Friday, September 18, 2009

Thursday - last day in Budapest

It has been an interesting day.  We began finalizing travel and lodging plans for your Saturday trip to Belgrade.  We will fly from Bucuresti to Timisoara and then take a minibus to Belgrade.  After that, we went out to see a museum that Florin wanted to see.  It was a long walk - our most usual method of transportation these days.  The museum is called House of Terror. On the outside it is gray/drab.  It is a place where there are artifacts from a realy difficult and shameful period of Hungarian history - the Nazi and Communist years.  The first thing you see is a real tank from the period.  Everything inside  the museum is almost colorless. There are replicas of prison cells and torture chambers and thousands of pictures of the victims and the victimizers.  A particularly difficult film clip was an interview fifty years later between a group of women who had been imprisoned and a female guard who had been their keeper.  Jews were decimated and sent to the camps.  It really was a house of terror.  We finally had to leave, both of us deeply affected by what we saw.  It is difficult for Ameicans to understand what the people of Eastern Europe have lived through.  That history has left a great scar on the collective psyche.

We walked a lot in the rain after that experience to Millenium Square, built to commemorate 1000 years of Christianity in Hungary.  Since the rain was getting heavy, we took the subway a few stops back to Oktagon Square and found an excellent restaurant for our last meal in Budapest.  Florin had a lamb dish and I had roasted butterfish over spinach risotto.  I don't know what butterfish is but it was excellent. We then took the metro back to our apartment to get ready to leave for the train station.

I've attached a few pics from our day.




1 comment:

  1. FYI...The most distinctive characters of the butterfish are its very thin deep body, like a flounder on edge; the fish is only about twice as long as it is deep to the base of its tail fin, combined with a single, long, soft-rayed dorsal fin, an anal fin almost equally long, and a deeply forked tail, but no ventral fins. This is one of our best table fish, fat, oily, and of delicious flavor. Experience with many fresh from the net as well as on the table proves the old tale to be a myth that butterfish have a peculiar odor.

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