Free Walking tour - Blogabond

After our brekki today Chris, our new mate Janene set off to the heart of the city in search of the free walking tour that we saw advertised. As we had missed the 10.30am one we decided to do a bit of sight seeing ourselves before catching the 2.00pm one.

To fill in time we walked over the chain bridge and up to the Budapest Castle that is now a museum. It was a little bit of a hike up here, but it offered good views over Budapest. We took a few photos, took time out to take it all in and then went for a little walk around the museum. As we turned to go around one corner of the building (we were walking around the outside) a security man stopped us and told us that we could not go any further. At this stage we were only looking for an exit out of the garden area we had stumbled upon, he told us to go around another way, so following his directions we head off, only to find ourselves back where we originally spoke to him, only on the other side. Now we understood why he said that we weren’t to go behind him… we stumbled upon a Korean TV drama being filmed, complete with stunt men leaping from a building and blood stained “victims” We got chatting to the stunt man next to us who was very nice, though we had a little trouble understanding his broken English and as we didn’t speak Korean or Hungarian it posed as a slight problem when trying to quiz him on the name of the drama, the plot, what he did etc etc. From what we could gather the name of this drama is “Iris” though, it could have also been his name, we’re not sure. After standing around for a while surrounded by stunt men, blood splattered victims and other various actors we were asked to move out of the shot by a very polite directors assistant. We obliged willingly, we didn’t think that 3 white westerners in various colored rain coats would really fit into the ‘feel’ of the drama.

We stopped for a quick yummy lunch, Hungarian salad and omelets and then joined the free walking tour. The tour was very good and very informative we learnt all about the history of Hungary, about how the country was formed, many invasions over the years and the most interesting and depressing history of 20th century Hungary I didn’t know that before the end of the first world war Hungary was much bigger and included parts of Austria, Romania and the Czech republic but after Hungary picked the wrong side in WW1 they were forced to give up a lot of territory. Then they picked the wrong side again in the Second World War after Hitler promised that they would get some of their lost land back. Once the Nazi’s started to round up all the Hungarian Jews and either through them into the Danube river that runs through Budapest or send them to Nazi death camps in Germany they tried to split from the Nazis and where promptly invaded and occupied by Hitler then in 1945 the Russians “liberated” them from the Nazi’s and of course occupied the country for themselves Hungary struggled under Russian cold war communism until 1990 suffering millions of it’s citizens being sent to Russian GULAGS and plunging the country into near bankruptcy a couple of times. So all in all a fairy depressing history lesson. The tour took us back across the chain bridge and back up to the castle so a hell of a lot of walking was achieved today!

After the tour finished we took Carlos who we knew from the hostel and was also doing the walking tour to see the parliament building a look for a memorial to the Jews that were drowned in the Denude in the form of lots of iron shoes by the riverbank. The Parliament was impressive and kind of like Westminster in a way with its Gothic jaggared towers. I thought it seems far too big for a country the size of Hungary but I guess Hungary used to be a lot bigger.

We went back to the hostel and I had a little bit of a snooze (Chris here by the way, we are on a train to Prague and I am catching up on the blog as Em is too tired) then decided at about 9 to go get some food. We ended up at a Chinese place and none of the staff spoke any more English than the word “chicken” so as you can imagine a great game of charades was carried out to work out what we wanted, this was followed by a dash through the rain back to the hostel and some well deserved sleep.

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Chris and Emily on June 23, 2009 from Budapest, Hungary

from the travel blog: Europe 2009

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