Buda + Pest = Budapest

After Romania we spent two wonderful sunny and warm (for this wintery weather) days in the capital of Hungary. The city itself is situated on two banks of the Danube river... the hilly side is Buda and the flatter one is Pest...

Buda has the castle on it...

and a hill with the WWII Victory Monument, which we climbed and from there you can see most of the city, which was awesome.

One can also take the Funicular (as Jack made me practice this word) Tram up the hill - oh the fun!!!

On the Pest side there were lots of pests... nah, bad joke. This one has heaps of museums and the really nice church of St Stephan, plus the old opera house and just tons of cool looking buildings. Actually comparatively to all places we've seen so far in Europe, Hungarians dress the best by far... so many clean, properly dressed men and women made us feel very bogan.

Another notable thing is the subway... apparently Budapest has the oldest one in Europe and the train is this tiny little yellow thing of three carriages which makes a very loud but very cute buzzing noise as it leaves each station.

We did a tour of these ancient catacombs under the Buda castle... it's a series of caves and passages that used to have some prehistoric paintings, but during WWII were used as a bombshelter, so not much of it was left. But we did find an underground fountain of wine... it's literally covered in vine leaves and has wine flowing from it on all four sides :)

One other notable thing about Budapest is the abundance of lion statues - they're everywhere... here are just some of the ones we came across.

And lastly some more generic photos...

Fisherman's Bastion in the Buda castle

Jack with 'The Guy on the Horse'...

Meself with the statue of a boy that really looked like Buratino (Russian Pinoccio), but had some weird Hungarian name instead... being Hungary and all.

Jack with the backdrop of the National Museum in the evening.