BUDAPEST

We're finally home, rested, and with photos in hand! (Click here to see the entire set.) It was a marvelous trip, and yet I feel marvelous to be back in the states again. Tragically for Dave, he is leaving Saturday for a week long business trip to China and Taiwan. These will be his seventh and eighth countries this year. Yikes.

Anyway, the trip. We departed on a Friday night, and the air travel was much nicer than I remembered from my experience six years ago. We flew British Airways. My only complaint was that they don't award frequent flier miles for all travel, only "full priced tickets." What is THAT about?

But they had free drinks, great movies, big comfortable seats, good pie, and little kits that included eye masks and socks, of all things. My favorite detail was that the headrests had little arms that folded down, so you could lean your head against them to sleep. Genius! I watched bits of Narnia, The Producers, and TransAmerica before falling asleep, and was able to sleep for about 5 hours. My knees were positively killing me when I woke up, it's just not natural to sit for so long in one place. I was also entertained briefly by my book and some sudoku puzzles.

Same story on the way back, by the way, except I didn't sleep, watched all of King Kong, The Matador, and half of Match Point. And listened to the screams of a toddler that truly gave the impression of serious physical abuse.

We arrived in Budapest in early evening and were delighted to find that it was a simple matter to navigate the airport and get a car to the hotel. Our hotel was the nicest of the trip, high ceilings, a balcony, lovely bathroom, everything you could want. Including a cool little wall-mounted magnifying mirror, that I loved despite hitting my head on it a couple times. One of our great strokes of luck was staying at a hotel on the Andrassy, which is a big beautiful thoroughfare, and we made extensive use of it every day. We kept it simple and dined in the hotel restaurant -- borsch soup, carrot soup, veal medallions, and a veal burrito-type wrap, all very tasty (although it pretty much shut down my interest in meat for the trip). We finished the night with a stroll down the street to Hero's Square, a string of monuments of significant figures in Hungarian history, all captured in a brightly lit colonnade. In contrast to the countless tourists we were to encounter on our trip, we shared the square with a few teenage skateboarders.

The following morning, we embarked on our biggest sight-seeing day of the trip. I estimate we walked about 14 miles, and saw pretty much every sight in the center of the city. I won't bore you with random churches and street names (although we did see a church with the relic of someone's stump of an arm, which we found kind of a funny claim to fame). Sufficed to say that the highlights for me were the Opera House, the Chain Bridge (and the Danube of course), views of the Parliament building, and another historic and fun strolling street, the Vaci Ucta. Since it was a Sunday, we actually got to walk down the middle of the chain bridge and admire it from within. It culminates at the Four Seasons, which is a great looking building at a perfect location, rich bastards.

One of the interesting things about Eastern Europe was that everyone on the street is in a perpetual state of eating an ice cream cone. Everyone. After spying the first few dozen cones, we stopped for gelato, and of course it was magnificent. We had some happy hour snacks at the hotel, and finished with a light dinner at a place on Adrassy called Premier, where I had my favorite dish in Hungary -- cold fruit soup. It was a delicious puree of berries, with a spice that tasted like cloves to me, and some tiny cherries thrown in for good measure. Fantastic.

The next day I awoke to -- of all crazy things -- a marching band. Turns out it was Hungary's version of Labor Day, which seems to be celebrated mostly by passing out balloons. We took the subway back down to the Vaci Ucta to visit a historic and very cool pastry shop called Girbeaud, then had lunch at the first McDonalds to open in Eastern Europe. Then we took the subway to City Park to experience the Szechenyi Baths.

For me, this was the highlight of the trip. After a slightly unclear process of paying for entry and changing in sort of open air locker rooms, we took a brief dip in an indoor bath, and then headed outside. It was an overcast day, drizzling and chilly. It didn't take much convincing for me to hustle to the nearest pool and join the locals. The buildings were enormous and banana yellow, and the pools were also giant, a perfect temperature, and lots of people speaking every language under the sun -- except English. It was so relaxing to listen to the murmur, unwind, and people watch. (What attracts older portly men to the speedo? No answer was in evidence.) It was high entertainment in hot water, what more could a person ever want?

For dinner we went to Franz Liszt square, and had a terrific dinner at a trendy place called Menza. This square has on display one of the most clever details I've ever seen -- there are lots of outdoor cafes, and every café provides a nicely folded microfleece blanket over the back of every chair. Every café has it's own color of blanket, and we noticed lots of people wrapping up when the air had a chill. Isn't that smart?

One more snooze at the hotel, and we were off to the train station...