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Budapest reflections

Home from a lovely city break in Budapest and back to reality.  Looking at my photographs I realise they just don't do the place justice, I think its difficult to capture the majesty and grandeur of the buildings with a simple point and shoot camera,  but they are nice memories of a very interesting city steeped in history and culture.
view from dome across town showing mish mash of modern, fairy tale and old buildings

We climbed the 149 steps up into the dome of St Stephen's Basilica.  The first bit of stairs were fine, wide solid and reassuringly light, but the second spiral was a bit creepy, it felt very temporary, made from twisted metal, with alarming gaps between the steps giving clear views up and down - I have a reasonable head for heights but was a little unsettled.  The views of the city from the balcony made it all worth while.

spiral stairs up

spiral stairs down
We got a taste for height at this point so decided to spend our last evening doing a bar crawl of all the roof top bars in Budapest.  Disappointingly few!!! the first one we found was closed for refurbishment so we wandered across town to one we had spotted from the Dome balcony and managed to find it and spend a happy hour supping G&Ts while gazing back across at St Stephens Church.

There is still quite a lot to see in Budapest that we didn't manage to get round to - its a fascinating city, large and sprawling, best seen from on foot I think.  We walked about 40 miles over the four and half days we were there so there was no guilt about sampling all the excellent restaurants and cake shops we wanted to!  There is lots of street art from fountains to statues and some very varied 'graffiti.  this was amy favourite piece - all painted onto a totally flat wall, it went up three stories and then more as it depicted the roof being mended.  Amazingly realistic!

me patting painted dog!

There are many monuments celebrating and commemorating history and culture, these are proud people who have seen much suffering and distress and are determined not to forget how it has shaped them and the city.

holocaust memorial Liberty Square
(Interesting article https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/05/20/holocaust-history-can-rewritten-with-memorial/SbYfRLz1pmjCAAlPqloCeP/story.html )

Its a larger city then I had expected - I think I thought it would be like Prague but in Budapest life happens all over the city, and every district has something interesting to look at - Prague keeps most of its tourist interests to the main city centre.  Budapest definitely merits a return visit sometime in the not too distant future, but for now I need to start planning our big north America / Canada trip for the summer!
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