Budapest 2009 – The Hot Walk

On vacation we are on our feet all day.  We love walking and sometimes skip public transportation on purpose to walk to our destination, enjoying all the sites along the way.

That is when the weather cooperates! We don’t like heat so if the sun comes out, so do our bus passes!

Heat ruins the fun because by the time we get to wherever we were heading, we are so sweaty and hot and grumpy that all we want to do is find shade! Ironically, we end up missing out.

Case in point: Our walk to Hero’s Square in Budapest.

The plan for the day was:

• Tour of the Parliament Building
• Check out the Ginormo Church (really the Basilica of St Stephen, but it was so huge I gave it a new name)
• Walk to Hero’s Square

Great morning! The tour of the parliament building was fantastic… and gorgeous!

 

And then onto the Ginormo Church (Basilica of St Stephen) to see “The Holy Right”, the 1000 year old mummified right fist of the Saint-King Stephen.

It’s kept in a very dark room and you have to pay to see it. I think it was something like 200 Forints (1$) for 5 minutes. You drop the coin in the box and it lights up the hand.

Here’s our blurry shot of the Reliquary, you can kind of make out the fist near the top…

 

And then, the walk to Hero’s Square. Straight as an arrow down Andrassy Street – a little over 2km.

It started off as a great walk, but it was getting hotter and hotter and we were fading fast! There was NO SHADE!

We saw the Opera House:

and many more beautiful buildings like this one.

The architecture is a lot like what you would expect to see in Vienna but a little more run-down. Still very beautiful!

And look at these 2 buildings, one dirty and one clean.. neat!

We were melting, so we stopped at Müvész Café to finally try Hungary’s Famous Dobos Cake and hide from the heat!

I love LOOOVE these types of old cafés that remind me “La Belle Époque”

I didn’t like the cake AT ALL! bleh – not for me!!! I thought it was gross.

yes, I know my husband is not very appropriately dressed!! HA HA HA but the place was pretty empty so who cares! And we were SO HOT! I had a tank top on under that jacket and just covered up for the picture.

Leaving the café and continuing down Andrassy Street, we became less and less interested in the sights. Actually, we didn’t care anymore! All we wanted was shade and there was NONE

When we finally made it to Hero’s Square (essentially, a large open square with ZERO shade), we couldn’t have cared less!!! we were just cranky and grumbling.

We got less than 5 decent pictures, NONE from the angles I wanted, NONE of the images I wanted to capture, we just clicked and split.

I’m still annoyed that I don’t have “nice blue sky” shot to replace this one I took in 2002 (before I met my husband)