Budapest – Baths & Synagogue

We’re staying near the Opera house in Budapest. Today we decided to walk, instead of taking the metro, to Hero’s Square, which was 2.5km.Elora and Ollie were both very excited to get out of the stroller once we arrived and run around. Then they started dancing and clapping when they heard the man in the backround playing a clarinet. He was a 2 song pony though…. we were there long enough for his repetoire to repeat a few times.Next stop was the Szechyni Baths. It’s expensive (hi Dad!), but worth it. We visited this place in the spring and it is the better of the two famous baths in Budapest. It’s like swimming at a palace! Plus they have hot tubsz, szaunas and szpring water.Elora wasz excited to szwim in her floatiesz! (Every ‘s’ in Hungarian is followed by a ‘z’, like ‘q’ and ‘u’ in english).Ollie loves to go swimming. It was funny though because Elora usually remembers all the places we go and she didn’t seem to remeber this place even though we were just here a couple months ago. You’d think it would be hard to forget swimming here…All of that swimming in the sun made us pretty tired so we stopped by a duck pond to eat our sandwiches. Since none of us speaks Hungarian (but I [Chris] can grunt pretty well like one), we think we were eating ham. Or rather hope. I just pointed at some meat and grunted to the deli lady at the grocery store… The bread is very tasty though. Always fresh baked.Mom didn’t want to sit on the grass for some reason. Too good to eat with the common folk I guess. Meanwhile Ollie slept like a donkey.Then we went to see this little church and Elora stopped to smell the flowers.The kids were both pretty exhausted so we went home to see if they’d nap. Ollie woke up on the way back and Elora started to fall asleep. But by the time we got home neither one wanted to sleep. So they decided to eat lots of corn flakes instead.The Jewish Synagogue of Budapest is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world (behind New York). It was apparently designed by a catholic. It was also pretty pricey…one of the most expensive things we’ve done in Budapest. We had to go through an airport metal detector to get in. The stroller and I beeped like crazy but they didn’t bother to check us.This stained glass display represented Jewish history. The colors all stood for different things. Blue for Israel, red for blood, green for hope.It was tough to get pictures of the inside of the building. It was definitely unique to look at. I had to wear a yarmulka and Karen was told she was inappropriately dressed and had to cover-up with a shawl. Scandalous.This sculpture is called the Weeping Willow tree. It’s a stainless steel memorial for the victims of the holocaust. The leaves have the names of the Hungarian Jews that died in the Holocaust. Apparently the famous actor Tony Curtis started the foundation that raised the money to pay for it.Elora was excited to look at everything in the museum. This plate was from the 1600s. But it had a crack in it, so they should probably just toss it out…More fun things to look at. All of the pieces in the collection were from various synagogues and private homes that were collected from within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.Finally we went to get some dinner. Ollie was not happy unless he had the Itsy Bitsy Spider sung to him over and over and over and over again.Dinner! Elora just got french fries. We’re such lucky parents to have a kid that always eats her “vegetables”. Dinner was really good, but it was soooo expensive. Budapest is such an expensive city, good thing mom has her credit card!After dinner, the world famous Hungarian Kurtos Kalacs. Mom says she had a bad hair/make-up day because we spent the day in the pool. And finally we present the following video. On the way back to the apartment we walked by a woman playing her flute. Elora gave her a few coins and then proceeded to dance around for a few minutes, so I had to get the camera out to recorder her dance. it’s very cute, and she sure does like to move around alot, but it almost reminds me of Elaine from Seinfeld dancing… And notice Ollie “I’m about to pass out from lack of sleep, but I want to clap anyway”.