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Castle Hill is home to many of Budapest's most important monuments and museums. To miss this part of the city is not to have seen Budapest or even Hungary at all. The hill, made of limestone, is 1 kilometre long. It is more a plateau with a flat top than a hill. It soars over 170m above the city and Danube River.
The Hill is essentially divided into two distinct sections, the Royal Palace and the Old Town. The Palace was originally a 13th century castle where the monarch of Hungary lived (when it was not occupied by the Turks). The castle was renovated frequently and then brutally demolished during the Second World War. Today the Palace has been faithfully reconstructed and now houses several cultural institutions such as the Hungarian National Gallery, the Museum of Contemperory Art and the Museum of the History of Budapest. I only visited the first of these.
The Old Town was where the common folk lived during medieval times. There are museums and cultural institutions here too but the most important monument is the Matthias Church. Leave a Comment
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U must first of all check this:
Fesztiválváros
than you'll now what to choose! Leave a Comment
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Its a huge festival on an island in the Danube river. Lots and lots of stages, bands, food stuff (with resonable beer prices) and stuff to do. People say it used to be better before it became commercial, but I liked it anyhow. I think it was only 15 euro for a day ticket. Leave a Comment
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We travelled thoughout Western and Central Hungary and stopped at dozens of cities and towns. Every one had a Tour Inform office, usually in the downtown or the Old City area, which was an excellent source of area maps, restaurant and lodging suggestions, etc. And all the personnel spoke English, at least to some degree.
So just watch out for the Green, red, and white signs directing you to the local Tour Inform office. Leave a Comment
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Dentistry was the point of our journey to Hungary. There are excellent dentists who charge about a third of usual European prices and a large proportion of Austrians and Germans visit for that purpose. We went to Mosonmagyarovar which, like all the small towns near the border, had a dentist (fogorvos) on every corner.
Apart from that we thoroughly enjoyed our time there, it was a bit like 50's Britain but with Tesco, Spar, Lidl etc. Incredibly inexpensive. Do try the local drink, Unicum, and the language which is unlike any other.
Goulash, fish, generally relaxing. Leave a Comment
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OK, I did not spend long in Hungary during my first visit, and I only visited two cities, Budapest and Szeged. However I am left with the impression of very clean places, with wastepaper bins all over the place, each of them having a charming and regularly emptied ashtray (look closely at the photo - the little lip at the top of the bin is for cigarettes). All you smokers out there, there is NO excuse for dropping you cigarette buts in the street.
This photo was taken on a Sunday early morning in one of the pedestrian streets in touristville Budapest. The owner of the brus and shovel was a city employee. While he was busy clearing up here, his mates were scrubbing the roads with one of those water-vac-vans.
You will see none of the Saturday night debris that litters many European capitals on a Sunday morning. I thought it was charming. Leave a Comment
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Well, if I knew little about the Trabbie before leaving the UK, the Moskovich was even more an enigma to me. I think I only vaguely know of its existence because of some picture cards my brother got free with a comic. Until I arrived in Budapest, just before I left Hungary, I honestly thought they had gone the way of the Dodo a long time ago. My memory was of an unlikely racing car that had gained some recognition decades before I was born.
But look! Neatly parked beside our car in Budapest was a fine example of one that I can only assume was still in working order! What's more, one of my friends who was with me there, a retired Finnish academic told me he drove one in the 1970s. He did add that it ran well once he could actually start it, but the best option for doing that was to make sure it was parked at the top of a hill - not easy in his part of Finland.
So here you are, a fine example of a little-known Soviet car, whose development seems to have run at 10 years behind the western models the manufacturers hoped to emulate, and one which is rarely seen outside Central and Eastern Europe.
And here is a website to tell you all about this quirky car, that I located after a considerable amount of googling! Leave a Comment
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The Trabant is a car that has worked its way up from a glorified motorbike to something of a car legend, akin to the Mini and the Beetle. Having grown up in the UK I can honestly say that I had never seen one until I first began to travel in central Europe.
I stopped in my tracks the first time I saw one of these cars in Hungary, thinking they had by now disappeared, and then realised that they were still widely used. My friend in Budapest told me that she found her Trabant a much more useful people carrier than the more modern car that she came to collect me in.
The Trabbie, by all accounts was a bit of a manufacturing mistake. Produced originally in East Germany (an off-shoot of Audi production believe it or not) to provide a half way house between the motorbike and the car, it was further developed, and went from being a cheap way of transporting the family to an inefficient car. Shame! Apparently it was designed so that the engine could be removed by a single person (I'm not entirely sure why such a safeguard should be built in). Over 3 million were produced between 1957 and 1990 (more than the entire production of the Morris Minor) by which point the engine had been replaced with that of a low-powered VW Polo. Its days are clearly numbered, but it seems to remain a firm favourite in Hungary.
In 1989, the Trabant became one of the symbols that featured in the stories that abounded during the days leading up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
I still get goose pimples when I remember spending a long evening in the company of a friend in Prague listening to his tales of those days when everyone know that something momentous was about to happen, but no one knew quite what or when. Then slowly but surely the Trabants began to arrive in Prague, first a few, then a few hundred, then too many to count.
People from the East were flocking to cities near the boundary of the iron curtain. It seemed they were all driving Trabants. The people of Prague came out to greet the travellers and to ensure they had plenty to eat and drink.
Click here for a great site giving the history of the trabant Leave a Comment
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POSTCARDS.
If you want to bring back a souvenir from Veszprem and your photos arent what you had hoped , heres a cheap alternative!! Leave a Comment
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