Budapest: Day 2

Woke up quite early but only managed to leave at 08:30am. I went directly to the Great Covered Market not far away from the hostel. It's quite a huge market, kind of the combination between the (covered) market in Riga an Helsinki. Clean and huge market. It consists of two floors, the first floor basically for the food materials, from spices to meat, oh and strudels (yummy). The second floor is for the souvenirs, traditional clothes, bags or something like that. In the other side there are some food sellers too, kind of warung or Imbiss. I could not resist to buy the strudels and yeah it's delicious :-)

After the market, I walked along Vaci Utca in the direction to the Vorosmaty Ter (all are in Pest side). I joined a free walking tour for 2.5 hours (yup it's quite a long walk). It was kind of cloudy and cold morning when we started around 10:30pm. I was one of the earliest person to show up at the meeting point. I was surprised that finally quite a lot of people joined the tour, I think there were around 50 people (in such a crappy weather, I could not imagine what happens in sunny summer :-P). Gabor who guided us, gave us a lot of interesting stories about Hungarian history and architecture (and thermal bath wohooo, it's a must he said :-P) and he did a good job to make it interesting and fun for us. We walked along the Pest area, then crossed the Danube river to Buda. We climbed the Castle hill, visited a strange small Russian monument (it was inspired by the famous Basilica but it's a small one so it's kind of weird :-P), the colorful Matthias church (too bad it's still being renovated), and the Fisherman Bastion. We finished the tour several minutes after 01:00pm.

I explored the Buda area myself after the tour, visiting some souvenir shops and booking a folk dance show for the evening in Touris Info Center. I then took bus to return to Pest and visited the Weihnachtsmarkt again before going to Danube Palace to see the folk dance. The performance was interesting, but I run out my camera's battery, so no pics from that show :-(.