Sunday, June 10, 2007

Day Ten – Saturday, June 9 – Budapest, HU




We had a somewhat slow moving morning, with a bit of online research to determine itinerary highlights since we had limited time and no book. The hotel gift shop didn’t offer any particularly useful books so we figured we’d start with Buda Castle, try to get to one of the thermal baths and see how far we got.

Since the breakfast buffet wasn’t included with our room, we passed and walked a couple of blocks to Vací utca, a pedestrian shopping street. We had what turned out to be a two-phase breakfast. First, we each had coffees in an outdoor café, but since it was around 11:00 by now they weren’t serving any breakfast pastries, we couldn’t help but notice a couple of girls who had been asked by the rather stern waiter to eat their yummy looking chocolate covered cream-filled donuts outside the restaurant perimeter while their dad had a beer. On the way out, we asked the dad where they had gotten them, and he pointed to the McCafe down the street. Hmmm? McCafe, eh? It turned out that the McCafe, which is attached to the McDonald’s but has more of a Starbucks feel, was quite a find. Another round of café lattes, fresh squeezed orange juice, croissant and a dense biscuit topped with a Parmesan type cheese, for quite a bit less than just our coffees had been at the outdoor café. And good, too!

As we headed toward Buda Castle, we bought a couple of tickets to an evening dinner cruise on the Danube – opting for the late sitting at 10:00PM. Again, a super touristy thing to do, but why not! And it was really not a bad deal at all at about $35/each for the cruise, champagne, dinner, wine and desert.

We walked across the Chain Bridge and took the funicular up the hill to the Buda Castle area. (missing a chunk here, I’ll need to come back and edit:

Fisherman’s Bastion, Lunch at St. George’s Residence (Annette: stuffed cabbage with pork chop, sausage and bacon on top, sauerkraut and sour cream sauce; Paul: perch-pike), Labyrinth,

Walk to Gellert baths, and thermal & large pool. Walk back to hotel across green bridge (??) to hotel for rest.

Laundry, posting on blog, emails,

Dinner cruise at 10:00, back for posting pictures, etc.

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