Budapesht is our new favorite city…

Daily life on board a river ship is similar to an ocean cruiser. Yet somehow it seems less hectic, even though we are doing tours every day and sometimes twice a day. One big difference is that we mostly dock close to the cities so we’re able to walk to lots of sights and activities. In fact, walking IS a major activity in some of the beautiful towns and cities we’ve been in.

Of course we can choose to stay on board (as Randy and I have done on a couple of occasions) and then we are really relaxing. There is a piano bar where a pianist plays every lunchtime and tea time (we haven’t stayed up late enough to know if he plays late into the night) and he already knows what songs we like. This is where everybody gravitates in the late afternoon (and all day, sometimes!) for cocktails, music, and conversation. If the weather is nice, we can be up on the top sundeck (but internet is not good there so if I want to upload and download anything, that isn’t the place to be) but there is no pool (no great loss as far as I am concerned!) or even a hot tub. We’ve seen a few much larger ships (we are 110 meters by 11.3 meters, they are up to 145  x 14+ meters) that do have pools, but I am loving the smaller size of our River Princess (138 passengers).

Our tour to Mohacs and Pecs (pronounced ‘Peach’) was almost three and a half hours on a bus with one hour tasting some barely adequate wine (the California wine snob in me is rearing its head!) and an hour and a half in the town of Pecs and its museum of Victor Vasarely. Not our favorite use of time! The big excitement on the hour and three quarter bus ride home was seeing two raptors and a parrot by the side of the road.

After our less than memorable trip to Mohacs and Pecs, we arrived in Budapest, two cities made into one but divided by the Danube: Buda and Pest (but it is pronounced ‘Pesht’).

Our welcome to Hungary was a face-to-face meeting with Hungarian customs officials who have a less than sunny outlook on life in general and tourists in particular. They have gone off with our passports. I hope we get them back! At least we have some nice stamps on our hitherto pristine passport pages. We had to get new passports because we ran out of space! I had no idea we had traveled that much.

We’ll do some tours of Budapest and I’ll continue this later. 

Oh, yes, Randy got a haircut. In Mohacs.

Randy and his gorgeous hairdresser. Pretty good haircut, actually!

Shopping, Mohacs style.

Our welcome to the wine tasting. Great except he wouldn't stop playing. Even when the guides were trying to tell us where we needed to go.

Wine tasting.

Our less than friendly guide. Martinet is a more apt description.

These "huts" are where the wine ages.

Wine cellars

Stairs to the cellars.

And what do YOU want with us?

Stork nest.

Church in Pecs.

The newest craze (everywhere, I think)

So Pecs officials had a sculpture made so people would stop locking locks to public stuff.

What university students do when they are overwhelmed by their tests.

Budapest bridge by night

Budapest Parliament by night.