Budapest – Heroes Square & Vajdahunyad Castle

Here is Chris trying to interpret a street sign. Have you ever tried to read Hungarian? Me neither til this trip, and wow is it difficult to pronounce and even remember what the words are because they are so different than English. So we remember all the things we did, but we don’t know what most of it was called… Luckily the back of the signs have English… but Chris says he didn’t notice, so apparently he was just relying on his innate good sense of direction.Here is Heroes Square. Very neat. Lots of statues… Chris thinks it’s cool that the statues around the bottom of the monument were Attila the Hun and his troops. He also says the reason that is cool is because Attila was the scourge of all of Europe and seen as barbaric and yet revered as a hero in Hungary… people name their kids after him. He’s not making that part up, I thought he was, but he says there is a guy in his class named Attila…Here is Elora looking at the statues of other Hungarian heroes…Me and the kids hanging out with Attila with his cohort.This is the Vajdahuendydysg Castle. Okay, so the real name is in the title of the post. I didn’t even know what this was called until we looked it up on Wikipedia… I just knew that there was a park in Budapest with a castle. And look how cool it is! It is a copy of a castle in Transylvania. Originally it was made from cardboard and wood(much like our house in Glendale) for the millennial exhibition in 1896 but it became so popular that it was rebuilt from stone and brick. Fezzik! The portcullis!Here is a chapel that is inside the castle walls. I loved all the intricate carvings in the stone.This is the gift shop. No, seriously. This is either a monk, or the grim reaper… Elora was fascinated by this statue, she kept creeping up to it to get a closer look. She also likes skulls and skeletons. Hmmm…Those are vines crawling up the statues at the top of the castle, which always looks cool, but you just have to wonder – doesn’t it cause lots of spider and bug problems?