Can You Guess.... Part 6

End of the Adventure:
A Pleasant Day in Buda

Yesterday = Pest
Today = Buda
Tomorrow = Home! (ish)

Tonight is my last evening before I fly back to London, and I'll be sad to leave Eastern Europe. It's been a trip, to say the least. Anyway, on to the last couple day's events...

Today we struck out nice and early, like the good workers we are, and trekked out to the Statue Park, a collection of old communist statues. Unless you are as amused by these old sculptures as we were, I wouldn't recommend going, it's nothing amazing. However, if you like blasphemy and silly photos in front of statues, you'd be in heaven (like us!). A few postcards and one ridiculous Lenin-shaped candle later, we were on our way back into town, ready to tackle Buda.

We had lunch (pizza again, how adventurous) and then headed up into the old town on the hill. We started out at Fisherman's Bastion, an amazing fortification along the wall with great views of the city along the river. It stretches the length of a few city blocks and is made all out of white stone. It's beautifully decorated and, interestingly enough, all the columns are in different styles. After that we wandered around the old cathedral and over to the palace for some more great vistas and photos. On the way we stopped at a little handicrafts market, and I got an embroidered table runner which I plan to use as a wall hanging. The sole reason I bought it is so that when I have kids and they say, "Mom, why do we have so much old crap in the house?" I can say, "Ohhh no, I bought this in Hungary aaaaages ago, when I was on vacation from Edinburgh. I must have been, oh, 20 years old? That was 2007; it's very old and valuable now." It's a red floral pattern on a rough, tan colored piece of linen.

Anyway, on to the palace, where we walked around wallowing in its splendor, and then I fell asleep in the grass for a bit while Stephanie wrote some postcards. Lovely, except now I'm a little sunburned. Me! That's how pathetically pasty I've become, living in Scotland. I'm out in the sun for one day and the back of my neck gets sunburned. Tsk. Anyway, we walked back down through Buda and headed back to the hostel to regroup before heading out to get groceries and dinner.

Buda and Pest are amazing cities, both old and beautiful in their own ways. Buda's much more medieval and renaissance, up on the hill and overlooking the Danube, while Pest is flat and has lovely large boulevards decorated in a more baroque style. I love both parts, and oddly enough the city reminds me a bit of San Francisco. Sigh, home.

More in a bit, there's people waiting to use the computer here....