Budapest and Bratislava!

Ok, so you know you live a pretty charmed life when you get to spend a long 4th of July weekend in Europe for kicks.  Life has been pretty good to me, and I’m lucky to have friends who work for the airlines who can hook something like that up.  I managed to sleep not in a plane 3 out of 5 nights… Our weekend looked a bit like this…

Wednesday afternoon:

• Fly to Chicago to join up with friends at O’hare
• Find out the standby route to Budapest that looked great last night is now a disaster (with weather, cancellations, etc – these things change fast!)
• Stare in awe at the pile of tickets Guy has to cover every possible flight possibility
• Consider going to Kuwait instead
• Get lucky and get on our connection to Munich
• Eat pickled Jello with eggs and grey ham for breakfast
• Connect to Budapest
• Get a badly needed shower
• Walk around one of the coolest cities in Europe to explore
• See roads on the edge of the Danube River flooded by 20+ feet of water
• Grab dinner and head out til 4am
• Order a pizza and go to sleep before it arrives
• Sleep for the first time in more than 24 hours

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It’s Friday now, right?:

• Eat the pizza I ordered last night for breakfast
• Head to the market
• Try heading to the Opera House to take a look, duck for cover in heavy downpour instead
• Walk into St Stephen’s Basilica, where we see the world’s oldest fist pump (1000 year old hand in a jar)
• Climb a lot of stairs for a great view of Budapest from the top of the Basilica
• Inspired by the fist, I finish the pizza for lunch around dinner time
• Head for Gellért bath house before it closes
• Marvel at one of the beauty of the building, jump in a wave pool, sit in a “dry sweating room” at 82C (180F), thermal bath
• Out til some late time, sleep 4 hours

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Saturday, I think:

• Get on a 2.5 hour train to Bratislava (aka Pozsony, aka Pressburg), Slovakia
• Think, “man, it’s wierd that I can travel to what used to be a communist country with no ID or border control”
• Walk around the beautiful cobblestone in the Old Town
• Walk up the hill to Bratislava castle and panoramic view of the city
• Walk past the UFO on the bridge over the Danube
• Walk around the not so beautiful (but very interesting) block apartments on the other side of the Danube
• Marvel at the kids playground that would never be built in a country with lawyers
• Watch life-size chess and listen to a public concert (violins playing “Bohemian Rhapsody”)


Bratislava Apartments



UFO

• Train back to Budapest
• Dinner, out to Szimpla Kertmozi, sleep 1 hour
• Flight to Frankfurt, Washington DC, Chicago, Minneapolis
• Get a badly needed shower
• It’s Sunday night now, right?

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I’ll have some more pics up in the coming days…