Budapest Day 3

Pretty crazy the difference a few days make. In my previous two posts I mentioned having trouble ordering food and being a bit intimidated by the public transit system. Today I found myself hopping on and off trains like I had been doing it my whole life and even sounding like I knew a little of what I was talking about at restaurants. Although, to be fair, I think my experience with food the first night was due mostly to finding myself in a part of town that wasn’t very english friendly - which is typically ideal, except when you need to figure out how to eat.

Yesterday, between the sun being out and walking, quite literally, all over Pest, I never really felt all that cold, despite the temperatures being right around freezing. Today was a different story, today I froze my ass off. We’ve had a few dustings of flakes, but no real snow since I’ve been here, but when the wind picks up it grabs your soul and chills it until you’ve forgotten what the concept of warmth is. (And this isn’t even the coldest city I’m going to, by a long shot, woo!) So between the numbing cold, and my aching feet from stomping around the day before, I decided today was as good a day as any to visit the famous thermal baths the city is known for. In different venues around town, I have seen Budapest referred to as both “The City of Waters” and “The City of Baths”, with the Danube running through the center and a network of mineral water streams running under the city, Budapest is renown for its drinking water and its thermal baths. The bath in particular that I visited, the Széchényi Baths, are the largest thermal bath complex in Europe. Now, not knowing what a ‘thermal bath complex’ was myself, I can imagine thats a tough thing to contextualize if you’re not familiar. To describe it, it was a very large building with a maze like arrangement of rooms and pools, all at different temperatures, with saunas and steam rooms littering the area as well. Széchényi also happens to have a wonderful outdoor area, which was really neat to see as well, albeit challenging to enjoy while not fully submerged due to the aforementioned coldness. If I am remembering correctly, there are like 14 pools in total, and I think I was able to take a quick dip in at least most of them, including the cold plunges. The demographics here were pretty humorous as well, as it consisted of about 60% tourists and 40% older Hungarians getting in their daily pool aerobics or steam. Since I didn’t have a water proof cover on my phone, I left it in the locker the whole time, so I have no pictures unfortunately, but here’s one I grabbed from a google search of the outdoor area to paint a picture for your minds eye.

I had planned to spend most of the day at the baths originally, but after a few hours of soaking and exploring, I felt pretty satisfied with the experience so I decided to head back towards town. After hopping off the subway at my stop, I noticed I wasn’t too far from St. Stephen’s Basilica so I started to meander that way just to check it out. I was pretty pleasantly surprised to find that a Christmas market had popped up overnight in front of the Basilica, and they were selling mulled wine for cheap… so I stuck around for a while keeping myself warm on all different flavors of mulled wine (the sour cherry was my favorite). I didn’t go inside the basilica as there was an organ concert going on when I walked up that they were charging for, but the outside is very impressive, and with the lights and the tree lit up in front with the market, it felt very festive!

With a few mulled wines in my system to keep my insides warm, I started walking towards home base to shower the baths off me and try to warm my exterior. One of my favorite things about traveling alone (and really just traveling) is meandering, and seeing what I stumble into. I ended up walking through the middle of what is called “Freedom Square”, which has a number of different monuments in it, most relating to the Hungarian freedom from he Soviet Union (including one of Ronald Regan?), my favorite picture of this area of Freedom Square is below.

However, the most fascinating part about Freedom Square was the next monument I stumbled upon. At first it looked just like more of the same, however, laid out in front of the monument was a line of pictures of Holocaust victims, notes, old luggage and rocks with notes written on them in all different languages. The monument, which became clear it was a memorial, had written in several languages “In Memory of the Victims”, however this was added later. I encourage you to read the notes which I took pictures of and will post below as they describe the controversy better than I can, but I will take a quick shot at it: The memorial was officially commissioned to commemorate the German occupation of Hungary, and depicts Archangel Gabriel dropping/offering (depending on the interpretation) the Hungarian country orb (?) out while an eagle (Germany) is ready to pounce. The feeling is that this monument is an attempt by the Hungarian government to ignore any complicity that the Hungarian people and government had in the deportation of nearly a half a million Hungarian citizens to concentration camps, instead suggesting that Hungary victimized by the Germans instead of being one of the first to ally with Hitler. Apologies if this misses some of the nuance of the situation or is missing some facts, but this is my basic understanding after reading the postings around the area and doing some high level research.

My mother was killed in Auschwitz. Thank you “Archangel” Gabriel

That quote in particular is very powerful to me.

As one of the notes mentions, there is a group of citizens that get together to protest this monument every single afternoon, and have done so since its construction 4 years ago.

And on that incredibly somber note, I’m off to try some Hungarian whiskey and see what tomorrow brings!