Around The World 2011 Day 28: Budapest, Hungary

One important thing to do when you are traveling is drink a lot of water.  And to do that in Europe you need to be able to tell still water from carbonated water.  In Italy, it is easy; naturale and frizzante.  In Hungary, I was lost.

I could not find any words on these bottles to distinguish which is carbonated.

But look at the model's hair?  Straight for flat water and frizzy for sparkling!  The code is cracked.  (Cracked after opening the bottles and drinking some, and then noticing her hair.)

First thing we plan to do is walk around the corner and visit Saint Stephen's Basilica.

This is literally what we see when we walk out of our hotel and turn right at the first corner.

Everyone takes a picture with the broze copper.  But how many stick out their belly to match his?  Not many, my dear friends.

See the café to the left?  We stopped in there for breakfast before visiting Saint Stephen's.

Cappuccino for her, espresso for him, and a fantastic croissant to share.

Forty-seven degrees north latitude?  In Phuket I stood at eight degrees north latitude.  I really need to live on the equator.

It is actually the law that no building in Budapest can be built taller than Saint Stephen's, which explains why the Parliament building is the same exact height.

This church is named after Saint Stephen I of Hungary, who served as the first King of Hungary from 1000–1038 AD.  His incorruptible right hand is somewhere in the building, but we did not see it.  Pope Gregory VII canonized Stephen I in 1083 for spreading Christianity throughout his kingdom.  It is funny when people get mad at today's Popes for politically motivated sainthoods, as if this has not always been the way it is done.

Barbie lights a candle in every church.  You should, too.

How beautiful is the dome of Saint Stephen's?  And more importantly, how great a picture is that!  Un-cropped, I might add.  I lined that sucker up myself, with a little help from the circular guide in ProCamera.  Fine.  A lot of help.

I like how they let us know to not go any closer, unless you are actually there to pray.  You know my favorite quote about prayer, no?  I have to clean it up here, but it goes something like, Pray in on hand and ... in the other and see which fills up first.  However dirty you made the omitted words would be your problem, not mine.

Barbie shows you Saint Stephen's Square from the gates of the Basilica.

Note: Obelisk and Waste Wear, together for the first time.

Obelisk in the tall circle; Waste Wear in the wide circle.

We walked over to  Erzsébet tér, or Elizabeth Square, to catch the hop-on hop-ff bus.

The bus was not going to come for 45 minutes; we strolled and improvised.

Globalization.  Note McDonald's to the let and TGIF's to the right.

You cannot escape Ikea.   The Swedes have seen to it.

In front of the Lutheran Church sits this memorial to Lutheran Pastor Gabor Sztehlo, who protected as many as 2,000 Jewish children and adults from the Arrow Cross Party, the Nazi's stand-ins in Hungary during the War.  After the war he gave home and shelter to countless Jewish orphans.

After this woman passed us, Barbie pointed out that her brassiere was visible though her oddly patterned top and asked, "Did you see that?"  See it?  I took a picture.

We hopped on the bus that goes a different route from yesterday's bus, and soon we crossed the river to the Buda side.  We especially wanted to take this route to go through the famed Budapest tunnel (the Alagút ) that leads directly to the Széchenyi Chain Bridge.

Tunnel shot.  It said to not lean out of the bus.  You have no proof that I broke that rule.  This could have been taken with an iPhone that makes it appear that I leaned out of the bus.

The funicular of Castle Hill.  People love funiculars.  They even love the word funicular.

Walking along the Danube, I take another picture of Budapest's most photographed building, the Parliament Building.

And another.

Public art.

We ate at this restaurant for the same reason that people climb Everest.

Barbie chills in the restaurant.

The Coke came with a Coke glass, and the Nestea came with a Nestea glass.  Dedication to concept.  Look closely and you will see the movie star handsome waiter.  Not my appraisal, Barbie's, and she knows what she is talking about.

Barbie got the Croque Monsieur.

I got the goulash soup.  I have been craving Hungarian goulash, and this failed to satisfy the craving.  I was a foolish tourist who did not know the difference between goulash and goulash soup.

We then hopped on to the hop-on hop-off boat.  See, we are doing it right.  We paid for one day of the bus, which entitled us to two bus lines and a boat line.  We did one bus line yesterday, and during the complementary second day we have ridden the other bus line and the boat line.

The boat, she was note very pretty, but I still should have taken her picture.  I did not.  Oops.

Another. 

The Parliament Building is THERE.  (Guest photographer Barbara Howard.) 

Another.

Our hotel room is right THERE.  (Actually, my finger is pointing closer to the pool in the attic.

A shot from beneath the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, after a jillion shots of it from the hotel room.

The memorial to Bishop Gellért, who is said to have been rolled down the hill in a barrel to his death by pagans at that spot.  There was apparently a Great Pagan Rebellion in 1046.  You mean, the whole country did not want to instantly become Christian?  How odd.

A waterfall representing his fall is just beneath the monument, but I never got a decent shot of it form a moving bus.

