Budapest - day 3

Let me take a minute to tell you about our hotel. The building is a converted bath house (Budapest is famous for its baths that use water from thermal springs) that still has the high arched ceiling and huge copper revolving door from its glory days. A lot of buildings in Budapest are from the mid to late 1800s and their glory days are long past. Some are restored and cleaned up, others are crumbly and sooty and somehow beautiful in their state of disrepair. Anyway, our hotel is owned by an Arab hotel chain, the same one that owned the place where we stayed in Cairo. It's a nice hotel, at least by our standards, meaning that there are bathrobes to use and doormen whose job it is to spin the revolving door before you walk through it. It's a big place and the guests, guessing by languages and fashion, are German, French, Japanese, Irish, and Russian (and certainly some other nationalities that we can't identify).
This makes hotel breakfast very interesting. The hotel tries to accommodate all these people and their tastes,  so breakfast looks like this:
breads, muesli, pastries, scrambled eggs, hot hard boiled eggs, fried eggs, bacon, paprika-flavored sausage, beans, porridge, salamis and hams, cheeses, cucumbers carrots and other veggies with salad dressing, some kind of egg salad with mayo, onions and peppers, pancakes, fruit and yogurt. Whew. I probably missed a few items but it's a lot of stuff.

Our hotel has a workout room and pool, and you have to pay to use them. The wireless internet, however, is free. I am not sure what the hotel is encouraging by charging to exercise but not to go online... I guess it worked though because I am here blogging for you.

Our general observation of Hungarians is that they are not fat people, skinnier than Germans even, the women are pretty, and there are a lot more big men then you would ever see in Germany. I have heard the theory that so many big strapping German men died in World War 2 that it depleted the big strapping gene pool.  The result is that there are a only some big strapping German men and a lot of slight, narrow shouldered ones. (what is the opposite of strapping?) I am not sure whether that's true, but in Hungary there are some big dudes.

Today we got a slow start. That was due to our second (and final) stop on the tour of ruin bars of Budapest last night. We went to one with a big shady courtyard, a big chalkboard menu, and some shabby flowered furniture on the inside. They had food there but the menu was all in Hungarian. The bartender was nice enough to translate for me. Brian had some turkey in paprika sauce and I ate what the bartender called "pork cream with toast". It sounded gross but I ordered it anyway. It was actually pretty good - like a pate but a little meatier. Then we tried palinka. Palinka is a Hungarian schnapps that's made from fruit. It doesn't seem to matter which kind of fruit as long as it tastes very boozy. Ours was plum and along with the wine and beer, contributed to our sluggish start this morning.

We went on a walking tour to see some of the major sites in Pest and learn a little more about life under communism in Hungary, the 1956 revolution, and general Budapest history. As we were crossing a street during the tour, our guide joked that we should all be careful, since you wouldn't want to get to know the Hungarian health care system. A sarcastic Hungarian passerby said (in English) "it's better than the American one." I am not sure who else heard that comment but I appreciated it.

Brian and I went out to our first nice dinner since (we traced this back) our anniversary dinner in Dingle, Ireland. In Hannover there aren't that many good restaurants and we are too cheap to keep looking for one. We slowly ate some good Hungarian food and the whole meal cost less than we paid for bad pasta in the Stuttgart airport.

Tomorrow  morning we get on the train to Bratislava. It's been a good trip in Budapest. We saw a lot of sights, though not all of them, found some local places, and didn't squeeze in too much tourism. The worst part has been that the weather was so much warmer than what we'd packed for. I guess you can't complain much about that. We get one more chance to eat three kinds of eggs, multiple kinds of pork and salad for  breakfast, then it's on to Slovakia.