Sightings in Budapest: 7/8/2025

The day started with breakfast in the hotel, and we all had different approaches to the diverse offerings they had. Ranging from fruit and yogurt, to toast and cheese, pancakes, omelets, and more; there was something for everyone. However, it had to still be a quick meal as our first excursion would be ready to head out come 8:30. We each enjoyed our meals, grabbed any bags or coats as needed for the day, and then boarded one of the busses provided by Viking for the “Scenic Budapest” tour. The tour began with a 1 hour drive – accompanied by historical explanations – around the city. We began by heading northeast to a large green, Heroes' Square, within the city. Our guide referred to it as the Champs-Élysées of Budapest. This was both a joke because it was a local monument in a large town-central square, but also there was historical precedent to try to be like Paris at the time. As we drove around the square, we also saw what appeared to be a castle a few roads over. This was apparently not a castle, but a modern building – the Vajdahunyad Castle - which is a modern collage of buildings from diverse eras in Budapest's history. The building is now the home of the Museum of Hungarian Architecture. Our tour then took us through the heart of the city. We passed the local opera – which was part of an ongoing competition with Vienna to always one-up each other with the scale of their buildings. We passed the magnificent Istvan-Bazilika, St. Stephan's Basilica, and learned that it is the second cathedral in the same place, as the first one collapsed into soft earth. We had our first of many passes today past the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, as well as another town square. And there were many sites as well, but this all led us into the palace grounds of Buda Castle on the Buda half of the city, on the West side of the Danube River.

After walking around the palace grounds we were brought to the most notable site, the local cathedral. Unlike so many buildings in the city, this one has stood and endured

the years of history and war, notably due to being linked as an education building to survive the bombings that the city had received. The church itself had touches of a wide variety of styles. My personal favorite aspect was the golden-metallic paint inlaid with the otherwise matt coloring. As you moved throughout the building the light would catch this paint at different angles and appear to illuminate features of the walls and artwork. The roof tiles were also of particular note as they, along with the floor tiles, were a locally made and stained porcelain, but the exact formula for them was kept secret. This is also what made the exterior of the cathedral so eye-catching from afar, as the roof itself had intricate designs and vivid colorings (despite the slightly gray pictures we're able to provide sue to weather).

While we would have loved to wander the area more, the rain was coming

down harder, so we found a local bier-garden on the grounds to enjoy ourselves. We ordered a pretzel with sausage, one beer a piece, and we were talked into trying the local “shot” called a Palinka. While it comes in different flavors it is a raw alcohol mixed with a fruit flavoring – much like schnapps – and what we tried was apricot. Little did we know at the time just how often we would be offered variants of this drink over the next two weeks! Afterwards, we returned to the tour bus, and then the hotel for a short rest. After which, we headed right back out to explore the city via public transportation and return to the palace grounds again! Public transport was pretty smooth sailing. Senior citizens could ride for free and adults could buy easy single-use tickets at frequent stands (that said, you hop from bus to train so often it is likely just best to get a day-pass). The same tickets could be used for all forms of public transport, including busses, trains, etc., making the exact number we bought at the start a bit more flexible. Then a bus ride and a subway trip dropped us off a 30 minute walk from the palace grounds where we returned to experience the Budapest Museum of History, also known as the Castle Museum, as it is located inside the old Buda Castle structure.

Upon entering the building we enjoyed many impressive statues, including a grand fountain of Mattias’s Dog and numerous fabulous lions guarding the palace grounds. Many of these had clear “patches” and repairs done to them, as they had been earlier described to us as the result of bullet holes that can be seen on building-scapes throughout the city. Inside the museum the different floors were separated to different parts of the history. Our favorite was the basement which was a walkthrough of the medieval history of the castle grounds. This included a demonstration of how the water-pump systems worked, as well as a reconstruction of the chapel. One of my favorite aspects of seeing historical recoveries was to see reconstructions of statues and arches, where they marked in pictures where they had recovered

specific pieces. Those pieces were then displayed on an adjacent wall panel. By contrast, the upper floor included some interactive exhibits and comparisons to present day Budapest. I thought this exhibit included some good humor as it compared an ancient axe-head to a modern (circa 2024) plastic-handled hatchet. We concluded our tour by walking around the exterior ramparts before the long trek back and another sampling of the public transit system. After a quick break for a whiskey in the hotel we headed out to dinner again, again to the Café Vian Ferenc ter. It wasn’t that we weren’t interested in variety, but it was local and there were plenty of dishes we were still excited to explore. It was again, over filling and delicious. And so after a wonderful meal we headed back to the hotel for our last night before boarding the boat!