We managed to leave Spokane about 9:30am. This is an early start for us. No line at the Nelway Canadian border crossing. We stopped to eat our picnic lunch in Kokanee Creek, Provincial Park. Not many swimmers in Kokanee Lake.
We also stopped at Ainsworth Hot Springs where after a struggle we found the straight uphill cemetery hike. Well worth it!
I don’t think I mentioned visiting Esztergom Basilica on our road trip with Szusza. Pictures don’t capture that this is the 3rd biggest church in Europe. On any adventure abroad there is always something you wanted to see that’s being reconstructed. The inside was disappointing.
I bought tickets for us all to climb to the top of the tower. Dennis & Szusza indulged me. Neither was at all enthused. Think of climbing to the top of the Space Needle or the Empire State Building. What the tower lacks in height the small round stairs more than makes up for in claustrophobia.
We worried about Dennis’s head
After our climb Szusza drove across the bridge to Slovakia where we had our best Hungarian meal. The restaurant looked questionable as it was in a small slightly grimy building and called Casablanca. I guess because it was once painted pink??
The newly designed and very interactive House of Music and the Ethnographic Museum which we walked on top of were a nice surprise. Part of the Liget Project which Zsuzsa told us was quite controversial when proposed. The plan is to make part of the park into a museum district. So far it look good and is quite popular. We had to wait almost 2 hours for our turn to see the House of Music’s permanent exhibit.
The Agriculture Building is still a castle. There was a long line of families waiting to enter. I wondered what the attraction was. Was it the castle like building or something farm related? Later Zsuzsa told me all the park museums have educational exhibits with interactive features that interest interest children. Part of our Budapest visit coincided with a Fall Break for Hungarian schools.
Exploring the Agricultural Building is something for next trip. I actually remember that in 2008 the building was hosting an international flower show. The ticket for admission was so $$ expensive so we opted not to go.
I am relieved that Trump canceled his trip to Budapest. I’m sure Victor Orban would have made sure Trump visited Budapest’s acre of monuments on Heroes Square. Trump would have been inspired to add a few ancient horsemen or something worse on our Capital Mall.
I thought these young people must be waiting for a rock star. We couldn’t believe the lines of tourist waiting to buy a chimney or funnel cake. In my opinion there are far better Hungarian desserts. Rick Steves and other guide books tell visitors this is something they must eat.
A transportation pass for trams, the underground Metro and buses was $17 for 15 days. When I was here 18 years ago there was a transit strike. The system was losing money. I paid $35 for my first monthly pass but $50 later. Something is fixed. The trams & subway cars are new too.
Finding our way around Budapest was not hard. It took us a couple of day to master where the various trams that came by went. The metros were easy except I kept confusing the numbers M2 took us home in Vienna but not in Budapest.
We loved our very modern Airbnb. We were in a quiet neighborhood in Buda convenient to the tram line. The price was right. Our only difficulties were which button to push to get the stove to heat and how to get the remote control blinds up once you have them down.
Dennis tried to take a picture of the kitchen but it wouldn’t fit in 1 shot.
We had a big kitchen table, a huge coffee maker & the smallest dishwasher you ever saw.
We had the traditional 2 bathrooms. One with a toilet and sink, the other with a shower, sink, and washing machine.
This clothes washer is supposed to both wash & dry. That didn’t happen so I spread the clothes out the more traditional way in front of our sunny window.
We had a great 2 weeks in 2 beautiful cities.
Ters (Squares), Parks, Statues, the Duna.
Squares, statues, & plaques that you can’t translate pop-up everywhere and sometimes in unexpected places.
In a country known for its very good sausages
Budapest park playgrounds make the most of very little space. We saw a small soccer practice area built up stairs above the playground. Another park combined a soccer area with basketball ball hoops. Kids were doing both but they wouldn’t stay still for a picture.
I love any route going uphill, across a bridge or even stuck in traffic if it allows me a view across the Duna (Danube).
I find a lot of quirky things in endearing.
Leaving tomorrow.
Posted in Hungary, Uncategorized
Downtown Vienna is not all palaces, museums, monumental building, and high end shopping, there are quite a lot of those though.
