December 22 – Budapest
Jan & Harry left for the airport before breakfast and we had most of the day to explore. The hotel gave us a late checkout so, after breakfast, we took trolleys & Metro to the Parliament for a 10:00am tour. The building is over 100 years old, the 3rd largest in the world, has over 700 rooms and is completely made of Hungarian materials (except for 8 Norwegian granite columns) and was designed by Hungarians. It’s an exquisite building and a real pleasure to tour. The crown of St. Stephens (the founding King of Hungary) is on display and is reportedly the oldest crown in Europe. The crown represents Hungary, not the king wearing it, and it was used for all coronations throughout the centuries. St. Stephens’ great accomplishment was to realize that, in order to avoid takeover by other European kingdoms, it was necessary to unite all the tribes and convert to Christianity. It worked. There is a lot of gilt work and stained glass throughout this spectacular building. It hosted innovative concepts when originally built, including forced air heating and cooling into the legislative chambers. The cooling used air flow over ice and was quite efficient.
After the tour we walked for about 30 minutes through commercial & financial streets and ended up at the Christmas market where we bought a few items we had seen on previous visits. We returned to the hotel to dump our stuff and went to the bistro we visited 2 nights before for a late tapas lunch. Packing is simple for us because we’ve figured out how to survive easily with a 25” wheeled duffel and small carry on each. Our cab met us at the hotel at 3:00 for the 30 minute ride to the airport where our Malev Hungarian flight to Frankfurt was on time. Fortunately, our itinerary avoids all the trouble spots shutting down much of Europe (Heathrow still isn’t back to full operation since the big snowstorm 5 days ago.) We stayed at a small hotel near the airport for the night.