Spellbinding Budapest...

Budapest has always conjured up images of mystery, romance, and a little bit of horror to me, so I was pretty excited when we finally reached there. I was definitely looking forward to the mystery and romance though not so much of the horror, I definitely did not want to see or encounter any vampires while we were there!

The first thing that struck me about Budapest was how lovely the city was, in spite of its previous communist history. Sure there were the usual communist buildings which looked totally horrible but there were also buildings with lovely neo-Gothic architecture interspersed throughout the city.

We spent our first day just wandering around the city and taking in the sights. We had gone into the tourist office to get some information and ideas on what to do but it was staffed by a man who looked like he dragged himself to work, and decided to spend the rest of the day being grumpy so we got out of there in a hurry and decided to just explore it ourselves.

Walking around Budapest was kind of like walking around Paris, but cleaner and less crowded.  We wandered into the Hungarian State Opera House but they didn’t have any tours running. Then, we went into the Museum of Fine Arts as we read that there were tours of the exhibit, but again the tour wasn’t running. We decided to just view the exhibits, which was lucky for us as they had a section called ‘Hands On!’ which allowed the public to handle original artifacts and learn more about them. The artifacts we were allowed to handle were from the Egyptian collection and we had to put on gloves and use one hand to hold it and the other to touch. It was fairly exciting and I was pretty terrified that I would somehow drop the artifact and have to pay them millions in compensation, lol… That was actually the highlight of the museum for us, with nothing really standing out.

Hungarian State Opera

 The next stop was Heroes Square which was built in 1896 to celebrate a millennium of Magyar presence. The weather was a little dreary when we were there, which I suppose makes a rather dramatic backdrop to the impressive monuments around.  One interesting event we stumbled upon was Critical Mass. Hundreds of cyclists biked past us to raise awareness of cyclists rights on the roads and within the city. It was rather festive and there were lots of ringing bells as they cycled past us.

Heroes Square

Critical Mass Movement

We also took the metro to get around, which was an experience in itself. It’s the oldest underground, after London, in Europe and nothing has changed since then. While we may have shiny new MRT stations in Singapore, I think there’s something to be said for stations that have been around since 1896.

Our first day in Budapest ended with us walking back to our hotel, from Pest to Buda, enjoying the lovely view of the Danube river.

The Blue Danube