Night in Budapest

View from Sofitel Hotel Room across Danube to Buda side:

Final day: Budapest

Tomorrow we fly back to MD, and today was a fitting end to the trip. It was really like three trips, with part one Istanbul, part two the cities in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia,  and Croatia in cloudy cold weather, and Budapest on a sunny warmish day.

Having been to Budapest several years ago, day we toured on our own, and with the gorgeous weather it was the right choice. We hiked up the steep hill on the Buda side of the chain bridge (named for the look of the main suspension cables: they are basically bike chain links) beside the closed funicular and spent into the afternoon in the streets, restaurants and museums.

Returning after a nice lunch, sans wine this time, I walked Judy, the other Judy (Paul) and Melinda to the Budapest "eye", a large Ferris Wheel that they had been admiring since we came here. A ride was in order for them, to keep up their string since Singapore and Bangkok (as I recall), but I had no interest so I went on to a coffee shop and explored more of the area around the Cathedral.

Chain Bridge and Pest side of Danube from Funicular:

Looking up Danube from Chain bridge, Parliament House:

Cute kids on outing:

Cold lady fountain:

From path by broken funicular:

Cathedral on top of Buda hill:

Tipping

Tipping was the bane of my existance. I neglected to bring lots of small denomination bills, and the boat was short too, so tips were a never ending panic and sometimes embarrassment.  It's not that they amounted to much, but without small denomination bills they were always too big or small. Today I spent $35 in tips to four separate people: the wagon driver at the horse farm, the musicians at lunch and the bellman at the hotel. That was exceptional, but what you get when you don't know what to expect and plan accordingly.

European guides in eastern Europe don't get too much, 1€ per day per person for a half day guide is recommended. But the driver also gets that amount too, so for a half day for Judy and I it would amount to 4€.

On our Asian trips I always took a big wad of $1 US and was fine.

Budapest: driving horse farm and show

Arrived on the Pest side of the Danube river at 4 am and left boat for last time at 9:45 am. We check into the Sofitel later, but first we visited a horse farm to the east about 45 minutes.

I was skeptical at first about visiting a horse farm since we live next to ( Sagamore), but this was a warm blooded ( as opposed to cold blooded like draft horses, and hot blooded like Arabians, driving horse farm (4 in hand and 2 in hand), and we had a great show and lunch featuring the Hungarian favorite goulash soup, wine, meats and desert, accompanied by music.

The horse demonstrations included driving, riding, ox cart pulling, and what I can best describe as a circus act with a guy standing on a team of 5 horses as they ran around the track. Then there was the "who can spill less beer while racing around the track" competition, which was exactly what it is named: each rider held a mug of beer in one hand while controlling his horse with the other. One enterprising guy held a tray with the beer on it, and simply poured the spilled beer from the tray to the mug as he finished, winning the competition.

Turned into a nice afternoon, improved by the second day of sun in the last two weeks.

The beautiful ox team:

Well appointed stables:

Lunch:

Four in hand team:

Pecs: beautiful Hungarian town

On our ultimate tour today we visited the  beautiful town of Pecs. The features we saw included a second-century Christian burial site from the timne of Roman rule under the present cathedral and a square with a mosque turned church turned mosque turned cathedral... well you get the idea. Plus a large statue of a horse designed by Davinci.

The burial site predated the use of a cross as a Christian symbol, bringing up the question of how it was so identified. Well they used a circular christogram in early Christianity.

The burial site, with circula s christogram:

Croatia on November 1

We did a second tour after Novi Sad around 3 pm. We sailed to a port in Croatia and visited a winery in the nearby town of Lloc, then met the boat in a sad little town called Vukovar which had seen devastation during the 1990's war when Yougoslavia broke up. The village is still recovering and great gashes and bullet holes can still be seen. A massacre occurred in 1991 where 250 hospital inmates were slaughtered by Serbian paramilitary and buried. Our guide lived in the town and describes her year underground in terms that made me want to cry. What a violent history this beautiful part of the world has seen.

Anyway, the wine tour/tasting was fine. The wine tasting and subsequent town tour were in the dark, but some pictures came out.

Novi Sad, Serbia: Albert Einstein and Monica Seles

Novi Sad (Serbia) is a pleasant city, the second largest in Serbia, behind Belgrade, but much lower key with a spectacular fort and wide pedestrian streets, where the shopping is promising, if the excitement of the female sector of our walking tour is any indication  (and their disappointment at not having time to shop.)

It is flat, making it ideal for bike transportation. It is home to the Serbian tennis player, Monica Seles, and where Albert Einstein's first wife,  Mileva Marić, was from. Einstein lived here from 1905-1907, and worked on relativity with Mileva, who was a mathematician.

Me window shopping, for electronic gadgets:

Town hall square:

Orthodox Cathedral:

Religious practices in the cathedral were idiosyncratic, to my eye. Women faced the virgin Mary, while men faced Christ when saying their prayers. They ate small morsels of bread in the church.  There are no seats, except for a few for old people around the edges, much like mosques in Islam. There is no organ, and the only music would be choir singing. People crossed themselves using there fingers, and did it in a n-s-e-w pattern, kissing pictures of biblical p characters. These differences seem incapable of sparking splits in the christian community I recall happening. That's religion.