Budapest- Day 4: 6/4/06

Last full day in Budapest, and most of us are exhausted from three days of intense sightseeing. Today I went to the Parliament Building with five of my fellow students. Getting tickets for the English language Parliament tour was quite the adventure (involving some confusion and lots of pushing and shoving). Parliament was gorgeous, and it was very interesting to hear about the symbolism in the architecture. For example, the entrance to parliament has 96 steps and the domed hall is 96 meters tall because they Magyars came to the area that is now Hungary in 896. It was kind of like being back in DC… only Hungarian. ☺ Our tour guide was good, and I greatly enjoyed his corny tour guide jokes. About half of my pictures from the tour came out blurry, dark, or simply awful, but I got a few good shots, especially of the ceiling in the domed hall.

The interior of the Hungarian Parliament chamber
The ceiling of the domed hall in the parliament building
The Hungarian Crown Jewels
Me looking adoringly at Imre Nagy, Prime Minister in the 1950s and Hungarian nationalist hero (watch out, Adam, looks like you've got some competition!)

Tomorrow we leave at 2 p.m. for an 8-hour train ride to Cluj. I am totally psyched to go to Romania (big surprise, right?). It is really fantastic to be in Eastern Europe. For the past few years I have loved studying the region, but it didn’t really seem real to me. It was as though it only existed in my mind and in the books that I read. I’m not sure if I’m getting across what I’m trying to say. Of course I knew that Eastern Europe was real, but just the same, it feels a little bit like visiting a fantasyland. Fortunately my experience here thus far (I know, it’s only been 4 days) has only made me love it even more. It has lived up to all of my expectations.