Photo 1: Traditional Goulash for dinner
Photo 2: Dinner with Hungarian family and friends
Photo 3: The rockstar of the family
Post by: April Donovan
Location: Budapest, Day 10
Today was the group’s first day in
Budapest, a new language, new currency, and a whole new country. We arrived by
night train at 9 am, exhausted. We brought our luggage to the hotel and they gave
us free breakfast, and by 10:30 we were off on our first bus tour of Budapest.
Our tour guide spoke very good English and was a teacher in Budapest. She told
us a little about the Hungarian language. It is one of the oldest in Europe. Our
first stop on the tour was the city park, where we drove by the oldest zoo in
Europe. She then took us to look at one of the many spas that utilized
Budapest’s hot-springs. The spa building had beautiful architecture and a faint
scent of sulfur from the springs. We could only see the actual pools through a
small window. The waters are medicinal and some doctors even prescribe them to
their patients to help treat many joint diseases.
After our tour of the park we got
back on the bus and went up the hill to the Buda side of the river. She
explained to us that Budapest is actually made up of two parts Buda and Pest
(similar to Minneapolis/St. Paul), but they were unified in the late 1800’s. The
view of the Budapest landscape from the top of the hill was spectacular!
However, our tour guide suggested going again at night because “Budapest is
like an old woman city, she looks best in candlelight.”
We had a few hours to rest and eat
after the tour, and then we were off to a local family’s house for dinner. They
made us a delicious goulash dinner with huge bread slices twice the size of my
face. We sat and ate in their backyard and talked for hours. The family was a
younger couple, George and Agnus and their four kids. One of the boys and their
neighbor played guitar for us. We were very glad to have been invited to share
a meal with such nice people, and they were equally excited to meet us.
Overall, it was a great first day in Hungary.
