I had no idea that Budapest was this big.

I didn't do anything on my first afternoon in Budapest other than find the hostel and then a supermarket to get some things for dinner. I was so impressed by the kitchen in the hostel having an oven that I decided to eat in. Other than that I did nothing interesting at all with my evening.

This morning, I headed out to Szoborpark, which is where the Hungarians put all the communist statues after the fall of Communism. It's out in the countryside on the Buda side of the river. There is a direct bus which is quite expensive and leaves from in the city but it really isn't that hard to get out there yourself by public transport. I caught a bus out to Etele Ter where I then swapped to another bus to the park. There are signs up in English at Etele ter telling you where to go which makes it easier. There is a huge construction site blocking the bus station that you have to go to. I feel that it has been there a while because the signs and the guide books all mention it. By the look of it at the moment, it is going to be there a while longer, too.

The park doesn't look like much from the outside, mostly, I think, because as the guide book explains, it was never finished. It was designed by an Hungarian architect but they ran out of money before it was completed. There is lots of symbolism in the design. It has a path that is shaped like figures of eight and the final path runs straight into a brick wall. I think, that it helps to be Hungarian when it comes to the symbols. There are over forty statues and plaques in the park and they are arranged around the garden. Some are huge and others are quite small. Most came from Budapest and were saved from destruction by people who felt that the history needed to be preserved. The guide book is very useful in explaining who some of the people are and what the Hungarian writing on the statue bases says.

I found it very interesting looking at the photos of the people that some of the statues represent. Some of them definitely used a bit of artistic licence in their work. There are a couple of unfit looking old blokes who look pretty good when cast in bronze. Unfortunately the section with films and some other artwork from the time is closed for renovation at the moment (the entrance fee has been reduced to 1000ft until it is open again). There is a small gift shop that sells communist propaganda and t-shirts and that sort of thing. I did like the EastPark t-shirt with 'Oh my God, they've killed Lenin. You Bastards' written on it.

I then caught the bus back to Etele Ter (there is one nearly every 10 minutes during the week) and jumped on the bus into the city again. This time I stayed on the bus until it reached Kirili Station and headed up into the City Park. The park is huge and has all sorts of activities. There are lots of playgrounds, some basketball courts, dog exercise areas. In the middle is a big castle thing which I didn't go to look at. Instead I went to the baths at Szechenyi. This is one of the main spas in Pest. The outside looks like an opera house or something and the inside is amazing too. The entrance foyer is all mosaic and has a huge statue of Neptune. It's 2400Ft to get in but you do get a little bit back if you come out again within a couple of hours. You can get all sorts of extras like massages and electrotherapy (I didn't find out what that was). I decided to just go with the thermal baths.

Once inside you head into the changing area which is mixed sex, so don't freak if you see men around. There are private changing cubicles for everyone so you aren't getting changed in front of people. You get let into a cubicle by one of the attendants, get changed and then leave all your stuff in the cubicle. The attendant locks the door and gives you a little tag on a string. This tag has a different number to your cubicle so make sure that you remember the number above the door not the number on the tag. If you want to lock your valuables up there are little safes (like the ones that you get in hotels) in a room just out the other side of the changing area. They're free and you just have to remember your pin. There are heaps of baths both inside and outside and I think that I ended up having some time in six of them all up. Some are really quite hot (38 degrees) and others are definitely a bit on the chilly side (18 degrees). I stuck mostly with the hot ones.

There are a few pools outside including a proper lap pool. The ones outside are quite warm and I spent ages in one that was 37 degrees, very pleasant when it's only 17 outside. The locals all sit on the steps and chat and there was a contingent of old men sitting in the water playing chess. There is steam rising off the water and it all looks very pretty. Because this is no ordinary pool that they have. It has fountains and statues of naked ladies and animals and the surrounding building looks like a palace. It's all very fancy and nothing like the practical pools that we have at home. The fountain in the middle is great and you can stand under the jets so that the water is hitting you in the back and giving you a free massage. I wondered when I was in the inside pools why all these people with red marks on their backs kept walking past. I now know that they had all been in the fountain.

It is a great place for people watching as you are just sitting doing nothing in particular in the water. It was good to see that all the people were happily wandering about in their bathers regardless of how old they were or how slim they were. You could pick the foreigners because they were the ones wrapping themselves in enormous towels as soon as they got out of the pool. It seems that in Hungary, everyone regarless of size wears a tiny two piece swimsuit and a real dark tan. I'm not sure where they get the tans from, I suspect solariums given the lack of sunshine since I arrived. The oldies seem to treat going to the spa as a day out and there were heaps of little old ducks sitting in the warm water chatting away. All they needed really was someone to bring them cups of tea and they could have stayed all day.

