Despite the hopeful forecast of warmer temperatures, and less fog, for our last day in Budapest, we awoke to minus 3 degrees and foggy again. It had also snowed more overnight and this time it wasn’t melting all that fast. The upside is that we got to see Budapest in a coating of snow rather than just fog!
After breakfast in our apartment, it was out for a day of exploring in the sub-zero temperatures. We had noticed people like to write on cars here when there is snow or ice on them, which made for some fun things to look at on our morning walk to the metro.
Heroes square in the snow
We head out for the day and hoped we might get some sunny views later in the day. First off we caught the metro over to Heroes Square again as Max wanted a look as they’d only been past briefly on the hop-on hop-off bus. We’d been here 2 days earlier but were happy to go back for another look. Today it was covered in plenty of snow and looked pretty dramatic!
The Hungarians love their giant statues and the Heroes Square and Millennial monument are certainly spectacular with the statues of kings and heroes now with a good dusting of snow, and a foggy backdrop.
Next on the kids agenda was checking out the giant ice skating rink between Heroes Square and Vajdahunyad Castle. The ice-skating rink had expanded in the last 2 days since we’d been here. It eventually becomes the biggest ice-skating rink in Europe, stretching to the thermal baths and around the castle, but it obviously isn’t quite cold enough yet as some sections are still to freeze. With not enough edges for our novice skaters to hold onto, we declined Astrid’s request to skate and took Max and Di to the Vajdahunyad Castle again.
Vajdahunyad Castle
The Christmas market that was in Budapest City Park, surrounding the Castle was still in full swing on New Years Eve but was now being packed up. I guess it was January 2 and the festivities had to end eventually!
Vajdahunyad Castle was looking rather pretty again. We didn’t find Dracula today but did find plenty of snow.
In the 2 days since we were last here the lake surrounding the Castle had started to freeze more. We can attest to the fact that the temperature had not gotten above zero in several days!
They just need some more water in the lake and the ice skating rink would be all the way across to the thermal baths!
Thermal baths and happy birds
We walked across to the Széchenyi thermal bath building, and checked out the steaming water in the lake outside, which has thermal water flowing in. The kids being kids had to check the water temperature and this water actually isn’t that hot. It’s just the air temperature is so cold that there was plenty of steam emanating from the lake.
The water birds were enjoying bathing themselves in it and we had fun watching a variety of gulls, ducks and herons bathing and coming in for a swim.
It was a pretty spectacular little lake today, although definitely not warm enough to go for a swim in!
Speaking of swimming, we had every intention of doing thermal baths while in Budapest, but most of us now were feeling a bit too weary to be getting changed and running around in the cold. The kids and Anto were keen but kids aren’t encouraged at the indoor baths. Széchenyi has outdoor pools as well (which allow kids) but they aren’t heated, so we decided to give it a miss on this trip as it was very cold!
The Széchenyi building is definitely beautiful so we enjoyed having a look around the outside of the trademark yellow building, but unfortunately we couldn’t get much of a peak inside without having to buy thermal bath tickets.
Another Chimney cake!
Di and Max decided to head off for some more exploring including the City Market Hall that we’d visited a couple of days earlier. We bid them farewell and caught the metro back to the city area. We found ourselves near St Stephen’s, and like the Budapest city park market, the St Stephen’s Basilica market was now all packed up. Most of the Budapest markets finish up on 1 January but we’d made sure we’d visited this one, and the Vörösmarty tér market, in our first couple of days in Budapest and collected our souvenirs and tasted our palinka.
We’d mostly been on the other side of St Stephen’s but today walked around and saw the Basilica which was on the other side to where the market had been.
The kids were apparently cold and starving, so convinced us we needed another chimney cake. We pass quite a few chimney cake stalls walking back towards our apartment and it’s hard to resist the smell of hot carbs! Today they voted for a chocolate and coconut chimney cake. We all voted that the cinnamon one from New Years Eve was better. Or maybe it was just warm food and calories consumed at 1am that made it taste better!
The huge Hungarian Parliament building
Needing to warm up for a bit we head back to our apartment for some lunch and see if the weather was going to improve for afternoon sightseeing. After lunch it was time to go to the Hungarian Parliament Building. We’d been hanging out for the fog to clear so we got views across the river, but no such luck so we went anyway, as it was our last full day in Budapest.
