Budapest: food & outskirts

One of the activities my mom and I did in Budapest was a food tour, where a former chef and Hungarian native took us around town for three hours feeding us local foods till we could eat no more.

GOSH do they love their paprika.

And sausages...

...and cheese (and other dairy). This cheese sits atop a layer of sour cream, all adorning a round of fried dough, a deathly and delicious Hungarian staple called langos. Yum. But yikes. And this is a tiny percentage of all the foods we saw and tried over the course of three hours. We decided to just boil some rice for dinner after this eating adventure.

Another local adventure was taking the train a half-hour outside of the city to the town of Szentendre, which is actually a Serbian-settled village that has turned into a kind of artists' colony. Mostly I just loved how impossibly colorful and photogenic it was.

Also, there was gelato (not pictured).

Okay, I'll leave it at that for Budapest--and unfortunately, Hungary in general. This trip is not digging too deep into any one country but hitting a handful of really great cities. Next we'll cross the border into Slovakia and check out its capital city of Bratislava.

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.

Chicago to...Budapest!

When I wrote that last post, I was in the midst of planning a grand adventure for this fall, starting in Central Europe and making my way up through the Baltics and then across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But a contract to spend the coming Southern Hemisphere summer at Palmer Station in Antarctica (the station I've been really wanting to get to for the past couple years) ended up working out for me and instead of getting chilly in Siberia, I'll be doing that on my fourth trip to the Ice. So stay tuned for that!

BUT, the timing still worked out for me to keep my plans to travel for 2.5 weeks around Central Europe with my mom. So on Sunday we made our way down to Chicago and started the fun in the O'Hare International Terminal...

...and flew overnight to Budapest, via Zurich.

We were pretty pooped when we arrived, so by the time we got checked in to our Airbnb and took a nap, our evening was made with the simple joys of a really yummy dinner across the street...

...and the reminders everywhere that WE ARE IN BUDAPEST!

More to come about something other than the area within one square block of our Airbnb. :)