Budapest

The Hungarian Parliament Building

This is a big river.

We're sailing into the sunrise, or where the sunrise will be. Clear sky, pink/orange/yellow dawn light seeping into the gray nighttime sky. Low hills – actually, further away than I first thought, so they're a lot bigger. We are in Hungary.

About the time we went to bed, we encountered Hungary on the right bank, and Slovakia continued on the left bank, all night. Not long before I got up, the Slovakian border turned north, and now it's all Hungary. There are big trees crowded on the left bank, but it looks like open land behind them. The right bank continues to be forest primeval. We can hear the crows on the right bank.

Smokestacks silhouetted against the dawn, seeming to rise out of the forest. The river is a bumpy mirror, as if there is no wind, but there is, a little, enough to drive me behind the barrier here on the roof deck. Blackcaps and chaffinchs in the distance. Pretty soon the river will dive south to Budapest.

A big old church with a huge domed tower rises above the river on a bluff; we've reached some of those hills. Across the river, four blocky apartment buildings tower over smaller ones scattered around them. A bridge. Esztergom. It's not to hard to figure out where you are on this river – bridges are rare, there's one here, and also we turned a little north, so – Esztergom. Trees and buildings, a new two-story building with lots of glass, and the rising sun – still hidden from the ship – glaring in reflection. And, interestingly, Esztergom's very own transport office, identical to the one outside Bratislava. And then, quickly, back to trees on both sides, with a much smaller church with one of those slim spires rising from them.

Now we are in the hills, with steep rocky faces scattered here and there. The sun still hasn't “risen;” there always seems to be a hill in the way. The right bank is in sunlight now, but we're not, yet.

And there it is.

This is a beautiful river. Big, sweeping, winding through rugged hills, sand bars and wooded islands. Isolated tents right on the shore, single campers greeting the sunrise. A long, slim, aqua kayak moving upstream. Scattered houses on the hills – not on the shore – more as we get closer to Budapest. We haven't turned south yet. The occasional steeple: slim and pointed, square and squat, or onion-domed. Now a flood wall protecting a small town. No bridges since Esztergom, where the river narrowed briefly. Silent, except for the ship's engine, way in the back. The sun is warm on my face, the breeze diminished.

The early morning regulars are interesting. There are a bunch of us – half dozen at most – who sit and look at the river, coffee or tea in hand, silent, some of us for long periods of time. All of these are guys. Never a woman sitting and looking. There are two women who are up early, but they are doing their laps on the promenade walkway, listening to something on their phones. So – six or eight of us up on the roof, greeting the morning, silent and calm.

Except for that one guy – loud voice, always something to say, who just showed up and ended the silence. Now talking about helping a couple back to their room after an evening of complimentary open bar. There is a lot of drinking on the ship.

We're making the long, slow turn south to Budapest. A kayaker paddles by, and on the shore a ferry – another one on the other shore, the first we've seen this morning. More campers. There is a broad pebbly beach all along the river – the whole river, and also on the Rhine – showing just how low the water is. The pebbly beach is river bottom. Whatever the impact of the low water is for everyone else, it's a good thing for camping.

Wow, it's really getting hot. It's just after 8AM, and people are finding shade to sit in. The breeze helps a little, but...

The hills faded away for a while, on both sides, but now return, on the right side, and populated with enough houses to suggest that we're approaching a city, which we are. There's the TV tower, peeking over the hill. Nearer, a red and white smokestack. A kayak and a racing scull, both zooming downstream; another kayak, laboring up. There have been many small boats moored along the shore; one or two are out on the water, and one got close enough to get a blast from our ship's horn.

A red canoe. On the right bank, small buildings, cottages really, one after another in the trees right on the pebbly beach. A swimming area with a couple dozen beach chairs and chaise lounges, but no one in sight. Small factories, warehouses and grain silos on the left bank. More bridges.

I have to get the laptop – and me – out of the sun.

