Back from Budapest...
Just in time!
Today there have been riots in front of the parliament. People throwing stones at the members of parliament.
Just one day earlier I visited the parliament myself. Well, it wasn't as easy as I hope it would be. First we tried on Friday. There was some big thing, some french delegation visiting (at least there were french flags everywhere). On Saturday we tried again. We were there half an hour before the guided tour was supposed to start. Well, no more tickets! "Try again tomorrow at 8 a.m." Isn't 8 a.m. a bit brutal for holidays? Anyway, we finally managed to get in. It's great! Wonderful, lot of gold, nicely renovated ...
The rest of the city is not in that good condition. A lot of houses have parts of the facades falling down. Generally, it's not as tidy as Prague. But then, the "center" of budapest is also much bigger than what I'd consider to be the center of Prague. It's same with the castle: Budapest's castle hill is huge (at least compared to Prague castle) and there are quite a lot of private houses up there. Most of them look like they need a renovation.
Budapest is also quite boring on weekends because shops are generally closed. Well, like in Austria. That was one thing I really liked about Prague: Almost everything was open 7 days a week.
A nice thing about Budapest is that people there generally speak German well. And they are willing to use it. That was more problematic in Prague, where people generally didn't like to speak German.
Anyway, it was a nice time. Saw a lot of things. Found nice restaurants. Learned some new vocabulary ;)
But I'm still happy that I went to Prague. It was a great choice after all. Don't even want to think about what I'd have missed ...
