The temperature was climbing so we staying in most of the day and edited photos, wrote in our journals and goofed off. I wanted to get some night pictures of the Chain bridge and we were in the mood for Hungarian food so we ventured out after dark. Earlier in the week I noticed a very Paris like street not far from our apartment that had many restaurants on it so we decided to start there. After walking past the second or third place I realized I didn’t fit in because I didn’t have the cool clothes, the fancy glasses or the slicked back hair. Apparently this is where all the trendy cool people hang out and I define uncool and I’m usually not even aware of trends.
We moved on and ended up finding a place that I’ve walked by several times. Each time I go by restaurants I take a peak at the menus which are posted on the streets (the U.S. Has to start doing this..) and this one looked good. It had a paprika cream sauce that sounded tasty so we ate here. The cool thing about Budapest is you could find the most back alley eating place and the odds of them speaking English is still quite good. It’s much easier traveling here than in France. After a short wait we get one of the four tables on the sidewalk and attempt to order two Hungarian menus. The menu is similar to the French menu in that you get a salad, soup, starter, plate and dessert. Our waiter informed us that the Hungarian food isn’t suitable for children. So much for trying Hungarian food. He said he’d give me a couple of main dishes and a dessert for the same price. The menus were about 3700 which equates to around $17 for two people. I ended up ordering my chicken in Paprika cream sauce anyway which included a spatzel type of potato noodles, Natalya got duck liver, onions and baked apples. Piper and Jade had lemon and tuna pasta. All of it was pretty good and the total price was about $30 which I was happy about.
We met a couple of English lady’s that were in Budapest to get dental work done because it cost 1/3 what it does in London. If I lived in London I’d have a ticker on my desktop showing the cheapest plane tickets anywhere and I’d spend every weekend in strange cities. The Brits don’t know how lucky they are.
After dinner we decided to visit the famous Chain Bridge for some night photos. Budapest is a pretty nice looking city at night on the river. They’ve built all of their real large government and religions buildings along the water. The castle is overlooking the rest of Buda and the Danube. There are lights on the Chain bridge that they turn on at night which ensure you’re going to take pictures of it. I got quite a few decent pictures of the bridge and a few of it’s permanent residents the spiders.
There must be a wind that brings flys into the south side of the bridge because these spiders are very well fed. Some of them are a couple inches across. There’s a funicular that takes people up the side of the hill where the castle is during the day. It was not operating at night so we climbed some stairs to the top of the underpass to take pictures. Buda is interesting geographically. The castle walls are built on very narrow ridge overlooking the Danube and Pest. There wasn’t very much room for roads on the river side of the hill so they just tunneled under the hill and castle. You can drive across the Chain bridge and drive right under the castle. We found our way home only after stopping for some Gelato and went to bed. The gelato cones are small here but don’t cost more than about 60 cents so their cheap too.