July 8-11, 2009 – Day 195-198 – Budapest, Hungary

We have been taking it pretty easy in Budapest so instead of boring you to tears with 3 sentence long dreadfully boring daily posts we have lumped them into one medium sized boring post! Budapest has fit our needs very nicely. Turns out our flight from here to Hong Kong (flying out Monday) will be pretty cheap and it gives us a chance to enjoy some western comforts before jumping into China.

What are you lookin' at?

So nnjoying those western comforts is about all we have been doing. We watched the new Terminator movie. Joke was on us though: it was overdubbed into Magyar (Hungarian). Lucky there is more action than dialog. We ate at a fantastic and horribly overpriced Mexican restaurant (we miss Mexican food like a fish misses water). We watched the new Sacha Cohen movie Bruno (in English!). And we have been eating amazingly cheap and mouthwateringly good pizza every… single… day.

Now doesn't that look tasty

We did do a little sightseeing while we were in Budapest. We spent one whole day exploring the hill and Buda Castle. The hill really affords some amazing views of the city and the river.

View from the Hill

The Castle on the other hand was alright but certainly not mindblowing like we had been told by others. We walked all over the hill which is covered with old churchs, storefronts, and restaurants we can’t afford.

The Castle

Finally on the 11th, we spent a delightful day at the big city park with cotton candy for lunch and later crossed over into the city zoo. Budapest has a very nice zoo facility with tons of animals, even a brown bear, raccoons and sloths! The sloth exhibit is probably the best as you get to enter the massive cage with the sloths and they climb around (slowly) right above your head or on the branch inches from your face with no fence or bars blocking your view.

Sloth and baby sloth hanging out

Besides those unusual zoo “exhibits” there was a white wolf, hairy 2-humped camels that we got to pet, a typical farm cow, and a huge gorilla that was so old he was graying out on most of his big, bulky body.

Lindsey and a spoiled Camel

We had such a fun time seeing the animals and checking out some fantastic tropical aquariums. By the time we left, we had nearly closed the place down.

Fish Fingers