July 16th to July 21st
Folks who've never been to either Budapest or Prague might think, like we did, of the two of these as pretty similar former Eastern Bloc capitals that are thriving now that they are open to the West. In reality, I'd say that neither are. Besides that fact, we did not find them similar at all.
Budapest
We were actually in Vienna, planning to skip Budapest entirely, with the intention of staying an extra night in Vienna and doing a day trip to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. We randomly came across a brochure for trips to each that had like 7 pages on Budapest and called it "The Paris of the East" and 1 page on Bratislava with the tour offerred a folk show. Since Bratislava sounded so incredibly boring and Budapest so awesome, we switched our plans and cut our Vienna trip a day short to shoot over to Budapest. After we finally arrived (having missed our first train from Vienna), we couldn't have been more pleased.
Budapest is a very cool city with great architecture throughout, some nice parks and a stunnng castle. The town is split up into Buda and Pest, which were once separate capitals separated solely by the river that runs between them. We stayed in Pest, but spent alot of time in Buda, and both were pretty cool. Pest is more lively with alot more going on, but Buda has the castle which is obviously awesome.
These are our friends Greg and Sophie, descendants of criminals imprisoned in Australia or who otherwise fled the laws of Mother England for the desolate island long ago. We'll talk about them later...
The castle looks amazing at night too.
We took this picture after Whitney's favorite dinner in all of Europe - Beef ghoulash with spaetzle from a relatively sedate restaurant overlooking the river and the castle beyond. Great location, but had no idea that Whitney would find her favorite food in Hungary and that it would involve beef stew. Huh?
The two cities of Buda and Pest were combined in 1796 and in 1896 the Hapsburgs (at this point ruling Hungary) threw a huge party to marke the centennial. Two massive construction projects for this celebration were the massive and ornate Parliament building and the ginormous and beautiful St. Stephen's Cathedral. Each is 96m tall to coincide with 1796 and 1896 - clever, eh? This picture is taken across the river from Buda, but you can see the Parliament building, which was meant to mirror and rival the Parliament building in London.
The only problem is that Hungary is a simple country with simple needs and a simple government. Therefore, the actual Parliament only takes up 12% of the entire space of the building.
Franz Josef Hapsburg, you so crazy... In any case, St. Stephen's Cathedral is equally grand and even after seeing a lot of churches throughout Europe, this one was mighty impressive.
The interiors were huge with beautiful gold leafwork on the domed ceiling.
Also, the issue of Catholic relics again presented itself. St. Stephen was the first king of Hungary 1000 years ago, and miraculously, this Cathedral contains the mummified right hand of St. Stephen himself.
It is old and blackened and scary looking, but sure enough, his little right hand is balled up into a fist and for 1euro, you can turn the lights on and see it in all its glory (or not).
We really enjoyed Budapest. These were some cool sights that were fairly popular, but the town was not over-run by tourists by any stretch. It retained a lot of natural charm and the people were great. The prices were reasonable and the western stores were not on every block. Budapest is not thriving in the same way that Prague is, and I think that is a good thing. While there are still many blocks of rundown-ish apartments surrounding the immediate downtown area, at least every citizen is not slave to the tourist trade. For this reason, they do not resent tourists and visitors receive a more genuine experience.
One experience that turned out to be a little too genuine was our visit to the Gellert Baths, a bath house that has been popular for hundreds of years.
The structure itself was pretty cool, with pools inside and out, but it was a little bit of a letdown to be honest, as it felt pretty similar to any other public pool, with the familiar chlorine smell and the same unbeautiful folks using the pool (notice the not tan gentleman with the rather large belly - nice!).
The experience that 
ended up being a little too genuine was when we went for our massages, which the guidebooks said you had to try. Anyway, my number is called and the biggest, strongest, baldest, Hungarian-est dude you could ever imagine (kind of like Soda Popinksi from Mike Tyson's Punchout on Nintendo - see left) comes out and tells me to take off my pants (in front of like 5 other old men). I sort of pretend not to understand and gently put down my towel and he yells at me again - "Pants! Off! Now!" which I took as my cue to exit stage left. This dude was going to break me, not to mention my Costanza fears of a male massage, so I awkwardly said "No, thank you" and shuffled out the door. The entire rest of our time at the pool, I was sure he was going to find me and say "You, Pants Off! Now!". Uncomfortable. But entire bath experience was okay and the other bath house in town is supposed to be alot cooler (Szecheny Baths).
Another reason we liked Budapest, was that we made friends and got to hang out with a couple Aussies (which is always entertaining). In all the world, it seems like Australians have the best understanding of what it means to maintain a good standard of living. Greg and Sophie were on a year-long sabbatical, with the blessing of their employer, and were using the time to slowly travel around the world, spending weeks in nearly every place they visit. Apparently, this is not unusual for Australian companies to allow or even to encourage these sabbaticals for their best employees (or in this case, two very average employees).
