Friday

Today is a big day in my new family. It is the last day of school in New York City and from now on until... Abigail will be home with me. She just got her report card and I am proud to say that she is a pretty smart cookie. Sometimes next month we will go down to Florida and leave her there with her siblings for the remainder of the Summer but we don't have our travel plans fixed just yet.

Now back to the TRIP.

We acted like real tourists except the fact that we spoke the language. We went on a guided tour into the Parlament (it is not an error this not Parliament). That is one gorgeous building where the Hungarian legislature resides. The building is over one hundred years old and the architecture is just fantastic.

We saw a small catholic church carved into the rock in the side of a mountain that was also quite old. We saw the apartment house where my Father was born and where his parents lived. The building was built in 1858 and is not the oldest in the area at all.

We took a ride on the Budapest Eye that is a giant Ferris wheel in the center of Budapest. It is 65 meter which is about 195 feet high and the view from the top was amazing.

We went up to Castle Hill on a funicular and walked around. Castle Hill is where the former royal palace is and also the residence of the President of Hungary. Castle Hill is filled with old buildings some dating back to the 1600s.

In Budapest there are buildings that are almost older the Columbus' discovery of the Americas.

Anyway, we walked and walked and walked. And when we got very tired and a pastry shop happened we took time out and rested! But thanks to our strenuous exercise "regimen" we didn't gain much weight.

Budapest has fortunately many, many pastry shops and all have seating capacity. Some outdoors as well as indoors. So finding a suitable oasis was not very difficult.

Here is a little aside from my recollections. In short the Hungarian Postal Service sucks! I am back now a week and a half. I mailed a postcard to my home address two weeks before departing the old country. That makes it now three and a half weeks and it is nowhere. Maybe it is the norm for those people but it certainly not the norm for me.