buda vs. pest - round 3

saturday we got up in the morning ready to do some sighsteeing. we went to st. stephen's basilica first (above). it is the largest church in budapest, seating over 8,000. it was begun in the mid 19th century, but because of numerous problems wasn't finished until 1905. in front of it is a huge square which was an awesome place to sit and sketch the church. later we crossed the chain bridge, which is somewhat famous, and the climbed to the top of castle hill. this is when we went to the labyrinth as well (see "weary return_"). after walking around for awhile there, someone in our group thought it would be a good idea to go see this statue park of old hungarian communist sculptures. the ads for it make it sound amazing, so they must be right. wrong. we had to take a tram to the end of the line, then buy a bus ticket and go another 6 or 7 miles. the only thing that could have made it worse was bad weather, and you guessed right, it started raining. also, catching the bus home proved to be a little more difficult than it sounded originally. so after that 3 hr. waste of 10 bucks we went back to the river and had dinner on a boat restaurant, which was actually good, and again, spicy, even though i only had pasta. the rain had let up so a few of us decided to go to the top of the citadel to take some night pics (below). the view was incredible, but on the way down, it started raining again, but harder than before. once back to the hostel and after alot of legwork, i was able to get ahold of gabor, a foreign exchange student at my high school who was from hungary and studying in budapest. i met up with him and we went to this student bar near his university. there he bought me many shots of hungarian liquor. it was rough. after the bar closed, i just went back to his place to crash cause it was much closer to where we were than my hostel was.




this just turned out pretty funny, so i had to include it.