Day 16. Budapest

In house breakfast at the hotel is good, we did a deal with the concierge when we checked in for a €12 buffet breakfast.

The Danube Shoe memorial( story is in the text)

First is the HOHO bus, we do a lap of Buda and then Pest, explore their magnificent parliament house, drop some of Tim’s ashes from the Chain Bridge, back on the bus, then a river cruise on the Danube, then dinner in the main shopping area then home to recover.

So highlights of the day were the beautiful buildings, the beautiful Albanian girls that sat near us on the bus, the amount of vegetation in the city is impressive and the copious number of Thai Massage places located in Budapest. They look ridgy didge proper places but I’m not sure of the legislation here.

The weather is crisp with a capital “C”, f….g chilly, with the sun not helping much. I think it gets to about 10degC. The Mechanic had to buy himself a beanie last night and The Navigator has actually been wearing her beanie (purchased especially for the trip with the comment ” but I don’t like things on my head!”) Beanie 1 v The Navigator 0.

I saw a poster on a streetside wall on the Pest side advertising Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – surely it can’t be real, they should all be dead by now? Google tells me they had a hit album in 1984 called Budapest Live, and were active 1971-1987 and are still going 1991 until now. Wow. News – they toured Budapest in July 2023 and are currently touring Europe with dates booked until late 2025. I was blinded by the light!

A little Hungarian history, a simple version, in reality it is very complex, and I might get it a bit wrong. The Austro – Hungarian Empire was powerful up until the end of WWI when the empire was carved up. They picked the wrong team to play on. In WWII the Germans occupied Hungary ( a bit of a friendly takeover by Hitler), the Germans ( maybe with a little local help?) killed 400,000 or thereabouts Hungarian Jews. A lot were lined up on the bank of the Danube, by Hungarian Fascist militia, ordered to remove their shoes ( so they could be sold), then shot. The bodies washed downstream in the Danube. There is a moving memorial of steel shoes on the Danube bank near Parliament house where the executions happened.

The Russians relieved the Germans of Hungary and imposed Communist rule. That is until 1956 when students revolted and were supported by some of the Hungarian soldiers. The 1956 Revolution is a big deal here. But it was still a very socialist country until in 1989 (when the Wall came down) and the country voted for free elections and in 1990 the Russian military left. The country appears to be pretty democratic. It’s a landlocked country, population 9.5m, and mostly Catholic Christians.