Saturday 12/1/2007- Monday 12/3/2007:
We arrived to the Budapest bus station at around 10 p.m. and took the metro to the Buda side of Budapest. We wandered up the large hill into old town… after a very tiring walking with heavy backpacks we arrived at our destination, the Hilton Budapest just inside the castle walls. We checked in and headed up to our room which had an amazing view of the city. Being Hilton Honors Gold definitely has its perks.
The next morning we woke up to view the fog over the Danube, and we to enjoy our complimentary breakfast buffet. We planned our day, starting with a visit to St Stephen’s for the first Sunday of Advent. After mass, we visited the infamous ‘right hand’ of St Stephen in the chapel. We stumbled on another holiday fair and enjoyed fresh Hungarian food, the most horrid folk singing we’ve ever heard, and kurtoskalacs (sweet dough flavored with vanilla, cinnamon, caramel). We also found the Tropicana casino to check out the poker tournament, but found out that you can’t watch like in the USA.
After watching the sunset on Buda, we headed back over the chain bridge to explore the old castle walls. We tried the local bitters, “Unicum” which reminded us of Balsams from Latvia. We grabbed a light dinner at café Miro and watched the fog roll into castle hill.
Yet again, the alarm woke us way before the sun, and we caught our taxi to the airport. We boarded our mini jet to Munich to enjoy our 9+ hour layover before heading to Egypt!