Day 14 - Wednesday, Sept 3 - Budapest

 When we looked out our window this morning we saw the sun shining on the Chain Bridge and the Palace on the top of Buda Hill.

A long day on the bus as we can't check into the Dorothea Hotel until 3pm.

There are over a dozen cruise ships docked along the Danube from various cruise lines. There were three identical Viking ships docked and we had to go through 2 of them to get off.

After a tour around the city, we went to Buda Hill overlooking the Danube to visit St. Mathias Church. This church dates back to the 1500s but was converted to a mosque during the Ottoman occupation and then restored as a Catholic Church in the mid-1500s after the Ottomans were ejected.

From there we went to the Central Market which is a huge market selling meat, fish and produce to the local people and many souvenirs to the tourists. We had lunch of pork stew and stuffed cabbage standing up on the upper level.

After checking in, it was interesting getting to our room. In the elevator, each person has to tap their room card in order to get to that floor. In other hotels, any person can tap their card and then everyone can go to his / her respective floors. We went up and down several times before getting to our room.

The evening was full of surprises. While at St. Mathias in the morning, I found a brochure for a Vivaldi concert at 7pm. We went back to Buda Hill for an early dinner before the concert and mentioned to the manager that we planned to go and he didn't think there was a concert. After much checking, we realized that the brochure was for St. Michael's Church on the other side of the river. It was too late for us to go to the concert. We had a very nice dinner of chicken paprikash and shrimp with Hungarian noodles.

Next to us was a 89 year-old woman in a wheel chair who was so friendly and full of energy with her family. I can't imagine getting her up and down the steep ramps to the ship.




Chain Bridge, Palace on Buda Hill

Carmen and Andrei
Andrei had worked at Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown


Carmen and omelet chef

Parliament building

St. Mathias church

Dinner at Maison Bistro on Buda Hill
Can't have too many Aperol Spritz or glasses of wine!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 4 - Monday, August 25 - Istanbul, Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia

Image
 The day got off to a good start with a drive under the Roman aqueduct and along the Roman city wall. The aqueduct was constructed in 373AD to supply water to the growing city of Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire under Constantine. Our tour guide joked that the Romans had taken care to make sure that the arches would be large enough to allow passage of buses. Along the way, our guide provided information on the development of the modern Turkish state. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is famous for the Ottoman success at the battle of Gallipoli in 1915 during WWI but the Ottomans were eventually defeated and since they had sided with Germany, were under English and French occupation - this was the beginning of the disaster in the Middle East when the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine / Israel were defined without considering the history of the region. Ataturk was able to establish an army and drove out the British in 1923 and became president of the state of Tu...
Read more

Day 1 - Friday, August 22 - Woodstock - Newark - Frankfurt

Image
 We are finally off on our lower Danube cruise through Eastern Europe. We were supposed to go on this cruise in June 2021 but came down with Covid 3 days before departure and had to cancel suddenly. We are taking the Viking pre and post cruise extensions to Istanbul and Prague. Makes for a long trip but we don't know when we would ever plan to go there separately. A beautiful clear, sunny and not too hot day to start our trip.😁 We were relieved to reach the Lufthansa lounge for a beer, Bloody Mary and snacks after the trip down. The traffic on the Garden State Parkway was very heavy and Google suggested getting off and driving through downtown Newark to the airport. There was no TSA pre-check line for security at Newark and it took us about 40 minutes to get through. Now that passengers aren't required to remove shoes and belts I wonder if TSA pre-check is going away. We didn't even have to show a boarding pass to get on the plane - just look into a camera that took a phot...
Read more

Day 9 - Saturday, August 30 - Golubac, Serbia - Danube Iron Gates

Image
 Going into Serbia we had a time change to Central European Time so we gained an hour, 7am became 6am. Around 6am we came into the Iron Gates Lock, the first lock of the Danube and one of the largest. The total height of the lock is 35 meters, around 105', and needs two stages to get to this height. The ship pulls into the first chamber which closes and the ship rises to the top of the chamber. Then the gate between the two chambers drops down and the ship moves into the second chamber which then raises the ship to the top so that it can go further up the Danube. Each chamber is just long enough for the Viking ship but looks like there is room for two side by side. There is a set of locks on the Serbian side and an identical set on the Romanian side with a large dam for hydroelectric power and a road over the top. This was only built in 1972 and flooded a huge area upstream, flooding numerous towns, roads and Roman ruins. Towns had to be relocated and new roads constructed along th...
Read more