Budapest Part 2 - Castle and Butterfly

Although it's been a number of weeks since our Budapest jaunt, we're going to suspend the disbelief and pretend that it just happened.

View of Buda. Our apartment was in the building the farthest to the left.

We woke up Saturday to a crisp, clear, beautiful morning just begging to be enjoyed.

Entrance to our apartment. They should have had a café in the courtyard.

Micah serenading Budapest with Gershwin renditions, I presume.

First order of business, find a place for breakfast. We wandered around the Jewish quarter in search of a quaint corner for a coffee and some form of sustenance. We stumbled on this little gem called Blue Bird cafe (or something like that). With six mini grinders, a visual representation of their coffee business model, and delicious looking pastries we were completely satisfied.

What you don't see is that in the basement they had a coffee lab and a huge parrot cage. What's up with that?

The six separate grinders (made in Israel) in one apparatus.

After a delightful breakfast we thought to ourselves, how do we want to go about exploring this place? Public transportation? How depressing. So we did what we know, and found a bike rental shop. Best way to explore a new city. Breathe the fresh air, maybe some exhaust, and see all the corners and facades that the subwayers miss.

First order of business was to visit the massive indoor market that closed midday. The place was packed with knick knacks, doo-dads, oozits, whatsits, and food. There was also some Japanese exhibition with a lady in a kimono singing, which was a bit strange. We purchased a wooden chess set with "Budapest" engraved on the side. The wording may have looked like it was chiseled by an elementary student or perhaps someone with arthritis, but hey it's still cool.

Paprika, without which the Hungarians couldn't eat anything.

After the bustle of the market we road aimlessly through the streets, stopping at outdoor flea markets where we found hot wine and a leather messenger bag from the 70s for only $6. To remember where and when we got it I etched "Budapest 2013" on the back with a fingernail. It also looks like it was drawn by an elementary school student or arthritic seamstress.

Heroes' Square. Evidently permanently peopled with Hungarian heroes that no one else knows about. But according to our walking tour guide Hungary has a lot of famous and accomplished people.

Heroes' Square lies at the entrance to the City Park Városliget in which can be found Vajdahunyad Castle. Built for the millennial celebration of Hungary, the castle was designed to feature the over 20 (or maybe it was 12) distinct architectural styles of Hungarian history. The variegated facade produced daydreams of dragons and jousts. But seeing as how it was built at the end of the 1800s I don't think it saw anything so interesting as that.

Castle, Castle, Castle. I love Castles.

The little attached chapel was a disappointment, but the courtyard looked serene.

Ah, fall colors

After tooling around the Városliget on our bikes we wandered back to the main area of Pest and stopped for, this is embarrassing, Starbucks with a view of St. Stephens. Now I know what you are thinking, and before you judge me just hear me out. Spain does not have holiday drinks. It is a sad sad fall without a pumpkin spice latte. So yes, I had to get a pumpkin spice before it was too late!

Happy with my choices. Judge all you want.

After a caffeine cup we went into St. Stephens and were not disappointed by the beautiful colored marble interior. Micah claims it was his favorite church in Europe (Sagrada Familia excluded).

I feel so discriminated against.

Exterior of St. Stephens

As we were heading to the opera later in the evening, we thought we'd do the night right and eat at Versailles (well, the interior looks like Louis XIV once decorated it). Evidently the New York Cafe was one of the famous haunts of artists and writers during the Belle Époque. And it is Epic.

Exterior of New York cafe

Did I not say Versailles?

Leg of goose with Hungarian beans. The beans were particularly delicious.

I'm spying on Micah. I guess I'm not a very good spy.

After a delicious dinner of asparagus soup (inspired), pork trotter, and leg of goose we returned our bikes and headed over to the Opera. We got to the House a couple minutes before 7. Thinking the show started at 7:30 (for some odd reason) we played around on the banister before an usher asked us what the heck we were doing and why we weren't going to our seats as the curtain opened at 7. Woops!

No I did not have wine with dinner...

Operas in Budapest are definitely the way to go. We enjoyed this view of Madame Butterfly for only $15 a head! We also picked the right show. Evidently the woman playing Madam Butterfly is the most famous Hungarian Opera singer. She was excellent. We should have bought the program as it would have given us a summary of the show - we didn't think to read about it beforehand. Luckily we sat in the same box as a nice Hungarian lady who explained the gist of the show.

I just happened to get surprised right next to this statue.

