Budapest: Day 6

This was our last full day in lovely Budapest. It began with breakfast and hopping onto a metro train to go to Parliament to try to get some tickets for a tour. We were able to buy tickets for the 12:00PM tour, but it was only a little after 10AM. We had a bunch of time to kill and to make it worse it was raining and pretty cold. We killed time by exploring some weird buildings and going into a little cafe to eat some vanilla croissants.

We headed back to Parliament for the tour and had to head through a airport style security thing before we could enter. Parliament was large with lots of red carpet and gold everywhere. They told us something about the gold leaves that we so thin that 10,000 of them put together were only 1mm thick. They applied them by rubbing the brushes against their faces and then using the static to pick up the leaves. Apparently the technique is still used today. We were able to see the coronation jewels in one of rooms. There was a neat cigar holder outside of the speaker room and you could tell how well the speaker was by the lengths of the ashes on the cigars in the cigar holder. A very good speaker could be "worth a whole Havana". A pretty much took video for the whole tour so I don't need to say anything more about that besides that it said it was the 3rd largest European Parliament and that some of the pillars in the main staircase were made in Sweden and the other pillars were used in the British Parliament. The British Parliament tour was much more impressive, but it was still really neat to see this one.

After Parliament we headed toward Andrassy utca to see the Opera House. When we got there I was curious to see if anything was playing. We ended up buying tickets to see a ballet at 7PM. After that we continued down Andrassy to the House of Terror. It is a building where they used to hold and torture prisoners, do interrogations, that sort of thing. It was interesting and the basement has been recreated to look like what it would have looked like when it was used as a prison. They were pretty intense with their prisons here. One of the most memorable parts came when I had to use the bathroom and when I got back Beth was sitting on the stairs, asleep.

After the House of Terror we went down Andrassy until we came to Heroes Square. It was a about what I expected. Nothing too spectacular and probably holds more meaning in what it represents or something. The statues were pretty large and you can tell in one of the pictures I have with Beth standing beside it. At this point my hands were starting to freeze and we could see our breath (different than the 10-20 degree weather we had been getting) so we had to get moving. We went back down Andrassy utca and stopped at MacDonalds. It is weird because at fast food places over here you have to buy your ketchup and they come in little containers like you would get barbecue or sweet and sour sauce in. At least at MacDonalds you don't have to pay to use the bathroom.

After MacDonalds we headed back to the Hungarian State Opera House and watched a ballet called The Karamazovs or something else that I cannot remember in Hungarian (just looked it up, "Karamazov testverek", you can understand why I didn't remember). It was a good experience to see it, but I think I had more of an idea of what was going on before I started watching it. The music was really good though and I actually recognized some of it because I think I have it on my computer. After the ballet we hopped onto the metro and headed back to the hostel. Tomorrow our shuttle is set to pick us up at 1PM and then our flight is at 4. We are supposed to check out by 11 though. The people said it wouldn't be a problem if we wanted to leave our stuff there until we left. Hopefully everything goes according to plan and we should be getting into Charlbury by 9-ish because Beth wants to see the Peter Pan statue.