Day Three, A medieval day

Today is the day they gave us the free trip to make up for our having to stay in this nice Marriott. In many ways this trip was nice, but it was kind of all the things that make going on the old lady bus kind of annoying. You get off the bus, they have promised you a potty break, which means you wait about 20 minutes while everyone in your group visits the bathroom, then there is a half hour left to see everything at the site, but if, as at this one, there is a lot of walking, you will all walk at the pace of the slowest person. Which means that you might have wanted to spend a little bit of time inside the oldest church in Hungary examining the marble statues, but it’s now time to move at a snail’s pace back to the bus. The church is striking, and was built in the 1600s to honor St. Stephen, but when they started doing the work, they discovered an even older chapel from the 1200s or so, made of red marble (an indiginious stone) so they changed the plan of the church to incorporate this older chapel. It’s quite a wonderful church, in a high spot overlooking the Danube and where you can see Serbia across the river. There’s a “friendship bridge”but our guide tells us there was little friendship between these two peoples. There’s also a statue at the top of the area showing the Pope’s legate crowning St. Stephen.

We looked down from this statue on a charming little town with a white church steeple and lots of red roofs. Then it turned out that’s where we were going to see the remains of a castle King Mathias built for his second wife. It was pretty interesting for a ruin, because so much of it was based on speculation as little exists except the footprint of the original building.

Following this, we were treated to a medieval style dinner – Venison soup – very good, all the wine you could drink – too much, followed by main course of spare ribs, turkey legs and really good potatoes – enough – and some sort of hazelnut dessert mit schlag. Once again we left a meal stuffed. So stuffed, in fact that we are both skipping the FREE meal tonight in favor of going to McDonald’s to upload this blog, and taking a little walk to get a gelato. Then we must pack because we finally have our boat and will move to the boat tomorrow. So we will be packing tonight after we get home.

Tomorrow morning we get a tour to a country area with what’s supposed be a great artisan’s market where we can buy tschachkas and other stuff we certainly wouldn’t want to be without. After the morning tour and lunch, we hope to go to this wonderful spa and spend the afternoon relaxing while others go to the Parliament.

Today’s pictures St. Stephen’s, St. Stephen being crowned, King Mathias castle ruins, town below St. Stephens, Budapest public market.
Dinner,