Beautiful interior

So happy to be watching an Opera in Hungary sung in Italian about an American Navy Captain with Geisha in Japan.

If you can't tell, this is Madame Butterfly holding up a knife.

After watching an excellent performance (which I didn't understand a word of) we did some more walking up around the Parliament over the Margarit Bridge and back to our apartment to finish another awesome day in Budapest.

St. Matthias church with Fisherman bastion on our nighttime wanderings.

Budapest a Dark Beauty

Parliament

I started out with 34 photos for this blog post, and thought: "Yikes, that's going to scare people." Then I tried to weedle it down the best I could, but it still was too much, so we're going to do this trip in 3 parts and if that's too much, well this is more for posterity than for anyone in particular.

It is impossible to show all of the grandeur, elegance, and beauty of Budapest, but at least these pictures might give you a taste and a hankering to see it for yourself.



We decided to go to Budapest over London chiefly because the price of the ticket was so low (thank you Ryan Air) and the apartment was so ridiculously inexpensive in comparison. Lucky for us, Budapest wasn't given the effervescent description and praise we've given it or our expectations may have been too high for any earthly city to gratify, so we had next to no idea what to expect.

Fisherman's bastion forming a crescent around St. Matthias

We booked a little flat abutting the Danube with a view of the Parliament building and the chain bridge (Buda side), and it was totally worth it! 

View from the apartment

We arrived at this little gem just in time to drop of bags and head over to the free walking tour. 3.5 hours later, with much of the Pest and the castle district under our visual belt, we found ourselves at 6pm with the most breathtaking view of a man made light marathon I've ever seen.



Note to all travelers: try and find the free walking tours wherever you go; you get so much more out of a city if you know a little about the history. For example, the Mongols invaded centuries ago so most Hungarians have Asian blood in them. It's also interesting to hear how they couch the darker periods of history. The tour guide used air quotes when stating that Hungary aligned itself with the "wrong side" of both World Wars. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she didn't know the connotation of air quotes in English (do the English use it in the same way we do? Maybe we're just weird).

The holes you see in the facade are actually bullet holes from WWII. This was the former Ministry of Defense.

This horse statue has a famous piece of anatomy that every university student would rub during 
finals for good luck...Poor guy was accosted so many times that it's now illegal to try to rub him.

St. Matthias church cloaked in pitch black

Trompsing around the Jewish quarter in search of food and craft beer, we gave in to hunger and stopped at an inexpensive pub for goulash and some kind of meat (not sure what...veal sausages? well, whatever it was it was tasty). The beer was only palatable so we hopped to a little garden level brewery with what turned out to be very acceptable craft brews.

Chain bridge all aglow

Not sure which beers we had, but it's festive

I do remember which beers we had here because they were delicious. Micah had the Chopper and 
I the bitter...dang, maybe I don't remember. But I remember the taste.

 Leaving the warmth for another jaunt into the cold (much colder in Budapest than Barcelona, and being away from CO winters has made us wimps), we made a circuitous, meandering route behind the parliament building, across the Margarit Bridge and dragged ourselves back to our cozy apartment to crash.

View of Castle hill from Pest. Matthias church and Fisherman's bastion.

Seriously, taking a picture of yourselves at night is hard.

St. Stephen's Basilica

Redfields in Barca, baby!

Palau de la Música

Stunning, is it not? Heralded by some as "the most beautiful building in all of Spain," the Palau de la Música is a most magnificent concert hall, a product of the Renaixença (Catalan Rebirth) of the early twentieth-century. Conceived in 1905 and completed in 1908 by the genius of architect Lluís Domènech i Montane, the Palau was birthed in the Catalan Modernista style - kind of a marriage of Gaudi and Frank L. Wright...or so my uneducated opinion postulates. (We were told Barcelona is a paradise for architecture students; this now makes a lot of sense.)

While it is the stained-glass skylight in the central hall (above) that evokes Wright, in my mind, the adjacent café displays Gaudi-esk pillars and Alphonse Mucha-esk glass. (If you are an artist or art-historian, I apologize for my leaps in association, my artistic scope is narrow.)

Of particular note is the sweeping mural that provides the stage's backdrop. While difficult to see in the picture, there are eight musicians on each side, each playing a different instrument. Half of their forms are two-dimensional mosaics upon the mural, and half emerge from the mural in fully-dimensioned sculpted form. Unique and captivating.

The performance was memorable, a competition between two, young, burgeoning talents, a pianists and a cellist. The concert price was comparable to a guided tour of the Palau sans the performance - there was no debate.

