For lunch I ate at Menza again. It had good, cheap food that is different every day, so as long as I'm in the area I may as well keep visiting. Today it was a cream of potato and cheese soup with a salmon and spinach pasta. I splurged and bought a lemonade with it as well, so it was $6 instead of $4!
Next I headed east on Andrassy Ave, which is the main street I've been using since it connects the place I'm staying with the city center. It's an old street with a lot of beautiful buildings, and the entire street is included in the Budapest UNESCO World Heritage site. I visited the House of Terror on the street, which had been recommended to me as the one museum to visit in Budapest if I was only going to visit one. The name sounds a bit like a haunted house, but the building (and the rest of the block) was used by both the fascist and communist regimes has a headquarters, and thousands of people were detained, interrogated, tortured and executed in a labyrinth of cells beneath the buildings. The building now is partly a museum of the regimes and partly a memorial to those who were killed. Even though they had good translations I found real history and information to be a bit lacking, but the audio-visuals of the place were pretty outstanding, if bizarre. A lot of rooms felt like walking through some eerie dream: walking through a maze where all the walls are made of wax bricks, a room where floorboards are ripped out and scorched with a giant glowing white cross lying in the dirt in the middle, a room that's dark except for tiny suspended white lights and a child's voice reading names (of the dead, I assume) - stuff like that.
I followed the street further east until I got to Heroes Square, Vajdahunyad Castle and the big park that surrounds them. It was another very hot day so I was happy to spend some time relaxing in the shade of the park and taking a break from walking.
The only real other thing of note I visited was the Central Market Hall. It's a big indoor market that was mainly food stalls on the ground floor and everything else on the upper walkways. I didn't buy anything, but it was a nice building and had a lot of fresh food.
3 comments:
Menza sounds like a great place to eat, no decisions to make and a great inexpensive meal!
I'm not surprised to hear you need to replace some clothes. How's everything else lasting? Your energy, your feet, your money (you still roughly on budget). It appears that your electronics are working well--still carrying around the original camera?
My energy is still good for now. I rest when I need to, but depending on which direction I decide to go tomorrow I could really put things to the test since I might be going non-stop with very little down time for a month. My feet are rough, but I don't believe they are bleeding anywhere right now, so that's not too bad. I had to stop wearing sandals for a bit since my ankles were being rubbed raw by them. It's really hard to calculate if I'm on budget, since a lot of the money was spent up front (for train and airplanes, for example) and it's hard to factor in the percentage I've used against the money, but it's definitely in the right ballpark. I have the original camera still, but I will probably throw it out at some point. I just can't really see a use for it short of in an emergency (like if I broke my new camera even worse). One weird quirk is that when I was back in Belgium or something my tablet randomly got this blue streak one pixel wide down the middle of the screen. It was annoying, but didn't really interfere with anything since it was just so narrow. Then, mysteriously, it fixed itself when I was in Turkey, so now it's back to normal. Not sure how it fixed itself and why it took over a month, but at least it's working.
Oooh! Oooh! Budapest! I've been there. I agree about the House of Terror - fancy exhibits, but lacking in some odd fashion.
I loved that city. It was one of my faves.
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