Graduation Trip: Budapest

My doting husband took me on a whirlwind tour of eastern/central Europe at the end of January as a congrats for having graduated from culinary school. Really, though, I felt it was more appropriate to be congratulated for just making it through 5 months of French chefs yelling at me regardless of the diploma.

Either way, the trip was amazing.  I thought I'd share it with you city by city.  Today I'm taking you to Budapest, Hungary. 

We arrived early in the morning to Budapest and were elated to find this as the view from our hotel on the Buda side of the river.

This too was a view from our hotel room.  If you are going to Budapest, I highly recommend staying on castle hill in Buda.  There are great views of the entire city.

After settling in, we of course couldn't resist the breakfast buffet.

Fueled with food and loaded down in coats/hats/gloves, we braved the snowy terrain in order to see the sights of the city.

We spent some time on Castle Hill.

Hanging out with these old dudes.

And then hopped on the metro that had the longest escalator I have ever seen in my life.  Look, you can't even see the top of it.  Don't be fooled into thinking this was a high-tech metro based on this escalator, though.  There were actual people standing guard at the metro entrance to see that we took our paper metro tickets and put them into a receptacle before entering.

Walking around Pest.

Leave it to me to find the one food market in the city.

It was a large inside market with food on the ground floor, clothes/trinkets and lunch stalls on the upper floor.  The food was quite diverse except for the ever present Paprika pepper.  In case you were not aware, Hungary produces Paprika peppers and powder and they are darn proud of it (as they should be).

We stopped by the sausage man.  Bit of a language barrier, but hey can you blame us for not speaking Hungarian?

Lace shops on the upper floor were plentiful.

As were stalls with beautifully painted and dressed dolls.

All of that is well and good, but nothing was going to steal the thunder from this piece of awesomeness that day.  I don't even know what it is called, but I know that I loved it.  Essentially, it is a savory funnel cake topped with sour cream, cheese, and salami.  Could it get any better?

"Liberty" statue built back in the day by the Russians.  Hmm.  Liberty.  Built by the Russians for Hungary.  Interesting.

Crossing back over the river.

B on the famous Lion bridge in Budapest, looking a bit cold. 

Just in case you didn't think it was really all that cold.

Dinner.  Finally a place to warm up with good food and drinks.  This was my first course - pumpkin pasta.

B had the goulash.  Somebody had to - we were in Hungary for goodness sake.  He wasn't disappointed either.  It was hearty and good.

Next, I had duck over barley.

And B had the steak.

We finished off the evening with this sponge cake.  Yum.

The next day we headed out to see more of the city.

This guy is awesome.

This is what one might call a "church of significance."

That comes with cool stained glass windows.

B and I wanted to experience Hungary like the locals. 

So we headed to a park and went ice skating with them.

And when that got too unbearably cold, we headed to the bathhouse and mingled in the naturally heated pools (that were outside, I might add) with all the Hungarians.