We enjoyed having coffee and people watching in the park, the rose gardens in Volkspark, and a couple of amazing churches.
Odd things too like the small dog parks, Austrian students lounging in their Palestinian protest encampment.
One fun things we did was go to the Albertina Museum to see the Gothic Modern exhibit explaining how modern painting was influenced by studies of Gothic art. The colorful paintings cheered me up after a day of wandering among So many large gray buildings.
We found our way to Freud’s house. We thought we should visit since we were in the neighborhood.
Our last morning we stayed in our Vienna neighborhood taking some photos of the Nachtmarket and visiting the Succession exhibits.
As we left on the train we saw that there are some very modern buildings in Vienna.
We visited the Hapsburg’s summer palace Schonbunn shortly after missing the NO KINGS demonstrations at home. Reading the U.S. news and seeing two Hapsburg palaces got me thinking of the many reasons that the Americans colonists disliked monarchy. There were reason beyond being subject to arbitrary royal commands that Americans decided we want NO Kings.
Schonbunn above was the last residence of Franz Joseph I in 1916. On our tour it seemed that most of the family occupied only one floor. I imagine the cost of the palace and its maintenance must have been (and is now) quite a few $$. I’m sure some of the tab was billed to the Austrian people.
There are additional buildings & grounds.
The palace woods, park and fountains are impressive. Imagine the maintenance required in the 19th century and now.
Luckily Vienna now has tourists to support palace upkeep. We paid $92 for two tickets.
Four hours visiting the summer palace and grounds wasn’t enough. We took the Metro downtown and did a walking tour that included Franz Joseph’s winter home. We spent a morning in this palace 18 years ago. We decided we didn’t need to do it again.
In addition to selling carriage rides Vienna seems to employ a number of friendly Courtiers selling concert tickets to tourists.
Here are some interesting things we saw in Vienna the King had built.
Driving the plague out of Vienna
Here is a building Franz Joseph wanted torn down but he didn’t get his way.
In 1910 the controversial Looshaus apartments were in and the Hapsburg emperor was soon out. No happy ending. Near the Opera is a memorial to remind us of the horrors of Fascism and War.
The memorial features the horror of Orpheus entering Hades and a starving Jew forced to clean graffiti.
The moral of the story No Kings, No Fascism, and No War. That sounds easy.
We planned that we would avoid going down the busiest shopping street in Budapest on a Saturday afternoon. Yet somehow there we were wondering where we could get Dennis a hot dog. He was feeling peckish. It turned out to be pretty interesting. You never know what you might see on the crowded street. For instance this giant floating ball. We’ll never know what it means. We did find a small place on a side street that had a hot dog with mustard for Dennis and a cappuccino and croissant for me. Best of all huge clean windows where we could relax and observe the tourists and shoppers.
Fortified we wandered off the crowded streets and found this pocket park. I love stumbling into small quiet places in the city.
We rejoined the crowd to see St Stephen’s Basilica but only from the outside.
On our way to the Parliament we saw 2 tour groups paused in front of this memorial monument in Szabadsag Ter (square). This is an official WWII memorial created by the Orban government. People have assembled a protesting memorial of pictures and stories of Hungarians who were brutalized by fellow Hungarians during the Nazi era.
Tours of parliament must be booked ahead of time but we enjoyed walking around the building.
On the grounds we found an underground museum on the 1956 revolution. Films documenting the repression of the 1956 revolt against the Soviet Union. Some were narrated by survivors. I found it very moving.
By 5:00 pm we had walked over 7 miles. It was time to find dinner but we discovered that on Saturday night many restaurants outside of the tourist area close early. The carry out pizza place down the street from us had an hour wait. We we’re relieved to find a kabob take-out next to our closest grocery store. With the help of pictures, just enough English, and a positive attitude on the part of the woman taking our order we got dinner.
Woke up on our very modern Airbnb flat. That is I woke-up when Dennis said “It’s after 10 O’Clock do you want to get up?
