To me Budapest was a bit of a shock to the system. Strange, because when we were traveling through Central America we were hanging on for the 'easy' european travel experience. And travel here is easy - in terms of infrastructure, but they have forgotten one imporant thing... some form of understandable signs or instructions. For Latin America I expected the lack of english and so learnt spanish, but for some reason I just assumed that english would be common in Europe, and as a result I felt truly out of my depth for th first time on this trip! I know that it is arrogant to expect signs in english - but we really struggled to figure it out on the first day! And this was compounded by the fact that we arrived on Easter Saturday, so everything was closed for the fist 3 days! And I mean everything - tourist sights, supermarkets, bureau de change - everything.
But once we settled in to Budapest and stuff re opened we really fell in love with the place - and while stuff was closed we did manage to find and english pub abd while away our time drinking beer and watching the Australia vs England World Cup game.
We stayed in Pest which is really flat and was completely destroyed by flooding from the Danube in the 1830's. As a result, all of the buildings look really similar (they were all redesigned by 3 designers) and in a strange way this uniformity makes for a really picturesque setting. And if there was ever any doubt as to the beauty of Pest, a stroll along the danube as night falls with the illuminated castle hill rising on the other side of the river would soon put any doubts to rest.
We had planned to tripo out to the wine region of Eger, but we liked Budapest so uch and found that there was so much to see we dicided not to go to eger and spend our time in Budapest instead.
A place in Budapest that needs a special mention in the Synagogue. The one that we visited is the second largest Synagogue in the World, after the one in New York city. One of the back walls of the Synagogue courtyard is the orginal ghetto wall from WW2, and Jews from the ghetto were assembled in the courtyard to be sent to cxoncentration camps or killed. This courtyard has been turned into a memorial to honour those that were killed, but also non jews who risked their lives to help Jews escape the terrible fate that they faced at that time. The courtyard is named after one such person, a Swedish diplomat called Raoul Wallenberg, who helped many Jews escape Hungary. He was eventually killed by the Soviets. The memorial is a modernistic metal weeping willow, with each leaf bearing the name of a Jewish victim. The place was an incredible testament to human survival as well as courage displayed by those who risked everything to help the Jewish people. My tip - take tissues!
En route to Croatia, we stopped in Pecs, a town whose pronunciation we never really mastered and people kept showing us accomodation listings for Pest... We spent our limited time here walking around the town and marvelling at the Ottoman period battlements that are still standing. The buildings here have incredible brightly patterned and couloured tiled roofs, a distration that made crossing the road somewhat of a liability!
From Pecs we made for Zagred, and the last 2 weeks of our time in Europe.
