Flashback Again: Hungary

Ok, so the first big trip of the year was to Hungary. Sandor's grandmother died and his parents paid for all of us to go over, so work was put on hold and off we went. Despite the sad reason for being there we had a great time, but oh, it's always interesting in different countries!! Like the Ireland blog, this will have a lot of what I put in the e-mail, but lots more pictures!

here we are!

So, having had time to reflect on the trip now, I think my favorite thing was the architecture. The buildings were an interesting mix of Turkish influence, gothic church influence, communist era block buildings and 4 or 5 story office/residential over shops. It was very interesting and like nothing else I've seen in Europe or elsewhere.

Sandor and his brothers

this is a church that stayed open during the Communist era. The church itself is inside the rock so it was a lot easier to hide than a building. I took some pictures inside but they are too dark - walking around was incredible. It was like you were in a cave, but there were little alcoves with church stuff. very very cool!

statue at the very top of a hill overlooking the city

the Danube River splits the city into two haves - Buda and Pest, which combined way back when to make Budapest - little fun fact for you

not sure if you can see, but the road actually skirts to the side to go around that old church

(all of those pictures by the way was just the first day when we arrived - Sandor's dad took us on a quick mini-tour between the airport and Sandor's grandmother's house!)

old bullet holes from WWII

Szent Istvan Bazilika

top of the Basilica looking over the city:

looking up in the dome inside the Basilica

some of the art on the ceiling was insanely amazing!

Sandor and his family back out front (they are in the shade at the bottom right)

mini-park in the middle of town

little side street

One night we headed up to what had been the King's castle and church. the church was having mass when we got there so we took some pictures of the city at night while we waited and then headed in for a look. The choir was practicing, which was beautiful and realizing how old everything was was wild!

this whole wall was painted with a beautiful mural!

Dani and Misi at the middle of the country (zero kilometer)

this is a large arena with statues of the 7 Huns that joined to form Hungary (this according to Sandor's dad is one of the many stories about how Hungary began) and then statues of all the kings are in a semi circle behind them

I'd say the second most - and more likely tied for first - thing that I remember distinctly is the food. The first thing I did when I got back to the US of A was thank God for the land of fresh air in which we live. The entire time we were in Budapest you pretty much had your choice of diesel fumes outside or second hand smoke inside. The idea of smoke free was absolutely and completely foreign to them. They were even smoking in the airport – IN, not at, IN the airport sitting waiting at the gate. My lungs loved me for bringing them back to the US. But possibly more than my lungs thanking me, my arteries were thanking me for coming back to a place where the idea of 'vegetarian' is not fried mushrooms or fried cheese. See you are laughing right now, but I am not kidding. That is the extent of the section of the menu they labeled vegetarian. Everything is cooked not just in oil, but in fat, lard. They buy it in chunks at the meat market – which by the way is a glassed in open air table with meat hanging out all over the place. Some of this may be a reason life expectancy in Hungary is around 55. I do have to say however, that I am quite a fan of most of the food we had – I just would have liked to eaten it spread out over a span of 2 months with some non-fat options thrown in there, rather than every day for a week. By the day we left I didn't even eat breakfast because bread, meat and cheese was just not appetizing anymore. But I got quite good at ordering sztrapacska, palacsinta, gulayasleves, and solt kolbasz (mmm..delicious). Oh and random funny thing – for some reason they are convinced that Americans eat a lot of corn. The 'American pizza' had corn on it, the 'American salad' was lettuce, corn, and mayo – ugh! I really don't think I eat that much corn and I most certainly have never had it on pizza, but Hungary is convinced we do :)

eating solt kolbasz at the market - yes you do that standing up, but they are so delicious it's well worth it!

this is the inside of the market we went to

meat market off there to the right

close up of meat market

look there ARE fruits and vegetables in Hungary :)

Langos - Sandor's favorite! I had mine without the gross sour cream everyone else put on theirs

Moving right along. Another intriguing thing I found was the driving/parking/anything having to do with a car. So, the cars, as in most of Europe are tiny, along with the roads being tiny and the drivers being insane. Something I also noticed since we were driving rather than me taking public transportation like I have done in the past there, is that the road signs don't actually tell you anything. I don't remember seeing a single road sign. You had to look at the address sign on the side of a building to figure out what road you were on. It was quite amazing that anyone had any idea how to get anywhere. I'm pretty good with directions and knowing where I am, but I was absolutely confused the entire time we were driving around the city. Oh and the yellow lights turned from red to yellow and yellow to green so that you had time to shift into gear before it turned green. Very entertaining. As for parking, wow is all I have to say. We could not figure out for the life of us if there was any rhyme or reason to where or why people parked the way they did. Most streets did not have parking lanes so the people just parked on the sidewalk. Yep, I'm not kidding. Most of the time it was just two of the four tires on the sidewalk, but there were certain roads where people were literally parked completely on the sidewalk. It was very confusing. And, if they couldn't fit by parallel parking they would just pull in perpendicular to the cars. And the most amazing thing was no one had tickets so apparently is was ok to just pull into a parking spot perpendicular to traffic on the sidewalk. Amazing.

street side parking

check this out! yep, that's legal

again, legal - we saw people pull the entire car up on the sidewalk when there wasn't a parking lane on the street

AND, we were there on Freedom Day (kinda like our Independence Day, but they have rioting instead of fireworks), so we went outside the city for the day and visited this super cute town called Szentendre and watched the school kids do a reenactment of the 1849 uprising – granted it was all in Hungarian, so Sandor had to translate, but it was interesting. It was also nice to get out of the city and see what the little towns were like.

hanging out by the Danube shortly after we got to Szentendre

I love skinny little streets

the town square where all the festivities took place

me with a Hungarian flag colored hat thing I made

band that marched down to the square and played - this was one of the my favorite things of the day!

more skinny streets

having a soda on a roof overlooking the river

random guy in a cart

really really skinny street

paprika (pepper) store

I've never seen so many peppers in all my life!

little shop on the street - the embroidery on those is incredible!

As they say, all good things must come to an end. So we hopped the plane back to the US. Unfortunately my good luck with not freezing my butt off in Hungary came back to haunt me. The weather in NY was not quite as nice, so this is what we came back to...

Yeah, needless to say the trip back to SC in time to fly out to Ireland was a bit more difficult than expected, but we made it :)