Budapest

Abby and I spent the weekend eating, drinking, and walking our way through Budapest in what amounted to a gluttonous couple of days.

A highlight of this trip to Budapest was Memento Park. It’s a statue park outside city center. After about a 30-minute bus ride you get off on the side of a road near what I think was a tiling business.

Across the street massive statues poke up over the horizon. After the Velvet Revolution, some of the biggest soviet statues in Budapest were collected and consolidated here as an open-air exhibition.

If you like art and are interested in Eastern European history than this statue park is a must-visit. Everything is self-guided. As of 2019, the museum is still under construction. In unfinished unlit rooms, massive busts of Lenin and of kid-Lenin jump out at you.

Creepy kid Lenin

In the completed statue park there are some magnificent pieces of art and monuments to oppression.

After Monument Park, we headed for the thermal baths at Széchenyi where we enjoyed a relaxed afternoon.

Strike a pose

We finished the night with a late-night falafel fueled walk along the Danube.

On Sunday, we ventured across the river from Pest to Buda to explore a local market. We got veg sausage, langos, olives, bread, veg cheese, Hungarian sweetbreads, and pickles then found a picnic spot. Lucky me, the park had a fitness park where I completed the pull-up challenge.

I spent most of the rest of our time together urging Abby to blow off her job and join me in Belgrade, to no avail.