The Hungarian Parliament Building, is the seat of government in Hungary. It is also one of the most recongisable landmarks in Hungary with it’s position along the Eastern bank of the Danube – on the Pest side.
All the Danube river cruises go past the front of the Parliament building and we’d enjoyed seeing it lit up on New Years Eve and then foggy views of the giant structure from atop Buda Hill the day before.
The Neo-gothic styled building was opened in 1902 and has remained the largest building in Hungary since it’s completion. The building was influenced by the famous Vienna City Hall, which we’d visited just a few days earlier during our time in Vienna.
The Hungarian Parliament building is the third largest Parliament building in the world and it’s absolutely huge. It’s more than a kilometre walk around the outside of the building. We made our way around taking in the beautiful ornate facade and the courtyards adorned with many statues.
You can book a tour of the inside of the building, but the kids were not keen on that today so we checked out the building from the outside. Even the Christmas tree in the front courtyard was enormous.
The statues are also huge here, much to Soren’s amusement. There so many giant horses and scantily glad men in battle. We had also learnt during our time in Hungary that like in other European cities, all equestrian designers followed the rules to indicate how the rider died. If the horse has all four hooves on the ground then the rider died of natural causes. One hoof raised means as a result of injuries in battle. Both hooves raised means the rider died directly in battle. The accuracy of this is debatable but the kids had a great time working out what each horse statue meant about it’s rider’s fate.
As we circumnavigated the building we found ourselves at the Kossuth memorial, one of the three public monuments dedicated to the former Hungarian President who died in 1894. This memorial is another Hungarian national symbol many official celebrations take place in this square.
We had originally planned to cross the bridge to take photos of the building from the other side of the Danube, but the fog was again so thick that you couldn’t even see the Buda side of the river clearly, so we stuck to this side of the river and enjoyed another foggy walk along the Danube.
You could barely see across the river again today!
Trams and giant escalators….
After racking up many steps wandering around the outside of the Parliament building we head back towards the metro and happened to see the ‘Christmas light’ tram. It had less lights on today than when we’d seen it lit up at night, but was so foggy they probably could have been on!
We were catching the metro back to our Jewish quarter apartment and this meant another trip on the M2. This station is almost 40 metres underground and the escalator tunnels have a very strong cold wind and run very slowly. It feels like you are descending into an icy abyss! We experienced this on our arrival and were negotiating the escalator with bags. We’ve done it a couple of times since without bags which is far less scary. Astrid and I are both not fans of escalators and this one is so long you don’t want to look up or down. At least we were doing it without bags today.
As we made it back to near our apartment, Astrid was expressing a desire to go ice skating at the rink not far from where we were staying. It hadn’t made it to zero degrees yet and was still foggy and damp so the other 4 of us were not so keen on hanging around ice skating rinks today. Astrid was not impressed but we did still have some ice skating options in Poland and Norway before the trip ended.
We did however see the lego tram again, this time in daylight so that impressed Soren and Zinnia. Astrid continued to be grumpy teenager about her families denial of skate time.
A farewell Italian feast….
When we got got back from our cold outing, Max and Di had also returned from their afternoon sightseeing. We were all enjoying Budapest but were in definite agreement that despite the temperatures not being as low as they were for other parts of our trip (like the Austrian and Swiss Alps) the constant fog and sub-zero maximums were making us feel permanently cold.
It was however our last night of the trip together. We had met up in Tokyo airport and then enjoyed some time in Paris together in early December, before reconvening in Basel, Switzerland then Innsbruck for Christmas followed by Vienna. Now it was time for Di and Max to head back to Australia and some warmth.
Max had selected a nearby Italian place for our last dinner together and we all enjoyed an excellent meal with some very festive and fun Christmas decorations to end our Christmas adventure together.
Di also found her size Aperol bottle, which held about as many Aperol spritz’s as she’s drunk on the trip. We didn’t think they would let her sneak it into her duty free though!
We all enjoyed our excellent pasta, pizza, gnocchi and some huge desserts. Apparently the tiramisu was almost as good as the one I make and the pistachio profiteroles were excellent.
It was a great meal to finish off the many we’d shared together on the holiday. As we head back to the apartment it was still minus 3 and snowing again!
Up next……
We bid farewell to Max and Di (Granny) and our family were bound for Poland for the next part of our trip.
