LAST DAY IN BUDAPEST

Today was another fascinating day and packed with things to do. This is our last day in Budapest. We started our day breakfast with a lecture on economics of Hungary by a guy who actually is a PhD economist and who knows a lot about it. He is definitely a European-style leftist. He has lived in the United States for number of years speaks excellent English and is knowledgeable about American politics as well as Hungarian.

When the lecture was over Zoe and I went to the New York Café

for lunch. It is an elegant baroque-style cafe which can also handle about a couple of hundred visitors at a time.

We both had soup and ice cream,both of which were fresh and delicious and artfully presented. The only downside of this was that we were sitting next to the piano player, who continued to come over to our table to ask if we wanted any specific songs played, which we said no, and then brought over his CDs to see if we would like to buy one. No to that also. His typical set list included a piece from the musical a pop song and then something that was yiddish or klesmer or otherwise Jewish.  His repertoire of pop songs was OK but it was clear that he had learned them from sheet music and never heard them played.

Following our elegant lunch we boarded the streetcar and went to the opera house.

There are two opera houses in Budapest, we went to the big Baroque one.  

We took the afternoon tour which was very interesting. We also met a number of our tour group in the lobby waiting for the same tour.

After that tour Zoe and I walked back to the hotel and then I walked down to Saint Stephen's Cathedral which is another very elegant Baroque place but I was unable to see much of it because there was a wedding there and they had most of the main part of the church blocked off.

And yet there's more!

Tonight our farewell dinner included a boat trip on the Danube just sailing around looking at the lights of Budapest which are absolutely beautiful at night.  

A boat trip allows you to see both sides of the river.  Then we did something that I never even knew about which was to visit Saint Margaret's Island

which is in the middle of the river in Budapest, and they have a musical fountain there that does music with colors. It was very fun.  

And then on the bus back to the hotel we had one more stop on the Buda side to see another lovely view of Pest.