Palau de la Música's forward facing facade

Good Eats

Coffee and Vino in the same pic; typical

They say home is where the heart is, but can one’s heart be in multiple places simultaneously? We seem to go from Euro-stoked to homesick-ish, a longing which vacillates from beloved Colorado to charming Alexandria/DC, and then back again to the Old World.

This whole rigamarole is fickly cyclical. Most recently, Budapest propelled us back to romanticized, european dreams, coming off the heals of a depressed demeanor resulting from weeks of c’est la vie in our traffic-clogged, narrow, maze of a Barcelona neighborhood.

Travels and visitors alike get us out of the day-to-day and back to rubbing elbows with tourists amongst world-class sights. And that’s precisely the medicine we need from time-to-time. (Note: I just used “day-to-day” and “time-to-time” within the same paragraph! Yay blogging!) Prior to November’s Budapest travels was October’s visit from my folks (Redfield family!) that reoriented us to appreciating our european city.

What have we been learning? To better appreciate a city get out there and learn about it. How do we best accomplish this? Walking-tours and bike-rentals, of course! (I guess one could combine the two [bike-tours -or- walking-rentals] but that would just be crazy talk.)

And while we did not rent bicycles in Barcelona with Mom and Dad, we did join two walking-tours: The Gothic Quarters, and Gaudi’s Barca. What a fantastic way to acquire an instant appreciation for a given history/people/culture/location.

Naturally, interspersed within all the elbow rubbing and photo snapping was food, lots of food, and coffee, and wine, and more coffee. That’s just how we tend in celebrating life; and celebrate we did...

Go to your best wine shop; ask for a Spanish Priorat

I think Dad took a picture of me taking this picture of Mom taking that picture...yeah, something like that

Many hours have been spent around this black, Ikea table - preparing food, praying over food, eating food, taking pictures of food (hopefully before it's completely eaten).

Beloved Caelum: nuns baked these for us

When we do manage to pull ourselves by the scruff of the neck and tumble downtown, we find ourselves, nearly exclusively, at either the Trappist/Nunnery bakery -or- the premier coffee roaster in Barca.

1 part espresso, 1 part cognac, yikes

"In the end, all the cakes and wines have a sacred air and every soul is collected in a chamber which Paracelsus called [the] 'olfactory chamber'. Meanwhile in monasteries [they] are producing high quality wines with healing spirits made by wise monks that pray silently and keep their secret recipes inside the walls."   - Caelum's introduction

Image: FoodieInBerlin (who was obviously not in Berlin when he/she shot this)

The roaster, El Magnífico, has a vast majority of its space devoted to roasting and sorting, as they provide beans to most all the top cafes in the city. Therefore, the retail cafe at Magnífico is standing-room-only. And as the weather has turned from cool to cold the population density of the cafe has managed to increase with each of our visits. A real shame, as we would happily sit down to hours of cortados and reading, perched at the cafe tables that don't exist.

Fromatgeria La Seu

Cheese! What wonders are derived from those grass chomping animals! Goats and sheep and cows alike, all hanging out at Fromatgeria La Seu. It's a scot who runs the shop, and for a relative pittance (twice the price of a cortado at Magnifico), she will toss together these tastings. You can then content yourself with standing around the small shop and enjoying some of the best Spain has to offer.

Fromatgeria La Seu: 3eur buys you three cheeses, membrillo, and a glass of tinto

Mom, surrounded by Fromatgeria goodness

What one experiences after multiple, full days of coffee and wine and food

 Churches

M&D! The Cathedral

Worn from centuries of being trod upon, the catacombs are still hard to miss

Del Pi, boasting the second largest rose window under Heaven at 10m across (can you guess where the first largest [12.9m] is?)

Around Barca 

"Quick! Take a picture of that bubble!"

Modus Operandi

Best friends

  Gaudi

A lamppost, ornate, but simply a lamppost, was the first and last of the city's commissions of Gaudí

Palau Güell's facade

Casa Milá

Gaudi's nautical themes within Casa Batlló echoed on the city walk (shoes included for perspective)

"How did he figure that out???" Gaudi was so ahead of his time

Mom and Dad in Barca, what a great combination. Much can be said for a like mindset regarding "travel," I guess I'm just a product of my upbringing; a good thing! After a week, we were only getting warmed up. More food! More coffee! And, it should come as no surprise, we have only discovered more of Barca since their departure. More time living here could truly warrant another round of visits from fam and friends; we have more to show you!