Day 58: Budapest, Hungary - The Danube is not Blue, Noooooo!

The Danube.

Ahh Budapest, city of two cities. Buda is on the west bank of the Danube, while Pest is on the east bank. The... murky brown Danube runs through the middle of the cities, and about seven bridges span it within the township limits. It's lovely. Something I noticed immediately upon waking up in Budapest is how broken it felt, like a well worn pair of shoes compared to a brand new pair.

Zagreb and Ljubljana were pleasant and charming, but due to various circumstances much of the construction was obviously new, despite being of an older architectural style. The buildings looked art-nouveau and/or baroque, but the paint was bright, metal was shiny, and fixtures gleaming. They looked like dollhouses fresh off the shelves. Budapest, in comparison, is dirtier and grimier, with centuries of soot and life caked onto the walls of its buildings. Basically, while the other cities try to look a certain way, Budapest does look a certain way.

Parliament.

Budapest streets.

I walked around the majority of the day, crossing the Danube twice and looking at the various buildings and famous monuments. I somehow managed to arrive on a national holiday, and the Terror House was free. The Terror House is Budapest's museum dedicated to Nazi and Communist occupation. They definitely try very hard to create a certain atmosphere (think Star Wars Imperial March type music), but the most powerful part needed no artificial ambiance. The Terror House is located in the former headquarters of the Hungarian secret police. In the basement are cells and torture chambers where prisoners were kept. One particularly gruesome cell was the solitary confinement chamber, which was designed to be too narrow for a person to sit in, so a prisoner inside was forced to stand the whole time. There was a well worn spot on the floor were prisoners obviously had stood for a very long time.

Cells in the basement of the Terror House.

Right next to the Terror House is Lukacs, an opulent coffee shop where the secret police used to have coffee when they were finished making people stand for long periods of time. It was expensive, but the quality of the products and the environment were totally unbeatable. I now understand the glory of cakes and coffees. Other places in other cities may have tried, but Lukacs got it right. I ate a cream cake so light if practically floated off my plate and read in Lukacs for almost two hours.

I had coffee here.

What better way to end a hard day of sightseeing than soaking in a Hungarian bath? Unlike Turkish baths, Hungarian baths don't treat you like a steak that needs to be tenderized. They're also not baths in the sense that you wash yourself. Turkish baths were about cleaning. Hungarian baths were about soaking. My particular bath looked like my coffee shop, way too grand. There were domes, gilded columns, and something like 15 different pools of varying sizes, temperatures, and water compositions. There were also saunas that were as hot as 80 degrees. Yikes!

I bathed here.