Originally, Diana and I planned to meet in Budapest, but the COVID-19 entry-by-air rules for Hungary are stricter than for Austria, so Diana flew into Vienna instead. We still wanted to see Budapest, but decided to just make it a day trip and come in this morning by train. I have really been impressed with the Austrian trains, but Diana got to experience them for the first time.
We reached Budapest before 10:30. The Budapest Keleti train station has a stunning facade.
We read a helpful little itinerary on what we might want to see in Budapest (https://www.ourescapeclause.com/one-day-in-budapest-in-a-day/), and Fisherman's Bastion was our first goal. We crossed the river by metro and were immediately impressed by the Hungarian Parliament.
We climbed the hill to Fisherman's Bastion, which is a lookout point named in honour of the fisherman who centuries ago apparently took responsibility for defending the city wall at this point.
The views of the Danube, the Parliament, and really the whole city are quite something from up here. We stopped at a cafe in the wall to enjoy the view.
Mathias Church is behind the bastion. The church dates from the 14th century, but the bastion was only constructed in the 19th century.
After a stroll through the old town, we descended back to the metro and next went to the Nagy Vásárcsarnok, or central market.
As evident in the picture, it is a very large market, but we were less interested in shopping than in eating here. With only something like nine hours in Budapest, goulash was the obvious choice.
After lunch we wanted to do what we were most excited about in Budapest--bathe! But, we were determined to not have to rent towels at the baths, convinced they could be purchased for cheaper. We walked down Váci Street trying to find towels for sale at a price the seemed reasonable. Finally I found some at "Half Price" at Vörösmarty Square which did the trick.
This ended up being a perfect spot to end up, because we were able to take the line 1 metro--continental Europe's first metro!--to the baths. This metro line is actually a UNESCO world heritage site!
We got off at the Széchenyi Thermal Bath stop.
Once inside, we were shown to our "cabin" change rooms.
After changing, we went outside. The baths are beautiful!
Many of the pools are actually indoor, but of course the biggest ones are these outdoors. It is a pretty cool experience, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.
After the baths, we walked across the city park and onto Heroes' Square. Much of this impressive infrastructure (the park, the square, the metro line 1, etc.) was built for the "millennium" in the late 19th century celebrating one thousand years of the Hungarian state.
We still had some time before our train back to Vienna, so we took the metro back down to the river to see the Shoes on the Danube Bank, which commemorates victims (mostly Jews) of a massacre during World War 2 who were told to remove their shoes, shot, and pushed into the Danube. It is a powerful memorial. Apparently 20,000 may have died in this way between December 1944 and January 1945.
We were, of course, by the river here, and had a nice view across back towards Fisherman's Bastion and the Buda Castle.
We were also now up close to the Parliament. This was another millennium project, designed to be something like one metre longer than the British parliament building!
We decided to sit here with a glass of wine and enjoy the view before catching the metro to the train station to catch the train back to Vienna.
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