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Edit: Budapest was cool. But not as cool as I would have liked. I guess it really wasn't my thing. The food was an interesting adventure. I can't read/speak hungarian so figuring out was stuff was presented itself as a challenge. For all I knew I could have been eating dead children sometimes. Well not really, but that is what it felt like. The park which held the communist statues (Statue Park) was probably the highlight of the trip. (see below)
We also saw the Parliment building.
Budapest has the largest synagogue in Europe. This is a metal tree constructed in the back to remember families that died in the Holocaust. I heard a stat somewhere that over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in just over two weeks in Nazi concentration camps.
I left 2 days before Hungairian elections took place. They take place on a Sunday which is such a good idea when you think about it. People can go after church (if they go), no stores or businesses are open so you don't have to worry about it iterfering with business and work, and people are out anyways enjoying a Sunday walk. I don't know who this guy is or what his platform is but his head is about 100x life size (at least). This was the biggest poster I saw in a prime location in downtown Buda. Also Budapest s actually two cities- Buda on one side of the river, and Pest on the other.
WTF is this doing here? Thank you, Florida for making the rest of us look like gas-guzzling morons.
This is more appropriate. And people still drive these around on the street. They must have 'pimped' Trabbies though, because none of them smelled. Original ones had a two-stroke engine and were very smokey and smelly.
Another interesting part was riding through the Austro-Hungarian countryside. Many places in rural Hungary were still quite rundown but with huge EU placards which basically say 'We are pumping tons of money into this site to rebuild it so that Hungary can be on the Euro someday and so that the EU doesn't have to associated with this ugliness. Also we have run out of other ways to spend money.' I was unable to get a picture of these places/placards but they were cool to look at. Another cool thing was a huge field of windmills on the Austrian/Hungarian border (more in Austria than in Hungary). I did get a picture of that but it does not do justice to how cool it was. Pictures are very difficult to get when you are on the train.
