Honeymoon Part 3: Budapest

In Budapest, we were once again staying near a Christmas market at the foot of a beautiful old building. This time it was St. Stephen's Basilica:

Right next to the entrance of the building where we were staying, there was a marzipan vendor, which was perfect because I flipping LOVE marzipan, and this guy had giant balls of it dipped in chocolate with various jam fillings. That was my favorite thing I ate on the whole trip.

The Budapest Christmas market also had the biggest piles of meat of anywhere we had seen:

MEAT

MORE MEAT

It also had these amazing hot cheese sandwich things - they would spread dough out very thin on a griddle, then pile a TON of cheese and sour cream into it, then flip it over a few times and hand it to you. DELICIOUS.

This is the face of pure happiness.

Besides eating, we also visited the Great Synagogue, which is the biggest synagogue in Europe.

It is really beautiful.

Like in Prague, it also had a somewhat questionably-title information kiosk:

JEWINFORM

We visited the Buda castle, which is near the gorgeous Matthias Church. In addition to being beautiful, it also prompted me and Ben to have a long conversation about Redwall, because of its name.

The church is surrounded by the Fisherman's Bastion, named after the fishermen who used to live there and defend the castle. It is also pretty fairytale-like.

Me on the bastion

Me and Ben on the Bastion, with the city behind us

I think the most impressive building we saw in Budapest is the Parliament Building, which has 365 towers (one for each day of the year) and 40 kg of gold leaf on the inside. It opened in 1896, in honor of the ONE THOUSAND YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the founding of Hungary. Geeze.

Daytime

Nighttime

That second picture was taken on a night cruise of the Danube that we went on, because we are very cool.

It also gave us a great view of the castle:

The last, and best, thing we did in Budapest was go to a thermal bath. It was amazing - you have to run through the freezing cold in your swimsuit to get to the water, but then you get in and it is so hot it is steaming, and you feel like you are in heaven. Plus, the whole thing is in a giant, gorgeous old building.

Ben was there!

So was I!

The next day we went home, and now we are back to regular life (or will be come January, when we go back to work).