The water does have a bit of a smell to it. I'm not sure of exactly what. The hotter pools definitely smell stronger too. It's not unpleasant though. There are drinking fountains in some of the rooms where you can drink the water from the springs also. I'm not sure what it meant to do for you though. It is worth keeping in mind the time limits for some of the hotter pools. They don't recommend that you stay continuously in the very hot ones for more than 10 minutes and I wouldn't go at all if you were pregnant. People with heart conditions should also check with their doctor before jumping into the hot pools because I found that it really made my heart pump after a little while, even though I was just relaxing in the water. It really made me feel good though.

After getting changed (there are plenty of showers and hairdryers and so forth), I headed back out into the park. You get a refund if you leave earlier than 2 hours. It's an automatic thing when the people put your card into the machine. The machine is on the left as you head towards the door and it will spit out your change.

Heading back towards the river, I came to the huge Millenium Monument which has lots of blokes on horses and a big angel and lots of statues of former kings. It's very large and impressive. Each king has a little frieze under him which I assume depicts some momentous event during his reign. Interestingly enough, it seems that it alternates between some sort of a war and doing something religious like building a big church. I'm not sure it that was what they meant to do or just how it turned out. From there I walked down Andrassy St which is one of the main boulevards in Pest. There are lots of impressive houses on both sides of the road. I then turned onto Elizabeth St which is fairly similar only with more shops and hotels. I continued along this until I got back to the turn off for the hostel and here  I am. It's been a nice relaxing day so tomorrow I'll be all set to hit the tourist sights and museums.

Budapest, I've found so far to be a very easy city to navigate in. The streets are well marked with repeated street signs on the longer streets. The bus system was easy to work out and with a map it isn't hard to find out exactly where the buses are going. Lots of people in the transport system speak a little english and those that don't still are very helpful. I managed to buy a book of 10 tickets from the metro station without any trouble at all (and I'm sure that my Hungarian pronunciation isn't that good!). I'll have to see how I go tomorrow.

Friday was a busy day and I covered a lot of ground. I had a slightly later start than I intended because I was putting photos into this blog and lost track of time. I headed first into the city to the American Express Office to change some travellers cheques for my local payment on the tour I am joining on Sunday. The Amex Office in Budapest does not issue or cash cheques anymore and they sent me to the exchange office around the corner in one of the main squares. Here I found out much to my annoyance, that in Hungary you can only change travellers cheques into Forint not the currency in which you have had them issued, so to get euros, I had to change it into Forint and then back again. This meant to get 300 euros, I had to pay 328 euros for the money that I lost in changing them from forint. This really annoyed me because I have been in other countries where they will cash cheques into euros directly and if I'd known I would have done this instead. So keep that in mind if you are coming to Hungary and need other currencies.

After doing that and being annoyed for about 10 minutes, I headed across the Elizabeth Bridge to the St Gellert memorial. St Gellert was a bishop who was sent to Hungary to convert the heathens. The heathens didn't take to him so well, and threw him off a cliff in a barrel full of spikes. Clearly they were the wrong people to piss off! There is a memorial supposedly at the spot where he was martyred and it's quite a nice one with a big statue holding a cross and a waterfall. I hiked up the stairs next to it and you get quite a nice view over the top end of the city.

From there I continued up the winding path to the very top of the hill to the Monument there. It used to be a communist momument but they removed some of the statues (which are now at statue park) and altered some of the others to make it into the freedom monument. It's quite pretty with a lady holding up a palm frond (not that they have those in Hungary but anyway) and a man fighting a many headed beast down the bottom. There are great views from the top over most of the city and the Buda castle as well. Unfortunately they don't photograph well because of the appalling smog in Budapest. They must have taken all the postcard photos forty years ago or a really good at photoshopping the smog out. You can also drive up to the top if you can be bothered walking.

