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A rainy day walk through Central Pest

Budapest Travel Blog › entry 15 of 41 › view trip summary

It's gotten very expensive to travel the normal way of renting a car and staying in hotels so we're trying something new. We're traveling around Eastern Europe by train and staying in apartments. Later we'll join a tour group. It's definately cheaper but does it work? Join us and find out.

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A rainy day walk through Central Pest

September 15, 2008

door to our apartment

Cloudy again today and still cold and damp so weâ€™re beginning to get used to it. I get dressed by picking an outfit and then just adding every sweater and jacket I have on top of it. The temperature has been no higher than 55 degrees for 3 days now which is very unusual for Budapest in September.

Weâ€™re compensating for the cold by drinking lots of coffee and visiting inside attractions. Since today is our last day in Budapest, weâ€™re going to visit places weâ€™ve missed for one reason or another. First on the list was a shopping area decorated with mosaics in a Turkish manner. Parizsi Udvar is just off Vaci Street and it even has a bookstore inside. Next on the list is the nearby Inner City Parish Church which Iâ€™ve never been able to get into. (I didnâ€™t this time either since there was a service going on.

ceiling in shopping mall near Vaci Street

) Itâ€™s a 16^th century Gothic church, the oldest building in Pest. The inside is supposedly Neo-Classical and designed by Hild (the same guy who did St. Stephans where the dome collapsed). I took photos of the outside and we moved on to the Opera House.

The Opera House tour is daily at 3 and at 4 so you have to get there early. The ticket booth is around to the left side of the lobby and it takes forever to get a ticket. The tours are led in various languages by young guides who hold signs to indicate the language. One tourist asked where the USA tour was since he only saw a sign for England. (That happens more often than you might think.) The Opera House was built in 1884 and has all the grandeur that Hungary could put into it. Supposedly Emperor Franz Joseph required that it be smaller than the Opera House in Vienna but he didnâ€™t put any restrictions on opulence.

Opera House staircase

The Hungarians did their best to shine and the building is worth seeing. (The guide said that Madonna was filmed in the Royal Box in the movie â€œEvitaâ€.)

The final stop before dinner was St. Stephenâ€™s Basilica which is near Parliament. It was designed by Hild, the dome collapsed during construction, and the redesign was done by Ybl who also designed the Opera House. Its interesting to see the same kind of opulence applied to both church and secular Opera House.

Due to excellent planning on our part we now were very near the restaurant where we wanted to have dinner. We walked over to Belarossi Lugos, hung up our umbrellas and had a marvelous Hungarian dinner.