our way and spent the next hour or so touring some of the most beautiful sights that Budapest has to offer, including the Citadella, Gallert Hill, the Liberation Monument, Memento Park, etc. I didn't know this but one of the bridges that we saw, the chain bridge, was the first bridge that crossed the Danube River to connect Buda and Pest when they were separate cities. Now Budapest is obviously one big city but depending on what side of the bridge you are on, either side is often referred to as the Buda side or the Pest side.
For Dinner we all went to a traditional Hungarian restaurant where Alan told us there was a challenge awaiting us. He told us once we got there that Hungarian meals are massive and that we were all being challenged to be able to finish our meals. I hadn't eaten in 6 hours and was starving! I was almost laughing to myself thinking, "has he met me? This is going to be so easy!" Well after 45 minutes of trying my hardest, I wasn't able to do it. Only two guys did out of a group of 36. Look at my before and after shots. It doesn't even look like I put a dent in my entree! Even though I didn't win, the food was delicious and my meal ending up feeding me three times so I was happy!
Thursday 7/28 -
We woke up to a rainy, cold, very blah day in Budapest which put quite a damper on our plans for our "free" day. Amanda and I set out anyway to try and make the most of it and ended up walking for several hours in on again, off again rain. We saw the Parliament Building,
Took our photo in front of the Danube River,
and went to see the Royal castle (which was my favorite),
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before giving up and heading indoors. We stood underneath the awning of a nearby restaurant for a while contemplating what to do. We didn't want to go to the hostel or to a museum but also didn't want to spend any more time in the rain, so we decided to try and find a movie theater to wait out the storm. We tried asking people but no one spoke any English and we were both getting really frustrated. I finally located a WiFi connection in a cafe and googled "Budapest movie theater" and found the Cinema City Alle (which at the time we weren't even sure was a movie theater). We tried looking at the google maps walking directions and found ourselves so lost and confused that we conceded defeat and hopped into a taxi. Looking back, the taxi experience was actually pretty funny because he didn't speak English and we weren't sure if he understood what we were asking for. He kept pointing to his wallet and then to the post office and we thought he was telling us to pay at the post office before we could get into the cab. We ended up inside of the post office trying to explain what we were doing and yielded nothing but blank stares. Long story short, the taxi driver was trying to tell us he needed to deposit his money in the post office/ western union before he could take us. Our sweet Hungarian driver still seemed a bit confused about where we were going but we finally arrived at our destination (which ended up being better than we expected because it was not only a movie theater but a brand new mall)!! Considering we hadn't checked movie times and had no idea how long the rain would last, we were glad to know we had hours of entertainment right in front of us. The shopping complex ended up being in the local part of town so Amanda and I relished the opportunity to hang with locals and benefit from non tourist pricing. The only two movies showing in English were "Larry Crowne" and "The Lincoln Lawyer" so we ended up seeing both! Haha! I know it wasn't a very touristy day, but we really enjoyed ourselves! Finding the movie theater was still an adventure and it absolutely made both of our days!!! :)
That's all for now. Tomorrow we are off to Vienna via Bratislava in the afternoon so I will check in again soon!
Love,
Lindsay
-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Budapest, Hungary
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