On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Tom V
Here are a few photos taken in Budapest in December 2019. As with my other On The Road submissions, they were taken with an iPhone XS.
Looking across the Danube from Pest at Buda Castle.
From the Buda side of the river this is the Hungarian Parliament building.
Statue of King (Saint) Stephen in the Buda Castle.
Food stand at the Christmas market. Hungry? Hungary?
Hotel Gellert. There is a fabulous spa there. If you don’t pay for the private room the changing area is co-ed!
Buda end of the Liberty Bridge across the Danube.
Corvinus University.
Buda Castle.
Rusty
13 years ago we were living outside of London as expats for my job. I had a business conference in Budapest, and for once in our lives we had someone who could watch our three kids for a few days so my wife flew over on Thursday when the conference ended and we had a wonderful weekend with just the two of us. Budapest has a memorial garden where they have collected all the statutes from the communist period and placed them in context with explanations. Well, a couple of weeks later I’m at work and my wife calls, “you need to stop at the chemists on the way home for some tests to confirm, but you son of a bitch, I am sure I am pregnant”. Which is how we ended up with our bonus child when we were both 43. We can’t imagine the world without him, but it was a surprise at the time!
Dan B
@Rusty: I’m trying to make the connection between the well explained communist statues and a bonus child.
Oh, nevermind….
And Mae West would have a field day at the Food Mart. I don’t have a big enough pan, or Barbeque to cook those sausages. Ye gods! Vegan nightmare.
tom
Lovely pictures. I’ve always wanted to visit Hungary.
Laura Too
Very cool, thanks! And love the stories OTR evokes, so funny Rusty.
Betty
Lovely pictures.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Whenever I see the word Budapest, I think about the scene in “My Fair Lady” where the rival language expert pegs Liza as being Hungarian royalty.
Beautiful pics!
montanareddog
@Rusty:
One of my favorite cities in Europe. Last visit would have been in 2010 as I remember watching the Spain-Netherlands World Cup final at a bar there.
Another interesting attraction, is the Children’s Railway, a narrow gauge railway in the hills behind Buda operated by teenagers and dating from the communist era when it was started as work experience for good young communists.
And the Vidampark funfair with its 1922 wooden rollercoaster in Pest.
stinger
Great pics — and stories!
KSinMA
Thanks for the pictures! I’m wondering about the guy in period (?) clothing in front of the King/Saint Stephen statue . . . and the large bird next to him. Are they re-enactors?
lashonharangue
Great pictures! Loved Budapest when we visited. The night photos remind me of our evening tour boat trip sailing up and down the Danube. However, shortly after that was when a tour boat was sunk in a collision with a big river cruise ship and many Korean tourists died. Don’t know if they have made any changes to improve safety on the river. There were a lot of boats cruising up and down the Danube when we did it.
MelissaM
I was in Budapest in 1987 during a study-abroad in Austria. I couldn’t enjoy it much after we got grifted out of money during an (illegal, of course) on the street money exchange that I didn’t want to do, but my bf at the time (now husband) said “it’s a good rate.” Lesson learned: listen to your instinct! Our first night we stayed in a room in an apartment after the guy mumbled “have a room?” at the train station. His family huddled in the other room. German women at the dining table next to us in a restaurant negotiated their large meal for 10 Deutschmarks, while at another place, we watched a gentleman pay us$10 for a full meal with a bottle of wine. Surreal for this wide-eyed American.
I did have a lovely pastry and coffee at a classic cafe. And your pictures make me want to go back, now with all I’ve learned about Hungary and the region.
delk
Years ago we were in Budapest for a European Bears week. My husband was in the hotel elevator and a German business man said to him that he was seeing a lot of men that looked like my husband and wondered what was going on. My husband said it was a bear convention and when the business man didn’t understand my husband told him bears were big hairy gay men. The business man looked at him and said, “They have conventions for that?”
Mike in NC
We did a Blue Danube cruise in 2010: Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and Budapest. It was very cool.
glc
Spent a few days there in 2013, lovely place, just like the pictures.
“Hungary? That’s a country? I knew Turkey was a country.”
Comrade Colette
Lovely pics! I’m envious. My mom and I were in Budapest for a few days in 1986, when it was still under Communist rule. We had to use an official State-employed tour guide for part of our visit, but did get to wander around by ourselves for a while. That was the only city where I’ve seen unrepaired damage from WWII (except for a few places that have left bits as a memorial). It certainly looks to have come up in the world since then.
And our visit was a couple of weeks after Chernobyl when the full scale of the disaster was still being covered up. My mom insisted I avoid fresh veggies and salads for fear of contamination. In hindsight, if we’d known then what we know now, we wouldn’t have gone – but I’m glad we did as I’ve never been able to get back there. Thanks for putting this back on my bucket list!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@KSinMA: Yeah, it looks like an eagle ?!?. That entire picture is remarkable.
Doug
First visited in the summer of 1989, just weeks after the Hungarians had taken down their part of the Iron Curtain. Lived there in 1993–94, working for English-language newspapers: the late, lamented Budapest Week and the somewhat-still-extant Budapest Business Journal. Quite a time.
Visited numerous times since, including arriving by bicycle at the end of a Munich-to-Budapest ride.
J R in WV
Great photos of what is obviously a great European city. Thanks for sharing!!
Bears convention, heh! Conventions for furrys… also too. And comic-cons, conventions for everything you can imagine, and things you can’t even imagine.