Bathing in Budapest

Hiya Everyone,

Happy almost May.  Obviously, I am at least 2 weeks behind on getting this Budapest blog posted, and I simply have no excuse.  Normally, the Sr. Director has been enslaving me with endless self-serving laborious tasks, but even her dictatorial diatribes have been minimal lately!!!  It has been a really relaxing latter part of April for us.  Ann had to make a quick trip to Rome this week for work, but other than that, we have not travelled since Budapest and we have not had any visitors.  We did make a little day trip 2 Saturdays ago out to Windsor to see Queenie's 2nd home.  Last Friday night, we actually went and saw a movie.  It had been a long time since we have done that.  We had a fun night out on Saturday for our friend Beth's b-day.  Great cocktails at the Portobello Star in Notting Hill.  We are here in London again this weekend and then we have some exciting upcoming trips planned to the Cotswolds here in England next weekend and then 10 days in Croatia at the beginning of June.   My parents were supposed to be over here visiting in May and we had planned Scotland and St. Andrews, but my dad sadly had to have back surgery and is recovering.  We are going to miss getting to see them.

Enough already, let's talk about Budapest.  What an incredible city.  It has had a very tumultuous history, most notably being overrun by the Nazi's during WWII and consequently bombed by the allies, and then following the war, the Russkies pulled it behind the Iron Curtain.  Despite all the years of oppression, they have been able to rebuild and re-establish the cultural and architectural fervor of the city.  We were really expecting to see this old Eastern Bloc city with an institutional feel, but it was completely the opposite.  We were shocked at how progressive and cosmopolitan it is.  The diversity in styles of architecture was amazing.  The city itself is divided by the Danube River.  The hilly side is Buda and the flat side is Pest.  We stayed at a great hotel on the Pest side on the Danube almost right at the foot of the famous Szechenyl Bridge.  We had a view of the Buda Castle sitting high above the river.  What we loved about Budapest is that you did not feel like you had to kill yourself making it to all of these different churches, castles, and monuments.  We did take an awesome tour of Parliament though on Saturday afternoon as well as a great river cruise on Saturday evening, but the culture was best taken in just by walking through the different parts of the city and seeing some of the incredible views.  Friday afternoon, we toured around for a couple of hours and then hiked up the large hill to Buda Castle and had an awesome late lunch sitting in this beautiful courtyard at a restaurant called Rivaldi.  The other unique aspect of the city was their traditional Turkish Baths built in the 16th and 17th centuries, a couple of them still being used today.  We made an appointment at the Szechenyi Baths on Saturday morning.  It is one of the largest bathing complexes in all of Europe.  It has 3 outdoor pools and 15 indoor pools.  The strange part was getting in some of these huge pools where the water temp was what you would find in a hot tub.  What a way to start a Saturday morning though, especially after having a late night in a casino near our hotel.  That's right, the Sr. Director found a blackjack table.  We ended up finishing both nights at the casino and had an absolute blast.  Neither of us are really gamblers at all, but Ann loves blackjack and is considerably talented, and I just bet enough to get comped drinks.  Unfortunately, there was no comping in the Hungarian casino!!  I think that we were the entertainment of the casino though.  The dealers loved us and were excited when we came back the 2nd night.  We made friends with some wannabe Hungarian mobsters who ended betting on the back of Ann's hands because she was playing so well.  We also befriended some strange character from Finland at the table.  He would not tell us his name, so I just started calling him "Helsinki."  The other great find of the weekend was this exquisite little restaurant called Tigris.  It was a very quaint restaurant that served traditional Hungarian dishes.  We had a really nice dinner and also discovered a brilliant Hungarian Chardonnay.  It was maybe one of the best bottles of wine I have ever had.  We had such a great weekend in Budapest.  We had so many laughs and enjoyed discovering a really unique place.  It definitely ranks up there as one of my favorite cities that we have been to.

I have to give a shout out to my buddy Gallagher in STL.  He was the proud owner of the Sports Attic, a bar that most of our friends spent more time in than our homes.  I know that a substantial percentage of my Boeing salary went directly to the Attic between 2003-2006.  The Attic sadly burned down 2 weekends ago.  It was an incredible place that held so many memories for me and so many friends.  It will be greatly missed.

What a start for the 2011 Defending Champs!!!  Let's take care of those Brewers at Busch this weekend.