A Travel Blog (Or Something)

Day 4 / Budapest: the Castle District

We started our last full day in Budapest on the island I mentioned briefly in my last blog post, Margitsziget (Margaret’s Island), around which we circled a few times during our dinner cruise. We went without any clue as to what to expect, except its remarkable length and density of trees (which we noticed from the boat). The first thing we saw upon exiting Margaret’s Bridge (a neat structure that has an optional deviation halfway across the Danube to get to the island) was the “Musical Fountain”—a small-scale “World of Color” from Disneyland, where the fountain’s many jets shoot and swirl streams of water in time to music each night. We didn’t get to catch the music show, but even watching the fountain operate in the middle of the day was mesmerizing.

This was at the southernmost tip of the island, which is shaped like a football standing on one end. Along either side stretches a rubber-covered running track that had me drooling. (U.S., catch up!) The center of the island, on the other hand, was a lush forest with intermittent meadows that were being used as soccer fields, track rings, picnic spots, and play areas for kids on field trips. Every now and then, we’d pass a small cottage hotel or a pub, an art museum or a pool—but otherwise, it was just an island filled with nature and the people enjoying it.

We took the remainder of Margaret’s Bridge over to the area north of Buda (Óbuda) and wound our way south on a trolley, which dropped us off at the foot of the hillside Castle District. (The Castle District sits roughly opposite the Danube from Parliament, and features the Budavári Castle, associated homes and government buildings, Matthias Church, and—randomly—plenty of ancient Roman ruins that just sit, unmarked, by the roadside. Before exploring this district more fully, we took a moment to enjoy our last paprikás csirke (as delicious as ever) and headed up the hill through wide, clean, sunny streets lined with cobblestones and quaint homes that looked as if they were built before the wars. Toward the top of the hill, we stopped inside Budapest’s Museum of Music History (Zenetörténeti Múzeum), which had a special exhibit on Bella Bartók. (Ryan was in heaven, particularly at seeing dozens of centuries-old instruments.) Just down the street was Matthias (Matyás) Church, which I particularly loved for its neat tile designs along the roof. Fisherman’s Bastion—named for the guild of fisherman who were tasked with defending the hill during the Middle Ages—offered fairy tale-like turrets and towers behind the church, where it looked down at the Danube and Pest far below.

Our next stop was the most depressing one of our entire time in Budapest, let alone on our entire trip. (Note the reversal of that sentiment: As much as we loved Budapest, there’s no questioning the fact that it boasted the most depressing histories of any place we’d seen that month.) Tucked deep into the hill is the Sziklakórház (Felsenkrankenhaus), the “Hospital in the Rock.” This hospital was carved into a system of prehistoric tunnels in the 1930s, in preparation for WWII—a war that was so much bloodier than they expected that victims slept two or three to a (twin-sized) bed, that the hospital ran out of food and supplies, and that nurses had to take bandages off corpses and sterilize them (if they had water to do so, which they sometimes didn’t) before reusing them. They’d wait out the bombs during the day while taking care of hundreds of dead and dying, and would wheelbarrow the corpses out at night—when the bombing had died down—to bury them in bomb craters.

During Soviet rule, the hospital was repurposed as a nuclear bunker, which—thank God—was never used. This was the part that was so incredibly depressing, given our current political climate: We were walked through rooms whose entire purpose was to heal—a best as possible—survivors of a nuclear explosion before admitting them into the hospital (i.e., via shaving, washing, burning clothes and hair). But after seeing photos of what victims’s bodies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after the explosion—that is, those who weren’t vaporized immediately from the blast—and after seeing the effect of that extreme heat on metals and other objects, the hospital tour reminded us that the bombs dropped in WWII are more than 1,000 times smaller than those held by Russia today. They showed maps of major cities around the world, with colored rings symbolizing the radius of immediate death by vaporization and the radius of fatal burns and radiation exposure (e.g., a bomb in D.C. would still lead to exposure all the way up the east coast). By the time we left the bunker, I was a hyperventilating disaster. The final quote we saw as we headed back to the surface was “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

We tried to decompress by going to what was purportedly one of the most beautiful libraries in Europe, according to plenty of Trip Advisor reviews. It sits as part of the Budavári Castle and its surrounding government buildings and museums, all of which were suspiciously deserted. No one at the Hungarian National Library (National Széchényi Library) spoke English, so we mimed our way through the ticket purchase and backpack storage process, then made our way up the stairs into what Trip Advisor promised would be one of the most beautiful reading rooms people had ever seen.

We were met with a view of what could have been the same horribly ugly library featured in “The Breakfast Club.” Hundreds upon hundreds of cabinets of catalog cards lined a room that looked as if it had been preserved in the 1970s, and the reading room itself was a sorry sight. Of the eight or so computers I found, each and every one dated back to the late 1990s. And throughout this shocked exploration (shocked because I kept turning every corner and opening every door, expecting to find this miraculously beautiful reading room), Ryan was in hysterics. At one point, he looked across the room at me, mouthed “Isn’t this gorgeous?” and broke down into silent giggles again.

We don’t know what happened, but our best guess is that people who actually visited the Parliament Library (which you have to be a citizen—or have a specific Hungarian library card—to visit) assumed the National Library was the same thing. Needless to say, it was an interesting afternoon.

We spent our last night touring the Jewish District with the rest of Budapest’s hipster population, popping into bars and food truck courtyards, and enjoying drinks at Whiskers Cat Pub—a pub with three precious felines and their kingdom of tunnels, towers, and toys. It was hard coming to terms with the sad fact that it was our last day in Budapest, but as Ryan promised, we’ll be back one day.