Hungary: Budapest, July 14

There is no better way to see a city than on a bicycle, so that’s exactly what I did this morning.  Tauck arranged a bike tour through I Bike Budapest for those of us who were interested (a grand total of 4 people out of 70 on the trip).  Our wonderful guide took us all around Pest (which is the mercifully flat part of the city), onto Margaret Island (no cars, lots of people enjoying a beautiful day), briefly along the river on the Buda side, and then back over the Chain Bridge and “home.”  It was the best bike tour I’ve ever been on, and I’ve taken many.

The bikes, unlike those in Belgrade, were brand new and comfortable.  (The bikes in Belgrade were the two-wheeled equivalent of the notoriously unreliable Yugo cars, and probably were at least as old.)

We rode down shaded, minimally trafficked streets in the embassy district, stopped to admire the Opera House, then headed to the House of Terror. 

Not the Halloween kind, but the kind inflicted upon protestors, dissidents, Roma, and others by Hungary’s communist and fascist regimes. 

Our guide apologized for bringing us to such a dark place, but she emphasized that Hungarians believe it is important to remember the terrible excesses of the past and memorialize those who were interrogated, tortured, and killed.

After riding through the city park we crossed the Margaret Bridge to, shockingly, Margaret Island (Margitszigeti). 

It’s a car-free recreational hot spot with a spa, aquatic center, the remains of a 13^th century convent, and, as one would expect, a lion made of 850,000 LEGO bricks and weighing 2.8 tons.  The sign informed us that the lion was “modelled and designed by LEGO Certified Professional Balázs Dólczy.”  I wish my high school guidance counselor had told me that “LEGO Certified Professional” was a career option.

Leaving the island, we paid a brief visit to the Buda side of the river, from which the massive Parliament building was visible in its entirety. 

Then it was back over the freshly cleaned and painted Chain Bridge (I barely recognized it from when I was here in 2018), past St. Stephens Basilica, and back to the hotel. 

The tour took less than three hours, covered a great deal of ground, and left me in dire need of a large, cold beer.  (The need was soon satisfied!)

This afternoon we visited the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe and second-largest in the world.  It’s like no other synagogue I’ve ever seen, looking more like a Roman Catholic church onto which the towers of a mosque were grafted.  It was built in the 1850s, at a time when Jews were subject to highly discriminatory laws which were not removed until 1869.

Our guide explained that the Jews of Budapest wanted to assimilate as much as possible, so they dressed in “normal” clothes, cut their hair, and chose a design their neighbors might recognize and appreciate.  They called themselves “Neologues” – conservative Jews with the external trappings of non-Jewish Hungarians.

Adjacent to the synagogue is a cemetery containing memorial stones for some of the 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed in the Holocaust.  All the death dates are in 1944 or 1945; the Germans didn’t get serious about murdering Hungary’s Jews until Hungary, seeing which way the wind was blowing, informed Hitler in the spring of 1944 that they would no longer collaborate.

Behind the synagogue is a memorial park with two stirring art installations.

In a somber mood after the synagogue visit, I was cheered by a few sights on the way back to the hotel, including a mobile book cart and the “Bitcoin Bar,” where I assume the drinks are virtual and worthless.

And thus ends this wonderful trip. I’ve made lots of friends (I’m looking at you, Deb and Ted; Andrea, Terry, and Charlie; Gary and Helen; and Ilene and Murray!) and enjoyed the tremendous hospitality, expertise, and caring of the whole Tauck crew, and especially our fantastic tour directors Sanja and Rastvan.

Travel well, travel wisely, travel often, and travel safely!!!