Hasta la Vista, Budapest...

Sunday -- our final day in Budapest... After our many marathon travel weekends this month, we were pretty low-key on our last day in Budapest (or should I say Pest, as that is where we were staying?). We started the day late -- at 11am after a restful morning and breakfast at the Hotel. We took the efficient metro from downtown to Moskva Ter (Moscow Square -- a major transit hub) to walk to Castle Hill.

The first site we happened upon was a bombed out church, presumably from WWII. It was quite an interesting site -- very few signs indicating what it was, how it was destroyed, and when, but churches are so clearly churches, you know? Here is a pic on the left...

I wanted to show Dustin some of the sites that Marianna had showed me on Thursday, so we walked through the streets, to St. Mathias Church and the Fishermen's Bastion (picture on left of the two of us taken from there), and to the castle. We stopped briefly at a cafe to have a poppy pastry and vanilla croissant (yum!) before walking down the hill and into the city.

Our next stop was the synagogue, which I had not yet seen the inside of but had planned on doing so... Dustin was pretty willing to do anything, so we walked there. As it so happened, we arrived just as an English tour was starting -- what luck! The synagogue is pretty ornate inside -- lots of geometric work everywhere. During the Nazi occupation, the synagogue was used as a horse stable. It was also located right in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest...

The ghetto was quite small and many people were packed in a very small space. When people died, they were buried adjacent to the synagogue. This may be the only synagogue anywhere which has a cemetery so close; in Jewish law, it is forbidden to have the cemetery located in such proximity to the synagogue. However, there was little choice for the ghetto inhabitants. Now, the cemetery is a quite courtyard place and is quite peaceful.

Around the synagogue and by the cemetery, the tree of remembrance is located. It is a striking exhibit. As I understand it, it is called the "Tree of Life." It has the names of Holocoust victims engraved on its leaves, and the black stone has a cutout that looks like the ten commandments, and represents the absent moral code of the perpetrators of the Holocoust.

We capped our experience with a final stop at our favorite gelato place and headed to the train station to take a night train from Budapest to Munich and then catch three more trains from Munich to Aachen. Along the way, a bite on my leg that I got in Salzburg reappeared and started to swell and itch... We decided that I should have it looked at once we got home to Aachen (and boy are we glad that we decided that when we did!)...