Exploring Budapest

Yesterday was our first "real" day in Hungary.  We spent it taking in the sights that Budapest has to offer.  I was crazy-excited about checking out the city seeing as the Hungarian Parliament is one of my favorite buildings in the entire world.  Our plan was to wake up early and take the city by storm and that's exactly what we did.

Luckily, we snagged tickets to the Parliament tour early in the morning before the line got too long.  The way they run the sale of these tickets is absurd.  There's a big "buffer" of chains and fences around the Parliament but you have to go inside to buy tickets.  The problem is that in order to go inside to buy tickets, a guard has to let you in and he refuses to let in more than 1 (or 2 people max) at the same time.  So he lets you in, you walk all the way to the Parliament, buy your ticket, then walk all the way out, and when you cross his little chain gate, he lets the next person in.  By the time our tour time rolled around (11:45) the line was absolutely ridiculous.  Yet the building was stunning inside!

Between buying our tickets and our tour time, we decided to try and check out a few other sights.  The Basilica of St. Steven was pretty neat.  It holds Hungary's holiest religious relic: the mummified hand of St. Steven, the first king of Hungary.  It's a pretty morbid exhibit, but neat nonetheless.  Our next stop was at the Museum of Ethnography.  It was here that we learned our first unfortunate lesson about Hungarians--apparently they have a strong aversion to work.  We never got to see the Ethnography Museum (or later the Terror House) because for some inexplicable reason about 50% of the tourist attractions are closed on Monday!  Not only that, through my research I found that in the off-season, a lot of tourist attractions are closed on both Monday and Tuesday!  I wish I had a job that I didn't have to work Monday or Tuesday and that I didn't have to start until 9 or 10 every other day.  Hopefully we'll get to see all of the closed places when we come back on Saturday.

The rest of the day was spent seeing all of the other sights.  We toured the Opera House, which was beautiful.  Apparently it has the third-best acoustics in the world...of course the first is La Scala in Milan, and let me tell you, they really are that good in there!  We also stopped by the Castle, which is really bizarre.  It was made for some sort of fair held in Budapest and the architect sought to showcase every Hungarian style, so he included Classical, Baroque, and Gothic buildings in the same complex.  It was supposed to have been torn down right after the fair, but everybody loved it so they kept it around.  The complex is neat, but so stylistically disjointed that it's kind of crazy.

I do have to say, the highlight of my day (and I'm confident Kati would agree) was the Royal Wine Cellar.  This place is tucked away in a corner street and you would never find it unless you knew it was there.  It's located where the wine cellar for the Royal Palace used to be and they have a "museum" and do tastings of Hungarian wines.  The museum was interesting in that it was situated in all of the old cellar tunnels which was really cool, and while it was neat to learn about all of the wine regions in Hungary, overall I found the museum lacking in substance.  Luckily, we didn't pay for the museum...because we bought the top-flight wine tasting.  It was totally worth it!  We tasted six Hungarian wines: 2 whites, 1 rose, 2 reds, and 1 tokaj azsu (dessert wine).  They were hands-down, some of the best wines I've had in a long time and our sommelier was fantastic.  We were definitely on the same wavelength because he brought out everything I'd wanted to taste.  The first white was a Sauvignon Blanc followed by a very unique Hungarian white called Jukfurt.  Then we had a dry Pinot Noir rose followed by a red wine from Eger (Not Bull's Blood) and a very spicy red wine from the southern part of the country.  The Tokaj wine was out of this world.  It's one of the best wines made in the region, but we'll be there in a few days so I won't belabor it's glory now.  When we told our sommelier that we were going to Tokaj this week to taste wines he even went out of his way to find the addresses for two vineyards he specially recommended.  It was so much fun!

We finished off the night with dinner on Castle Hill before calling it quits for the evening.  The morning held another day-trip to Esztergom, home of the largest church in Hungary.