Beautiful Budapest

Now, this is a CITY— reminds me of Paris, New York, and Pittsburgh. Had a good arrival at the train station after the 6 1/2 hour ride from Prague. Found the transit office (and elevator) and the tram to my place. I never could figure out the use of buses, trolleys or subways. This is a big city. Nice train station:

My apartment is great, remodeled and has a washer. It is in an old building that has an outside door that leads to an atrium interior. My place is up one flight (grand staircase). The strange thing is that I have a big window in the living room/ kitchen and one in the bedroom that opens onto the atrium but you can not see or get any idea what it’s like outside. I wouldn’t want to live here but just fine for three days.

My first day I took the hop-on hop-off bus and checked out Budapest:beautiful bridges and castle:This Parliament Building that was built in the 1800’s cost as much as it would have to build a city to hold 60,000 people— check out the bus/ boat in front right:

I then headed to the Szechenyi Bath for a soak and massage. The little curricular area in the pool on the left side is a moving river that you can scoot into and bob around in a circle.For dinner, I headed to the New York Cafe. This restaurant had been build in the early 1900’s— looks more like Paris than NYC. I had some Golash Soup and cheesecake with an apricot center and apricot ice cream for dessert:

The second day in Budapest I headed for the market and had to try out the sauerkraut in Hungary:

Check out these radishes:

After lunch, it was off to the riverboat ride on the Danube. This is a big river– goes through 8 countries to the Black Sea. Then I had to visit the Rudas Thermal Bath. I spent most of my time in a rooftop hot tub looking down on the Danube. There are different pools of various heat levels and an aroma salt room–very cool– there are deposits of salt on the walls and they play mellow music with tweeting bird sounds: