Tour of Budapest
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
After getting up at a leisurely 9.30am, we slowly made our way into the Castle district of Buda. We decided that we wanted to go to the main Budapest castle. It looked like a long way up from where we were standing but luckily they have nicely put up a funicular (cable car) for us to get to the top. Unfortunately it cost a bomb so we had to make a detour to a Bankomat (ATM). It was nice really that we couldn’t just go up because we got to go through a tunnel and into another part of Buda, and the Bankomat was attached to a supermarket so we decided to buy some lunch and sit in the park for a bit.
Going up the funicular wasn’t too special, but it was a really fast way of getting up to the top, as opposed to walking up in this heat! At the top we could see panoramic views of the city from all directions, it was breathtaking, and we both love just hanging around castles. This was a particularly good castle as you could just walk around it going into the gardens and up the turrets and over the…, and under the..., you get the idea. It was really nice in Buda that the tourist industry seems to be much smaller than Prague, and you get to see a hell of a lot more because of it. As well as just being nicer to walk the streets and have a bit of room to ‘be’.
Anyway after the castle we headed over to Pest on a bus, going over the ‘Adam Clark’ bridge (it’s called something different but this is the guy that built it several hundred years ago) it’s a very famous old bridge, Sarah has found the name… it’s the Szechenyi Lanchid. The bus took us all the way to the end of Andrassy Street, which is kind of the main entertainment street with bars, café’s and shops all down it. Towards the end there are a lot of old palaces and the road leads to Millennium monument. This is the begging of a huge park with a Castle in the middle that has a moat. We wandered around the park for the better half of an hour, ending up at the spa complex which is apparently largest in Europe. Was stunning. From there we took the underground (this is the oldest functioning underground in Europe, and was nicely done up but the train itself was pretty crusty) back into the centre of Pest and got the worlds most expensive ice cream before heading home… Tomorrow we intend to head out early to the train station and find our way to Austria…
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 pm,
