We headed into Buda today and headed up the steps to Buda’s Castle Hill. For some reason we always seem to be drawn to the medieval parts of town, and this town is pretty cool. Yes there is a castle, but there is a lot more besides. Throughout this city you see contrasts in architecture standing side by side. The staunch serious looking stuff that looks like it came straight out of the Communist era standing next to some very elegant ladies from several centuries before. There is still a hint of the communist with the regular appearance of the Trabant cruising the streets, well not so much cruising as spluttering. 600cc of basic functional power.
However, getting back to up the hill, our first stop was Fisherman’s Bastion. A large limestone edifice giving a fantastic view over the Danube and the city. There were the usual touts up there peddling their wares, but there was one guy who got my attention. There was a guy there with his loyal Falcon in hand. We came across the remains of a Gothic church that was destroyed in WWII. Quite cool the way it has been preserved with the remaining piece of the alter end still standing, and the rest of the area is like a small maze of the foundations of the church as it had been. At what was the entrance end of the church there now stands a memorial.
We spent most of the day just wandering the streets, so it was hard to keep track of exactly where we were. There are churches, museums, and statues everywhere. They seem to have museums for everything. As well as the mainstream ones like the History Museum, Agricultural Museum, Military History Museum, etc … the y have museums for things like the Underground Railway Museum, Telephone Museum, Firefighters Museum, Marsipan Museum, etc. I did say for everything. Despite this when we landed in front of the Hungarian National Museum we decided it was worth a look, and we are glad we did. A lot of art depicting events in the history of this country, so there were many images of fighting Turks etc.
One of the most amusing events in our visit to the museum though was having games with the guards. We noticed that if the guards were in pairs they didn’t even look at you they were too busy talking to each other. It was the ‘Nigel no friends’ ones that you had to watch out for. They would ask to see your ticket at every opportunity, and then follow you around. In fact we had one that insisted on standing between us and the paintings, just to make sure that we weren’t tempted to take photos of them. It made you more determined to take photos of some of them, just to see if you could get away with it, and we did. In one part of the museum there was one guard with a persistent cough and loud shoes who walked around in circles trying to keep track of Justine and I in a nonchalant kind of way. We had split up to confuse him. As we heard him coming we would hide behind a partition and step out just as he got there. He got the fright of his life every time. Ahhh … it’s the little things that cause the most amusement. I am sure that the portrayals of the Virgin Mary weren’t amused in the slightest though.
As we came into the museum we made an observation, based on most of the places like this that we have been to so far in Europe. The way they deploy their workforce just seems so inefficient. In the entrance to this particular museum there were two people at the information desk, two coat rooms with two people in each, a guard outside each of the cloak rooms, two at the outside door, three between the ticket booth and the museum itself, three others just roaming about the foyer, and then others scattered around the exhibition areas. And there was one dear old sole manning the ticket counter with a queue of people wanting tickets that she was barely able to cope with. We saw the same thing when we went up to the Cupola in the Vatican City. We queued for ages for a ticket, then we turned 90 degrees to go in and there was someone standing there demanding to see your ticket. He had seen us buy the ticket less than a meter away. What happened to multitasking, or perhaps the ticket sellers also giving information? Do these countries hire these people, pay them very little, to do very little, just to keep their unemployment levels down?
From here we did a little more mooching about before we walked down the hill, across the ‘Chain Bridge’ and along the edge of the Danube past the Parliament building. On the steps at the waters edge there are some bronze sandals. This is a memorial to the Jews that were executed here. They were lined up and shot into the Danube, but they were first ordered to remove their shoes as they were a valuable commodity.
From here we went up to St Stephen’s Basilica. Very cool inside. There is evidently the mummified remains of St Stephen’s hand here. It really does make you wonder exactly how many bits they break these saints down into, and who gets the distribution job.
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