Blue Jean Blues in Budapest

I am sitting in the hotel lobby writing this since the outlets in our hotel room have decided to only work sporadically. Unfortunately that means no pictures. Anyway here is a quick recap of the day:

• M and I left breakfast at the hotel by around 9:30am to make the 10am city tour we had researched. We got to the place (the Chain Bridge) where the tour began by 10:02. The good news is that we did pretty well consideing we have never been to Budapest and only had a general idea of where we were going. The bad news is that we got there in time to see the bus leaving. We couldn't stop the bus despite our efforts of waving our hands and running down the street in order to get the attention of the driver.
• Now that we were no longer burdened by the tour we could do our own tour. That started with us walking across the Chain Bridge to the Buda side of town. The best part of the Chain Bridge are the Lions at the entrance. Legend has it though that the sculptor of the Lions jumped off the bridge into the Danube after a boy remarked that the sculptor forgot to carve out the tongues.
• We then went to Mathias Church (C: under construction) and the Fisherman's Bastion (A-) in the Castle District. Both of us bought soevniers in the surrounding area.
• Also, we passed the House of Hungarian Wines (a place we wanted to go that was written up in the NY Times) at 11am, but decided to come back since it didn't open till noon.
• After the Castle District we meander down the street and across a bridge to to the Parliament for the noon tour. When we got there we found out that all the tickets to the tour were sold out.
• The next plan of action was to go to the Ethnographical Museum across the street. This musuem was so bad it was funny. They had a Blue Jean exhibit. Basically it was like walking through a weird European department store. M even got in trouble for touching one of the jeans. A guard took exception to her touching such a piece of art and scolded her in Hungarian.
• After a few rounds of successive disappointment the weather decided to match our thoughts by starting a constant light rain.
• We grabed a cab and went to the other side of Buda to the Gelert Hill. Gelert Hill has an amazing view of Budapest. We ate lunch there at the Citadel and had a nice meal of Chicken Paprakia (Hungarians love Paprakia) and Pasta for me and Fried Veal something or another (the Hungarian version of Chicken Fried Steak).
• The sights we saw in the Gelert Hill were the Liberation Monument (B), Cave Church (A-), and St. Gelert (C-).
• We then had to walked (lots of walking today) to the Budapest National Museum (A). This place was pretty cool. I never thought a Musuem would be the highlight of the day, but at last I was surprised.
• After that we went back to the House of Hungarian Wines for our much needed 2 hour wine sampling. This was not to be as the House of Hungarian Wines decided to close at 5:30 instead of the normal 8 pm closing time. Of course we got there at 5:24.
• We then cabbed back to the hotel and promised that tomorrow is going to be a better day.

Anyway, tomorrow we are off to the bath in the morning and then to Vienna in the afternoon. M didn't want to do one of the authentic Turkish baths, so we are going to a family friendly one tomorrow.

Hopefully I can write tomorrow. Now it is off for more of Budapest Idol. Kussurnurm.