Dennis had Google mapped the fastest route to walk to a transit center to buy a 15 day bus/tram pass. We got lost among the “Housing Estates”. The name for socialist era high rises. Not a bad walk because they have trees and the occasional park between building.
After a struggle to find the right tram to take back to our flat we recharged with granola bars and boarded a tram to see the still being built, rebuilt or perhaps even re-imagined, Castle District. Rebuilding the Castle District controversy
As I understand it, all the buildings are a recreation of the originals or better. The rebuilding started with Hauszmann in the 1900’s. The Castle District got shot up again in WWII when the Soviets took Budapest from the Germans.
Some dilapidated structures were razed in the early 70s and are now being rebuilt again looking very grand and new.
Still jet-lagged we didn’t get an early start. Sometime after 10:00am Dennis helped me map out a route to walk to the house where I had a small flat for five months, in 2008. I was teaching English at the Budapest Technical University, BME.
As we stared at the house, which looked a little more run-down than I remembered it, a woman opened a window and asked me something in Hungarian. I assumed she was asking why we were staring at her house. I replied with one of the few phrases I’ve mastered “Nem erte Maygar” I don’t understand Hungarian. I pointed to myself and the upstairs apartment I lived in and informed her in English that I had lived there. She shrugged and I’m sure told me she didn’t get it. She looked relieved as we left. We even exchanged happy good-byes.
In the afternoon we met my friend, teacher and mentor Zsuzsanna. We walked through the BME campus and toured building we taught in as well as the ancient original campus building.
Zsuzsa helped us find the bus up Gellert Hill. We all expected to see the beautiful view from Citadella a former military outlook. However access to the site was completely restricted by a remodeling project. It hasn’t taken us long to understand how much Victor Orban loves remodeling and rebuilding projects. This one is controversial because they have added a new religious element, a cross,to the former military site.
We were all disappointed because the viewpoint was blocked but Zsuzsa guided us downhill to the Garden of Philosophers which had a nice view of autumn color and less people.
We found a very good Hungarian restaurant in our neighborhood. It was almost 9pm by the time we got back to our flat and collapsed. Quite a full day.
A word about churches: I don’t know how many “oldest” churches there are in New Mexico but Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe was the first, oldest church, we entered. Loretto (1873) claims the title of oldest Gothic cathedral west of the Mississippi. The main attraction is the spiral wooden staircase miraculously built by a single carpenter in just 6 months. Upon completing the staircase, the carpenter mysteriously disappeared. Another miracle is that the spiral stairs was originally used without a handrail. It must have taken great courage to sing in the choir.
In Santa Fe we also visited San Miguel Mission down the street which claims to be the oldest church (1680 rebuilt 1710) in the U.S.
San Miguel Mission
Santa Fe Church but which one?
With impressive bronze doors is Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi 
which incorporated the oldest adobe chapel in the new cathedral.
San Geronimo Church Ruins & Cemetery
New San Geronimo
In Taos Pueblo San Geronimo would have been an oldest but the Pueblo Indians burned down in 1640. As I understand it there was some anger about the effort required to build a church for a strict Spanish religion many weren’t thrilled with. Religious compromises were made and the church was rebuilt and the 3-7 ft. thick adobe walls were a great protection for the Indians & Spanish against the U.S. cannonballs for a while. U.S. troops eventually came through the roof and set the church on fire. The cemetery and some ruins remain and the new San Geronimo was built on a different site.
Enroute from Taos to Albuquerque we stopped at San Jose de Garcia Church (built 1760-76) in Las Trampas one of the oldest, best preserved, Spanish Colonial churches.
San Jose de Garcia
We also didn’t miss Chimayo (1814) where a glowing crucifix was found and apparently (the crucifix) demanded that the Santuario de Chimayo church be built around it.
Very Wet!
Santurario de Chimayo
In Old Town Albuquerque we stumbled into San Felipe de Neri originally built in 1706 but rebuilt 1793 after the adobe melted due to a large amount of rain and not 300+ days of sunshine. It’s the oldest church in Albuquerque.
San Felipe de Neri-Oldest Church in Albuquerque.
Old adobe churches are definitely a New Mexico specialty.
Posted in Uncategorized
