Budapest

What a gorgeous city (well, two cities) straddling the Danube (Buda on the east, Pest on the west side)!

Also, fantastically quirky. The Hungarians are Central European outliers, unique in the region for being descended from a Central Asian people called the Magyar, who immigrated to the area that is now Hungary a bit more than 1100 years ago and have spent most of the time since being invaded and occupied by the Turks, the Romans, the Austrians, the Germans, the Russians, etc. As a consequence of all this looting and destroying and rebuilding, the architecture in Budapest is unlike anything I've seen before in its...eclecticism. You can see it a bit in this (still picturesque) shot of St. Stephen's Basilica, the building on the left definitely not matching the building on the right in style, and neither of them looking like they should be on the same street as the church in the distance.

But then it's even funnier when you get into the open square and the very Baroque church is flanked by this totally blatant Communist Bloc-style beast.

And it seems to be like this everywhere in Budapest. I failed to get a pic, but there was one part of the "castle" (a huge palace on a hilltop on the Buda side that's never been used as a permanent royal residence but has been built and rebuilt and maintained as an absolutely gigantic palace and used for a wide variety of purposes over the centuries) where one wall of the exterior met another at a right angle, the architectural style of the building changing right there mid-stream. Awesome.

I also really appreciate the touching creativity of how Budapesters do their memorials. For example, a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Hungarians murdered in WWII is on a section of the banks of the Danube where victims were driven through the city to the waterfront and then shot  so they would fall directly into the river. This was immediately following them being forced to remove their more valuable clothing, such as their shoes, so this memorial consists of bronze pairs of shoes standing vacant on the water's edge. Haunting and beautiful.

We also took a walking tour of the city by night, when it looked totally different than in the day, and even more stunning. All in all: I'm a fan.