Budapest

So our night train was fun!  When we first arrived in Prague, we bought our night train from Krakow to Prague and got it deluxe, so when we got our tickets from Brasov to Budapest we decided not to do deluxe.  That turned out to be a mistake, but more on that later.  For not being deluxe it was actually not bad.  We still had our own private room with beds, outlets, etc. and a shower (with cold water) down the hall.  Since Romania is not part of the Schengen agreement and Hungary is, when we crossed the border into Hungary, border control came on the train and checked our passport.  At 6am. While we were in our pajamas.  It was interesting :)  We arrived in Hungary not particularly well rested, but at least we were clean.  Despite our lack of sleep, when we got to the Budapest train station and got our tickets to Slovakia for the next day, we found out it was a longer trip than we thought and the train left at like 7 in the morning, meaning we had less time in Budapest than we thought and had to literally see all we wanted to see that day.  :o

So we quickly dropped our bags off at the hotel and hit the town.  One of the more unique things about Budapest is that it's actually kind of two cities, Buda and Pest, divided by the famous Danube river.  So we made sure to take several strolls across it and around it.


St. Stephen's Basilica was gorgeous.  It was a bit drizzly that morning, and since it wasn't supposed to rain the rest of the day and we didn't want to haul our rain jackets around all day, after the Basilica, we stopped in a cafe for a light breakfast (aka muffins) to try to wait it out.  We passed by the Parliament building but decided not to go in, since we'd just seen a big Parliament tour in Bucharest.  So instead, we went in the Budapest Museum of Folk Art, which was surprisingly awesome!  It was one of those places where, when Christianity came, they said, ok, sure! We'll add that to all our other native beliefs and traditions and just kind of threw it all together for a while, so there was an odd mix of things.

We were doing another crazy high step day (28,468/ 11.7 miles), so by the time we got around to crossing the river and heading to Buda Castle, we were ready fork over the money and take the cable car up to the top.  Also, turns out the castle is not so...castle-y anymore but is now an art museum.  Kind of disappointing, but we hadn't really been in an art museum on the trip yet, so in we went.  There were a couple of famous things (a sculpture by Rodin, "Portrait of Cardinal" by Rafaelo, etc.) The view from the top of the art gallery was totally worth it despite how tired our eyes and feet were by that point.


After a brief stop at the hotel, we had dinner at this delicious and popular Israeli restaurant where we had amazing shakshuka, falafel, and so much other deliciousness; I didn't even feel the need for dessert, which is unusual for me :)


We then took the metro to the far end of town to the city park, which had castles turned into restaurants, ponds with duckies (which I fed) and a tomb of the unknown soldier.  We tried to take the metro back, but some silly tourists could NOT figure out the ticket machine for the life of them, and we got tired of waiting, so guess what? More walking :)  We got to our hotel and slept an exhausted sleep, ready for an early morning train ride to Slovakia!