I then headed back down the hill in a long zigzagging way and headed across to the castle. I headed up the less used old set of steps that seems to access one of the older sections of the castle. Unfortunately what I came to was the exit of the museum so I had to head around the walls to try and find another entrance. I found one and headed up that way only to hit some security guys and a fence. It seems that there is a beer and sausage festival on at the castle at the moment and it was blocking the entrance. I figured that there had to be another way to get into the castle grounds so headed back down the hill to find one. Once at the bottom of the hill, I headed around the base and came to the funicular (for the truly lazy, it is really not that big a hill!) but there is no walkway next to the funicular so one I continued until I found a way up the hill. I eventually came out near the top of the funicular only to find another entrance to the beer and sausage festival. This entrance to the castle grounds is quite spectacular with a huge statue of a nasty looking eagle with a sword on the top of the gate. I found a sign near here that pointed to the national gallery but again it just pointed to the beer festival. So I decided to just wander for a little while and look at the rest of the castle and see if I just happened to stumble upon the entrance to the gallery. The castle is a mishmash of styles but is mostly fairly  baroque looking (to me anyway and I'm no expert on architecture) as it has lots of large over the top fountains and statues on everything. There is a great fountain in one of the courtyards with a giant man with a dead stag and some hunting dogs and a greek goddess (I'm not sure what she has to do with Hungary other than they seem to like half naked women here). There are also four great lion statues. Two are calm and happy looking and two are angry and roaring. Strangely though, the roaring ones face into the courtyard not out.

I found several closed entrances to sections of the gallery but not the main entrance. In the end I decided to see where the people heading through the little door in the corner of one of the courtyards were going. Initially it appeared to be another entrance into the sausage festival but when you went a little further through you could see a little walkway through to the right and this lead to the main entrance to the gallery. A sign would have been nice, guys!

The National Gallery is one of the few things in Budapest that is free and is worth a quick look. I went mainly to see the collection of medieval and baroque art and unfortunately part of the collection is closed at the moment. I get the feeling that the boy that follows me around the supermarket moving the things that I buy to the top shelf, has been following me around Europe closing the sections of exhibitions that I want to see.

The sections that I did see were good but I don't think that Hungarian gothic art was a patch on the stuff in Slovakia or Poland. There is also very little explanatory notes in English in the gallery so you just have to look at the art. I decided to skip the modern art section and headed back outside where it had become kind of sunny. I headed then to St Mathias church which is currently covered in scaffolding so you can't really see the outside of it. I didn't go in because I figured I could come back another day. Then it started to rain. Thankfully not for very long but they were very large raindrops. Everyone scurried for shelter in the Fisherman's bastion which is a really quite unattractive building next to the church. It looks not unlike the Disney castle only long and white. It was swarming with tourists taking pictures of the view, which isn't as good as the view from the top of Gellert Hill anyway. I didn't hang around long and headed down the hill towards the river. I walked along the front of the Buda side until reaching the bridge over to Margit Island. This is a quite large island in the middle of the Danube that is mostly park land. It also has a couple of hotels and a spa. At the bottom end of the island is a large communist looking statue that is quite bizarre. I think you must have to Hungarian to understand this one. Behind it is the singing fountain, which knocks the socks off the one in Kosice. It plays classical music and pumps the water out in time. Very impressive though don't stand on the downwind side or you might end up a little damp.

I wandered through the park and looked at the ruins of the convent where St Margit used to live. I don't know anything about her and whether she actually did anything much or just set a good christian example like a lot of the saints around here. I sat in the park for a while and wrote in my journal and just people watched. Lots of the people in the surrounding suburbs (mostly highrise apartments) use the park as a backyard so there were people jogging, playing soccer, kids with their toys, people lying in the sun reading. It's a really pleasant place. Even better it has a jogging track going around the outside that is made of that soft stuff so that it doesn't hurt your knees so much. It definitely made my legs feel better.

I headed off the island at the top end (onto arpad bridge) and started to walk back to the station to meet my friends who were coming on the train from Prague. It was all going well until I hit roadworks that blocked my route and then a construction site that blocked the pavement and then one of the footbridges marked on my map as going over the train line doesn't exist. So it took a little longer than I expected to get to the station. Not that I should have bothered rushing as the train was nearly an hour and a half late in the end.

The Kereti station people obviously don't want to encourage people to hang around in the station because there are virtually no seats in the entire building. So I had to stand up for a couple of hours and read my book. When they finally arrived we headed into the metro and got to our hostel and they dropped their bags. We went to a cafe down the road for dinner and while the food was good, the service was atrocious and the waiter even had the nerve to complain about the tip that we left him. I was tempted to tell him that he was lucky to get anything at all seeing as we won't be going back there anyway but instead we just left.

Saturday was a busy day. We decided that since Alice and Alicia only had a couple of days we might as well start with some of the big sights. We headed across the chain bridge (that's the one with the big lions on it) and onto the Buda side of the river. We walked up to the castle and wandered around the grounds for a while. It was a glorious day and I got some much better photos of the buildings and the view than I had the day before. After walking for a little while we decided that it was time for a coffee and headed off in search of a coffee house that had been recommended to them by some people they had met on the train from Prague. It's called Ruszwurm and is in a little street near the St Matthias church. It's just adorable and has been a pastry house for over a century. The building is actually heritage listed. The cake was really really nice. I had the Ruszwurm torte which had nuts and cherries in it and a real milkshake with icecream in it (they are hard to find in Eastern Europe). We sat there for a while and we realised that we were the only English speakers in the cafe. All the rest were either Hungarian or German (and they really know the good places for kaffee and kuchen).

