(This is the 21st post of our Croatia-Budapest trip, June-July 2014)
Tuesday, July 1

Yep.  Today is the day to get into the Parliament Building–the building that dominates much of the skyline on the Pest side of the river.  We worked through the concierge in our hotel, and they were able to get us in, for a small donation of 4,000 florints (approximately 18 US dollars).  But our time was later on, so we walked along this side of the Danube.First monument is Attila Jozsef, a statue of a “brooding young poet,” whose most famous poem is about seeing a watermelon float by in the Danube, from probably that very spot. This monument of empty shoes is one of the more poignant of our trip.  “While many Jews were sent to concentration camps, the Arrow Cross [the Nazi puppet government at the time] massacred some of them right here, shooting them and letting their bodies fall into the Danube” (Rick Steves). This one is filled with pebbles, a sign of remembrance.  While we’ve seen many war dead memorials and many also dedicated to the slain Jews in the Holocaust, the personal nature of these shoes brought home the idea that it was father, mother, sisters, friends who were slain in that most atrocious of regimes.  It also made me think of continuing slaughter going on around the world–and how the cycle of evil and horror now continues in places I’ll never visit, and who will never have memorials like this one.

We amble back toward the Parliament.This show of five soldiers is going on.  We have video of them moving in precision, but couldn’t quite figure out why people were laughing–was it a parody?  But they seemed so serious. Finally we are in, herded through their new visitor center which apparently just opened.  It was evident they were still getting the kinks out.  It took 10 minutes to get the crowd through security.Up some stairs, down some halls.  We snap photos on the run, for we were always moving.  Finally we stopped at one spot for five minutes, where the guide — in English, for we had specified an English-speaking tour — spoke to us.  Then she flipped into Hungarian and repeated herself.  We had a double tour, a double crush of tourists.We finally stop in this hall: the Reception Hall, where many wooden statues surround the columns, apparently the way that the “common man” was represented in these lofty halls of grandeur.  I snap photos of the different figurines, but it’s difficult to get a good shot.This is the Assembly Hall of the House of Representatives.  Gorgeous.  That was another quick stop.  Then we went past the Hungarian Crown, where no photos were allowed.  This explains why everyone was snapping photos of the replica over in the church in Buda.

This is one I grabbed from the web.  Those chains radiating out from the crown are most interesting, as is the tilted cross: “The cross was knocked crooked in the 17th century when the crown was damaged, possibly by the top of the iron chest housing the insignia being hastily closed without the crown having been placed in it properly. The cross has since been left in this slanted position, and is now always depicted as such” (Wikipedia).We were ushered to the top of these steps–where heads of state enter to meet Hungary’s officials, most notably a President and/or the Prime Minister.  Then it was over.  Thirty minutes of “seeing” and we were ushered out.  Quickly now. Right now.  Come on now, you tourists need to leave, because I’m a big guy holding a gun.  So we did, feeling a bit like we had been had, Hungarian Tourist Office-style.  My advice if you ever go there: put your camera on quick shoot mode and take a million photos wherever you are, for you don’t get to linger or compose your shots. Back out, we go past a building that has metal spheres where the bullets riddled the facade in 1956–a year of uprising against the Communist Regime in power.Imre Nagy, the bronze statue on this bridge, was a pre-eminant politician during a difficult time, thought to be on the wrong side of history and was executed by the Soviets.  His reputation has since been revised, rehabilitated and his statue now keeps watch on the Parliament across the way.  I like the handsome man next to him.

A few minutes earlier, we’d been recruited by four young medical school graduate students to take photos of them together on this bridge.  In talking to them, two of them were American, who’d come to Hungary to medical school. I’m sure there was more to this interesting story, but they were off to celebrate as they had just graduated and were all departing for different places.Just up the street is this statue of Ronald Reagan.  While it’s interesting to have this here, it was erected in 2011 “to deflect attention from a brewing scandal” (Steves).  Dave refused to hold his hand:We walked around the streets in the Leopold Area, noticing this small market–lunch, anyone?–but not much was there.This beautiful building is the Postal Savings Bank, designed in the late 19th century, with beehives along the roofline.  Art Nouveau buildings are all around, but the finest was this example (above), the Bedo-Haz building.Don’t mind if we do.This ginger-ale with a slice of orange was a welcome revelation.  How come I’ve never thought to put ORANGE in my ginger-ale?  I’m so trying this when I get home.  It was delicious. We shared a lunch under this umbrella-ed sidewalk restaurant, enjoying the break from the tourist action, recovering from our too-brief tour of the Parliament building.  I moaned to Dave that I still had NO souvenirs, none.  Zip, unless you count the Croatian T-shirt in the red/white check.  Which I didn’t.  This was our last day, our last afternoon, and we still have a couple of more things to see.  So after paying the bill, we walk on towards St. Istvan’s Basilica.

