A BAROQUE PALACE, A GREAT LUNCH AND A STRIP SHOW

Today we had a morning trip to a palace  called Godollo, 

which is the largest Baroque palace in Hungary and the second biggest palace after Versailles.  This is a change for Hungary, because most of the things we've been shown are the third largest, the third most important, the third this or that.  I guess if this were a horse race,Hungary would be the place of show.

This is quite a beautiful palace and if I got my information right, which has about a 50% probability, it's from the 19th century. And the king and queen who lived here the most were the son and daughter-in-law of Queen Maria Teresa. The queen who lived here was named Elisabeth, and is much beloved by the Hungarian people because she liked Hungary, and she learned to speak Hungarian and raised one of her daughters as a Hungarian, even though these people were all from the house of Hapsburg, meaning they were more Germanic.  It's quite a pretty palace. I particularly like the fact that the Queen's rooms were purple, because that was her favorite color.

She is the queen who was stabbed to death and it wasn't because anybody didn't like her, she was stabbed by an Italian anarchist who just wanted to find someone from a royal family to stab and she happened to be available.   When it was no longer used as a palace, it became a barracks for Soviet soldiers, and then an old peoples home, neither of which added to the charm of the place. In the 1990s it was refurbished and used as a meeting place for European union meetings the year Hungary was president of the European Union, or leader or whatever.

Following this tour, we went to a famous restaurant called Gundel, which is near the Heroes' Square.  I thought perhaps this was just a sort of a con game to tell us this was a famous high-class restaurant, but in fact it really was. And they didn't have us sitting at some big table in the back room they had us all at smaller tables around the dining room.  And the food was delicious, in a kind of more Continental than Hungarian way.  

Then it appeared that it was going to rain so we came back to the hotel to get our umbrellas and then we were going to take a walking tour downtown, but I decided not to go. After I was at the hotel for about an hour I decided to go anyway.

I tried to walk down to where we had taken our tour the first night I was here and I thought I was on the right track but I was paying attention to where I was going so that if I wasn't I could retrace my steps. I kept getting deeper and deeper into places that I didn't recognize, and finally I thought it's going to take me forever to get back because I made so many turns, But then I saw a kind of a big street and I thought maybe I should see if that is the street I recognize. Not that I bothered to learn the names of yet a single street. Anyway, as I was walking toward that street I went past something about a half hour ago because apparently I had walked in some giant circle, Even though I thought that I was continually getting closer to the river. So actually I thought I had a long walk home but I was halfway there.  Zoe and I got all bundled up and decided to go check out a store where I thought she might like the watches, and she was dying of the heat before we got back. Which was fine with me because I got to put on her coat. Including her coat I had on five layers of clothing. A shirt, a shirt over that, a sweater over that, my coat, and finally her coat.   My striptease pictures follow.