We then walked down and around the Fisherman's Bastion for a little while and then the others decided that they would like to go and try some Palinka at the Palinka and sausage festival. I left them to it and headed back to go inside St Matthias and I'm really glad that I did. It is just incredible on the inside. The outside is fairly ordinary as far as churches go (though it is not helped at the moment by the full scaffolding) but the inside is awesome. It is neogothic mixed with art nouveau with a Hungarian edge to it. The whole of the inside of the church is painted, mostly with patterns but also with angels and saints. It's much brighter and richer colours than a lot of churches. I spent over an hour on the inside and took heaps of photos. There is a small museum up in the gallery and you can get great views into the main body of the church from up there. There is also a copy of St Stephen's crown (the original is in the Parliament building). This is definitely one of my top ten churches for the trip so far and believe me I have been to a lot of churches. This one reminded me a lot of the Church of the Spilled Blood in St Petersburg which has been my favourite church so far.

By the time I came out the beautiful weather had left and it was starting to get cold. I headed back to meet the others but they were having a great time and wanted to stay at the festival. So I ended up going in and it wasn't bad. It's the first year for the festival and I suspect in a couple of years it will be great. They had lots of different types of Palinka (a grape based high alcohol drink from Hungary that is useful for disinfecting wounds and starting fires) as well as Hungarian sausages and other hot dishes like goulash and chicken. They had bands playing for most of the afternoon. Initially it was cover bands doing mostly English songs but in the early evening a Hungarian folk group came on and sang for a while. They need to work on their stage act a bit because they all looked very mournful but the music was great and they can really play guitar.

We ended up heading off at about 7 pm when it started to rain. We walked along the river to Margit Hid and then caught a tram from there back to the hostel. I was surprised by how few buildings along the waterfront were lit up given the number of evening cruises that we had seen advertised. The castle is all lit and up and very pretty but other than that and a couple of churches there isn't much. They only light up the dome on the parliament building so it looks slightly odd in photos.

This morning we got up fairly late and headed into the Pest side of town. We walked first up to the Heroes Monument and again I managed to get some better photos that actually had some blue sky in them. It is quite amusing that in Hungary you can still be a tough king with girly plaits and a mo.

Alice and Alicia then headed to the House of Terror Museum while I went to have a closer look at the castle in the park. It was such a lovely day, I wanted to spend it outside. I haven't had much good weather in the last month and it seemed a shame to waste even a minute of it inside.

The castle on the lake looks really old and has romanesque, gothic and baroque elements (I was really impressed that I picked those three before reading the guide book about it, my ability with architecture is improving!) but the building was actually built in 1896 (or shortly thereafter) for the millennium celebrations for Budapest. It is modeled on several different castles around Hungary and Romania. They have even made a copy church in the grounds that is based on a Romanesque church in the countryside. They have done a really good job because you would never guess that they aren't old. The inside is mostly used by the Hungarian Agriculture Museum, which bizarrely enough had a really long queue. Maybe agriculture is more exciting in Hungary or there could be a farmer's conference in town.

I then walked back down Andrassy Avenue to meet the others at the museum. The street was closed off for some form of fun run and it was a great morning for it. We met up and then headed further into town to find somewhere to have some lunch. After having a bit to eat, we headed in the direction of St Stephen's, the biggest church on the Pest side of the river. St Stephen was the king of Hungary in the early part of the second millennium and I'm not quite sure why he was made a saint. The church was built in the second half of the 19th century and must have been finished just as art nouveau was becoming big. It's quite impressive on the inside but in a different way to St Matthias. It's much glitzier and grander but very peaceful on the inside. The main drawcard at this church is the hand of St Stephen, which resides in a box in the side chapel. It's mummified and has been stored as a relic for centuries. At various stages, it has been stolen by marauders but has finally made it back to it's proper resting place. Most recently it was taken by the Germans during the war but they seemed to give it back quite prompt after the war finished. It is fairly festy looking but then again it is nearly a thousand years old.

We then had to come back to the hostel so that Alice and Alicia could head out to the airport. I'm heading to the new hotel to join my tour group and start on the next leg of my journey (one that thankfully someone else if having to organise!)