Flemming and I decided to spend a day in Budapest. We took a train from the Siófok train staion that opened in 1904:
In about an hour we reached Budapest. I always get an overwhelming feeling during first hours in that city, with its huge and such beautiful buildings:
We didn’t have any particular goal with Budapest, just wanted to have a relaxing day there. Nice archways:
Budapest is also well-known for its gastronomy, and Gerbeaud is one of its famous places, with a good selection of healthy salads, delicsious soups and tasty sandwiches. They sell their hand-made chocolate and cakes at the same place:
We were not hungry yet, just had coffee and tea and some small pastries. My tea was served on a fine porcelain, but made from a tea bag! It coudn’t be more disappointing! 🙂 Even at home I drink better quality tea.
In my prevous blogpost about Siófok I wrote a story of István Széchenyi, The Man Who Made Budapest. We wanted to visit the bridge, that bears his name – the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, the iconic landmark of Budapest:
The bridge has been closed for renovation since 2021, but we had a picture of us taken in front of it:
The old trams of Budapest:
It was nice to be surrounded by that stunning architecture.
Most of it was difficult to photograph – all those enormous buildings, and lots of people around them…
As a mentioned in one of my blogposts earlier, we basically had no clothes with us. We just washed every evening, and in the morning we had clean and dry clothers. Half an hour later they would become soaked in sweat, but that’s another story. Flemming had two t-shirts. Before leaving Znojmo (Czechia), on our first week of travelling, he washed one of his t-shirts in the evening and hanged it out from the window to get dry. When we got up in the morning, the t-shirt was gone, it simply got blown away. First in Slovenia, we went out to the shops and Flemming bough him a new one. And he was wearing it for the first time in Budapest. Nice colour, do you agree?
We just wandered around, had lunch, and tried to stay in a shadow 🙂 The Budapest Opera House (we had checked, unfortunately there were no performances on that day):
It was nice not to have any plan. The shop on the photo below sold an unusual mix of things, like old books, designer lamps, fresh cakes, and so on. And they paid no attention to the visitors. We wondered whether they ever sold anything?
It was a very hot and humid day, and an ice-cream normally helps:
Huge thinderstorms were on the way, and we saw them on a train getting back to Siófok:
In Siófok, we took a taxi – so scary the sky looked, and reached our home with a sigh just a second before the storm began.