Next post: Will she get a souvenir? and other sundry events

(This is the 19th post of our Croatia-Budapest trip, June-July 2014)
Monday, June 30

Revived by a break in the action, we head back out, up the graffiti-ed escalator, getting out at the Opera Stop, for I’d heard you could just walk into that building and look around.

I think we need this for our front porch.

What’s this?  There are a couple people in line at this freestanding kiosk, and we’re always up for something new.

The woman inside (there is a man helping her in that tiny space) keeps moving the dough rolled on the handled sticks up on the rack.  I’m assuming that is the rising rack.  When they are ready, she moves all the sticks up a slot in the baker/oven which is really like a radiating grill of heat, blasting the rotating sticks.

When it’s done, she slides off the cooked treat into a pan of toppings: we chose cinnamon-sugar.

What a find!  We remarked on how the only treat we knew like this was when the Scouts wrap poppin’ fresh dough around a stick and half-cook/half-burn it over a campfire.  We much prefer this one.

We arrive at the Opera House five minutes before they are shutting the whole thing up for a performance, and did we want to attend?  Since we were about to begin the Hunt For Dinner, we passed.  And after five minutes, they ushered us outside, but we did get a couple of shots.

Portico.  There were two vans parked under this elaborate ceiling, and we could see they were broadcasting trucks as the opera was being televised.

This dining establishment was shut down.  I”ll bet I know why: some of those 30,000 students who graduated from law school grew up and work now for corporate America, shutting down knock-offs.  But it is clever.

Dave had the pepper stew (above) and I had the “Home pasta.”  I was the winner, but Dave’s was pretty good, too.  Not too many restaurants were open; the waiter explained they’ll all be open later, after dark.  I’m thinking “after the soccer match.”

We cap it off with this lovely cake.  I often feel like I’m off-sync with the nightlife in the cities we go to.  After walking for 8+ hours some days, we are tired and ready to call it quits, so are usually at those eating establishments way before they are ready for us.  We probably wear overly-padded athletic shoes, too, and have grey hair.  Well, a few strands.

We wanted to eat early tonight for one reason: to get pictures of the Parliament Building.  We take the Metro under the Danube, getting off at the first stop, and find a place along the promenade.  We are slightly off-center, so Dave walks down to see if he can get a better shot. As I wrote in my journal:

“We stood on the walkway on the Danube River, across from the unlit Budapest Parliament Building. We were nearing the end of our Croatia-Budapest trip and the long day of sightseeing was coming to close. We watched the boats move up and down the river, turning and retracing their steps to pass by again past the stately building, waiting as we were. And then we saw it—the faint glow of lights on the building, the sky deepening into blue, the rain clouds of that day a backdrop to the lit edifice. Dave went a bit further down the promenade to see if he could get past those “irritating cruise boats” that were blocking his perfect photograph.

“The next thing I know he is standing on the waist-high wall that prevents tourists like ourselves from falling thirty feet below to the concrete dockside, and I know what he is thinking—trying to get above the cruise boats and the docks. But when I saw him flailing his arms backward trying to regain his balance, my heart skips a beat and I’ve rushed forward to that place in time where I’m trying to figure out how to get a dead tourist home on the airplane, and I start muttering, “Get. Off. The. Wall” over and over, and thankfully he does. He comes walking back to me with a smile on his face, most likely very aware of the near heart attack I must have been suffering.

“We attempt a selfie photograph here, but we are too old for these things, so a young couple rescues us, laughing when I tell them I want them to shoot it in square format for my Instagram feed. We are certainly not what they expect Instagrammers to look like, but whatever, we are what we are: middle-aged tourists in sneakers with some wrinkles, both in clothing and faces.”

I loved the kissing couple behind us in this version.

And now our attention turns back to the deepening night, and the rising of the lights on the building: We stayed until it was dark, cold and a bit windy, and headed home.  One more day.

Next post: Parliament, and Ronald Reagan holds hands with Elizabeth