The city is emerging before us; I'm not familiar with it, so I don't recognize anything. The shore to the right is still wooded; on the left, a cluster of six tall construction cranes, with four more nearby. Then a cluster of a dozen or so fifteen-floor apartment buildings, and a large modernist building that looks like a bunch of pizza boxes stacked up. Silver pizza boxes.

The river splits here, around a long island that seems to be a park. We're going right.

Outskirts of low apartment buildings and larger homes running up the hill on the right, and here comes downtown around the bend.

Our Program Director is narrating our approach. The island is Margaret Island, named after a holy woman from the 14th century, daughter of a King. The island is vehicle-free. And here comes the Margaret Bridge, built by the same company as built the Eiffel Tower, a cast iron and concrete Victorian confection.

And above it, suddenly, in the distance, is the magnificent, fairy-tale Parliament Building (top of page). Built in the late Victorian, there is nothing Victorian about it. Most of it is Neo-Gothic, and really looks it, like a medieval cathedral run amok. It's huge central tower is Neo-Renaissance, and that really looks a lot like the Duomo dome in Florence. The combination – and the size – is stunning. The building is right on the water, facing the opposite hillside, which is covered with smaller but just as elaborate and monumental buildings, all set to be seen from the river. This was truly a spectacular approach to a very unique city.

The Chain Bridge is just in front of us, a heroic statue on the hill beyond. The bridge was built in 1849, the first bridge in Buda and Pest, and the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, surpassed only by the Brooklyn Bridge about fifteen years later. We are turning around, so we can back into our wharf below the Parliament building; these ships always dock with the bow upstream, so the current can flow easily past the v-shaped prow, instead of pushing against the flat stern.

Quick breakfast, and onto the bus.

Our ship was docked on the Pest side, and our bus tour crisscrossed this bustling city a number of times. It resembles Paris in that its made up mostly of big late eighteenth-century buildings, maybe seven or eight floors, with shops and stores on the bottom floor and apartments above. Like Paris, the effect is charming; any street is a pleasant place to be. Unlike Paris, there aren't a lot of wide boulevards; most streets are narrower, with two or maybe sometimes four lanes of cars. Wide sidewalks facilitate enjoyment of the architecture, but overall, the streets are not wide enough to really take in the beauty of a whole block

Unlike Paris, most importantly, there is not one architectural style which predominates, and not even one color. There are many buildings per block, and each has its own style, usually pretty different from those beside it, but each is very elegant and competent architecture. The colors are muted and do not clash, usually; the most common color is white, or natural stone. Unlike Vienna, the architecture is not heroic or monumental, but beautiful and functional and, it might be said, restrained.

Well away from the river is City Park (Városliget Park), and in this park is Hero's Square, which kind of sums up the high points of Hungarian history. There is the statue of the seven chieftains who arrived and settled in the 9th century; the statue of the king who united the seven tribes in the year 1000, the generally-agreed upon date of the founding of the country. Fourteen kings also gaze out over the square. Not portrayed are the Mongol, Ottoman, Nazi and Communist occupations, all of which have had a significant impact on the country, city, and people. Not to mention on the architecture.

Part of Hero's Square

Hero's Square is at the end of a major boulevard named after Jyula Andrassy, who served, in the late nineteenth century, as both a well-regarded Prime Minister, and the lover of Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Emperor Franz Joseph's wife. Apparently, Elizabeth – nicknamed Sisi – spent most of her time in Hungary and the Hungarians loved her, naming all sorts of stuff in Budapest after her. The Austrians, not so much. A soap opera worth watching, especially since she was assassinated by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898, when she was sixty; he killed her with a sharpened needle file.

Over the river to Buda. This, according to the guide, is the expensive place to live and shop, while Pest is “the real city.” Buda is much older than Pest, which is only a couple of hundred years old. There's a hill that parallels the river on that side; the old city is on top of the hill; there's a tunnel from the Chain Bridge through the hill, which leads to the generally residential city beyond. Pest is unabashedly urban; Buda can't decide.

In 1873, twenty four years after the Chain Bridge first connected both sides of the river, Buda and Pest became Budapest. The rest is history (everything before that is history, too, but, you know...).

