I do not approve of Fitbit. My wife informs me that we have walked 16 kilometers today and I thought for sure it was 60, at least. The more we allow machines to rate us, to judge us, the more we are not going to like the judgements.
Anyway, every step was a step well spent. Budapest truly is an impressive city. After a big breakfast at the hotel, we took the Metro to the other side of the river, and began on a route Sam had planned, which I was not thrilled with because he’d placed my Roman ruins at the end of our itinerary, and if there’s one thing I learned in Journalism School, it’s that you put the stuff at the end that you are the least worried about if it gets cut, because editors are just fucking lazy and will go ahead and lop off whatever number of lines don’t fit.
Whatever. As long as the kids see what they want to see and they’re happy, I should be happy, too.
First thing on the list was the “Statue of Liberty” which is atop quite a steep hill, and the area right at the top was closed, but it was a good walk with some great views and what we could see of the statue was lovely. We couldn’t help noting comparisons with Prague. One side of the river (Pest) is flatter, but more built up, and the other side rises rather precipitously, and that’s where the castle and a lot of the other monuments are. Seriously, the view from the statue of liberty reminded me very much of the view from Letna Park.
Next stop was the castle, and it started actually raining on us there so we ducked into the cafe at the art museum which, amazingly, had fairly normal prices. Another thing that impressed me about the castle was that from the gardens at the bottom up to the top of the hill there was an escalator. Most considerate.
A couple of churches and monumental type areas later and we did make it to my ruins. I was very satisfied, because ruins can be as little as damn near nothing, but you could actually see the outline of a city there, and the museum contained a lot of stuff that was pre-Roman as well, stone carvings and such that were 7,000 years old.
Then we went for a very late lunch at an American themed hamburger restaurant, which was a good deal cheaper than yesterday’s lunch but also came in somewhat oversized proportions.
Tomorrow any sight-seeing we do will be pretty close to the neighborhood where we’re staying, and we’ll be driving home tomorrow afternoon.
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