Budapest, Hungary

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We woke up on the far north end of Budapest this morning. A little sad as it is beautiful to sail the Danube between Buda and Pest in the dark with all the magnificent bridges and buildings lit up. Oh well, we have our memories.

We were up early and had breakfast and vacated our cabin a 1/2 hour before the 9 am requirement per the request of our cabin attendant for access to get started. Right at 9:15 am our taxi driver arrived. It was a Mercedes yellow cab. We are staying at the Hotel Central Basilica which is very conveniently located. It was a short drive back down river to get us and our bags here. The ride cost 20 Euros. We got here before 10 am and dropped our bags after the desk girl confirmed our reservation. She told us we could check in after 2 pm.  We did and got a small room with an inner courtyard view and a weird bathroom and worst of all NO ICE because the kitchen closed at 11 am. It is in a great location though.

We had a short list of things to do between 10 am and 2 pm. We got our bearings and then started with the basilica. We'd planned to save that for afternoon thinking to stay out of the way of Sunday morning service, but by 10 am it was clear it was all tourists only. We went up. We bought tickets for the Panorama & Treasury. We don't think this was available when we visited before. We may have just missed it, but I think we'd have noticed. It was fascinating to walk around inside and above the basilica's dome as well as the 360 degree views from up there outside. When we left, we went in Gelarto Rosa for their beautiful ice cream cones. It was as delicious as we remembered. Clay had hazelnut, pistachio and chocolate. I had rose and sour cherry. Yum.

Next we walked over about a block away to the Budapest Eye. We rode but didn't love it. We needed to kill time though and it was another great view. We wandered several shops as we meandered away the hours. We ate 2 bowls of Hungarian goulash soup at Basilika Cafe. It was as good as we remembered it. Later we found a place serving chimney cakes and shared one served on a wooden spindle.

There is an orchestra concert at the basilica at 8 pm tonight of Mozart's Requiem. We thought we'd go and stay up late but the cheap seat prices of 32 Euros each put us off. We're still debating going back to Basilika Cafe for dinner or going to the street stall of take-out Langosh we found in our wandering.

Tomorrow we'll have breakfast here at the hotel at 7 am. Our car transfer to the airport should pick us up at 8 am. We should be in the air bound for Philadelphia by 11:30 am.

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