We left the bus and walked through much of the old town of Buda, and saw the home of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who, in 1847, discovered that infection could be avoided by washing your hands, preferably with chlorinated water, and radically changed the world of medicine forever. I've always wondered why it took so long for us to figure that out. We passed the hospital he worked at on the bus tour, and saw his home in the Old Town, where he established the first pharmacy in Hungary. He's kind of a hero of science, and it was really cool to be there where it happened.

We also saw an Actual Cat (left). Our only Actual Cat on the trip? I think so. So, that box checked. Actual Cat: DONE. Everything sort of stopped until everyone 1) petted it and 2) took a picture of it. It seemed fine with the attention, just a regular part of the tour. Hot cat.

We ended the walking tour in the Church of Our Lady of Buda, also know as the Matthias Church, after King Matthias, who had it built and then got married there. When the Ottoman Turks came through, they destroyed all the churches in Budapest (and lots of other stuff too), but not this church, which they turned into a mosque. When they were finally evicted in the seventeenth century, the local folks wanted to re-paint the inside, which had been painted to conform to the needs of the mosque. They hired some Jesuits from Andalusia, in Spain, which had been under Arab rule for seven hundred years (think the Alhambra); Islam had been eliminated in Andalusia less than two hundred years earlier. So the Jesuits, good Catholics (some say the best Catholics) brought that generational, inbred Arab sensibility to the job and the inside, today, this church has a distinct eastern feel. Pretty cool, though. You don't often see the entire interior of a Gothic cathedral painted with geometric designs (Islam discourages images of living beings in religious art).

We had little free time, which was OK because it was already beastly hot. We checked out the view from the lookout complex called Fisherman's Bastion (awesome)(see below), which was a little too, too.... especially considering that it was built, in its current form, in 1905. To be fair, there has been a castle of sorts on that spot for a thousand years. Then walked back to where the bus would pick us up, using every shred of shade we could.

We saw two whole-body misters that were pretty popular.

Our guide had pointed out the Parliament Building (impossible to miss in Budapest), and the Congressional offices and the offices of the Prime Minister, which were in the Old Town. He briefly described the structure of government in Hungary. What he didn't do is say a word about the Prime Minister, Viktor Urban. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Urban:

Since 2010, when he resumed office, his policies have undermined democracy, weakened judicial independence, increased corruption, and curtailed press freedom in Hungary

He's well-known around the world as a tyrannical strongman whose stated goals is to destroy democracy and establish a theocracy in Hungary. Hungarians deserve better, after all the abuse they've taken in the last millennium, but if I were a tour guide in the capital, I wouldn't bring him up, either.

Walking back to the ship along the Danube waterfront, we encountered the Shoes on the Danube Bank (Cipők a Duna-parton), a memorialto as many as 20,000 Jews and other "undesirables" who were murdered in January of 1945 by members of the Arrow Cross Party, a right-wing ultra-nationalist party which had been in power for less than a year.

Wikipedia:

Victims were ordered to take off their shoes (shoes were valuable and could be stolen and resold by the militia after the massacre), and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.

A month later, Soviet troops liberated the city.

Our last night on the ship. Mostly packed; bus leaves at 7:30AM; bags out by 6:30. For dinner we sat at a table that was actually outside on the deck, in the sun. It was after 7PM, so the temperature was more moderate, and the breeze more successful in keeping things pleasant. After dinner, here we are on the roof deck; it's twilight, and the horizon is punctuated by church spires and construction cranes. The quarter moon is up. It's crowded up here, but pleasantly so; everyone wants to watch the sun set on our last day. Just on shore, a band is playing to an appreciative crowd – a guitar, drum and bass playing long, creative instrumental pieces that Abbey and I both liked.

Some of the more prominent buildings across the river, up the hill in Buda, are lit up. The Chain Bridge, right next to us, wears necklaces of little lights, and a huge, stately building above it watches over the city.

Goodbye, Danube! Goodbye, rivers!