Next to the Citadel on Gellért Hill is this statue of a woman, holding an olive branch, the symbol of peace in her hand.  It was erected in 1947 after World War II.

A quick stroll by Váci utca.  What makes this pedestrian shopping street a little different than others I have seen in other cities would be the adult entertainment club at the end of it.

We passed a shop window with this; cow patterned men's underwear with an udder over the front with the word, "muuu."  Tell me you have seen that before and I will call you a liar.

Always fun to see USA movie posters in foreign countries.  They say that comedy rarely translates overseas, but I think the concept of wanting to kill your boss might be universal.

Since the boat we have been walking toward the Dohány Street Synagogue.

The Dohány Street Synagogue is famous for being the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world, after the Temple Emanu-El in New York City.  It seats 3,000 people and is aNeolog synagogue, which is Hungary's equivalent of conservative Judaism for the American Jews reading this who always want to know.

Something about Jewinform made me have to take a picture.

Built between 1854 and 1859 in the Moorish Revival style, the decoration of the Dohány Street Synagogue is based on Islamic influences from North Africa and medieval Spain.

The synagogue's Viennese architect, Christian Friedrich Ludwig Förster, believed that no distinctively Jewish architecture could be identified, and thus chose, "architectural forms that have been used by oriental ethnic groups that are related to the Israelite people, and in particular the Arabs."  I know a few modern day Jews who would bristle at that comment, but this is the man who was hired to by the Jews of Budapest to design their synagogue.

Inside, you can see that the Neolog Jewish community of Budapest decided to build a synagogue that would compare favorably to any Catholic church in town.

This is from the front, looking towards the back doors.  There is great symmetry in the design.

This graveyard on the side of the synagogue is, well, the most depressing picture you may ever see on the Waste.  That is because Barbie and I are not too likely to ever visit the ruins of a concentration camp, making this picture the closest we are ever going to come.   In 1944, during the Nazi occupation, over two thousand Jews died in the ghetto from hunger and cold during the winter.  Trapped by the Nazis, the community was forced to bury these victims in mass graves.   In the picture above we are looking at a mass grave of two thousand people.  Those that could be identified have a stone with their name resting against a planter, but many buried here go without any acknowledgement.

This Holocaust memorial sits adjacent to the courtyard, acknowledging all six million lost in the Holocaust with the words Never Again.

The Emánuel Tree.  I will share what is on the plaque beside it.  Memorials to the Holocaust era were constructed on the plot of land between the Great Synagogue and the administrative center of the religious community.  After the war, a row of memorial candle lights was placed here by survivors, next to the wall closing off the plot.  The Emánuel Foundation silver weeping willow was erected in 1989.  Names of individual victims of the Hungarian Holocaust are engraved on its leaves.  The stone columns standing in the middle of the garden record the names of the Just who saved persecuted Jews.  They are framed in a glass window by Klára Szilárd, installed in 2004.


There.  I have to say that next to Berlin's Memorial To The Murdered Jews Of Europe, this is one of the best memorials I have seen.  They preserved the names of those lost and acknowledged the Just who saved those that they could.

Okay.  We can move on.  It is not easy, though.  But I was not going to visit that memorial and the mass grave and not share it.

Take a moment...

...And continue.

On our way home...  Bananas and Orange Juice.

Barbie always needs bananas and orange juice in the morning, and today we finally spotted a store where she can get these precious items.

Jackpot.

After some time in the hotel, we nearly skipped dinner but then we decided to go out for a bite to eat.  At first we turned left out of the hotel, headed towards Váci utca, but before we had taken more than fifteen steps we turned around and headed the opposite way.  Next to our hotel is Kyoto, a Japanese restaurant that somebody recommended to me while we were in Thailand.  (And I cannot remember who.  Oops.)

The red awning on the left is Kyoto.  By now you had better be able to recognize Saint Stephen's Basilica.

Kyoto is classy and modern.  You could easily transport this restaurant to New York and it would fit right in.

Barbie got the tempura udon.

The menu said Eda Mame.

I got Tom Kha Kai.

Then something funny happened.  We had ordered a sushi roll, and we waited and waited.  Surely the waiter got the order, because when we ordered he asked if we wanted the three or six piece roll.  After around fifteen to twenty minutes, when the roll never came, and Barbie was nearly falling asleep at the table, we asked for the bill.  He brought it quickly, and the roll we ordered was not on there.  We will never know if he removed the roll from the bill before bringing it or if he never ordered the roll from the kitchen for us.  The food was excellent, but it is hard to say it was a good experience overall.

These sculptures are in our hotel lobby.  The light was low at night, but to make up for the graininess we have gone with black and white.

Barbie rightly pointed out that I have to share this with YOU.  The Four Season Gresham Palace elevators have these old school dial floor indicators.  That arm moves.  Fantastic decor.

Before you say, "Not another shot of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge," look again.  I used SlowShutter to catch the lights of the cars streaking through.

Until tomorrow.