They had gone to this great restaurant the night before, and told us that we had to try it. When we decided to get dinner together, we stuck to the original plan and they simply ate the same place two dinners in a row. Hey, they've got a whole year off, why can't they eat one single repeat meal, alright? Anyway, the food was fantastic and we even chased it down with a little Aussie wine. The weather that night was absurd. Just before dinner, for the second time that day, we were drinking cans of beers in the park (which we couldn't decide if it was "like the locals" or "like a bum") on a nice clear night, which in the span of five minutes turned to hurricane force winds and a tremendous downpour. We nearly got soaked running to the restaurant and afterwards running to a local bar.
Besides teaching us that all Australians are criminials themselves or the offspring of criminals exported from England, they also pointed out that Australia only has a population of 20 million. That struck me as amazing small - they make a pretty big impact worldwide for just 20 million people. Compare their performance in international sports to that of India with 1 billion people -- ouch, pretty embarrassing. Heck, they do a number on us in a lot of different things and we've got nearly 300 million. In any case, on our trip we've met one other set of Aussies and they were also on a more extravagant trip than ours -- the moral of the story is don't compare yourself to any Australians, because you'll end up jealous of their lifestyle (even if you happen to be on a nine-month long Summer of George). Speaking of jealous, I'm jealous of this dude's fashion sense (pic taken from train leaving Budapest)...
Are those Tebow's jorts?
For all the photos from Budapest, click here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mchamberlain22/BudapestHungary
Prague
So, above I said that Prague was not thriving under its newfound regime of capitalism, and I don't mean to say that its not doing well financially, because it seems to be. But its kind of like an investment banker who is making a lot of money but got divorced from his wife and never sees his kids. Is he doing well? Sometimes he probably thinks so and other times he probably knows better. He may not be sure anymore because its been so long since he sold his soul. Anyway, Prague has totally sold its soul for the almighty (used to be almighty anyway) dollar, and it is very sad. It is one huge, historically stunning and architecturally moving, tourist trap. We hated it.
People reading this who've been to Prague are probably upset with us and saying we just needed to get off the "beaten" track. Well you probably visited Prague 5 to 10 years ago, when folks were just discovering it and the people were warm and the beers were cheap. That is no longer the case anymore, as the entire city has been "beaten". The beers are as expensive as anywhere else in Europe and the people seem to (perhaps justifiably) resent all the tourists or simply steal from them (as we saw firsthand). The city has no soul and if that is an important factor for you to enjoy a city, you will likely not enjoy this one. Everyone should probably see it once for themselves though - for the architecture and history alone.
Negativity aside, the physical city itself is amazing. The architecture is unreal, and not just in the most touristed areas (like Prague Castle above or Starometzka Square below), but even outside the city centre, nearly every building is striking and covered in architectural details and ornamental decoration.
At this point the goatee was flowing pretty well, so these photos should be enjoyable for all. After issues getting into the city from the train station (ATM only disperses 1000CK increments and nobody at entire station will break more than a 100CK, so no way to buy subway tickets, etc. - lovely), we felt like we needed to treat ourselves so we checked into the Ventana Hotel Prague, which was ***** and probably the nicest place we stayed.
Regarding the subway, it was pretty cool, especially some of the stops in the city centre with their retro, crazy design.
Back to where we were staying - we were staying just of Starometzka Square, which was the most touristy place in the whole city (but that's not why we hated it honestly, the whole place just ain't good), but had some amazing buildings, including the below crazy church.
The first day, after setting out from our hotel, we walked across the Vltava River on the Charles Bridge (super touristy, but really cool - made famous originally by Vin Diesel in the action movie XXX) over to Mala Strana (Lesser Quarter) and the Prague Castle, which is a phenomenal walled complex of buildings at the top of a large hill looming over Prague.
This was one of the more simple buildings and its still great. Most famous is the St. Vitus Cathedral, built around 1350 and pretty awesome, but there is also another church, built even earlier that I thought was okay but Whitney was non-plussed...observe.
As we were leaving the castle, and returning the terrible audioguide (which is worth purchasing just so you can skip the line at St. Vitus Cathedral and enter through the exit, thereby saving an hour in line), we came across a seemingly impromptu Corvette rally.
Pretty cool. The views from the Prague Castle hill are pretty sweet too.
We walked down the hill from the castle and set out through the back streets that were as far off the beaten path as we could find.
The architecture was still phenomenal. We then actually had a great respite from the city at this small courtyard cafe in Mala Strana.
And walking back to the main sites, we enjoyed some pretty cool art - including Frank Gehry's Fred and Ginger building.
You've got me disintegrating on the left and on the right, the Fred and Ginger building - I get it - it looks like two dancers to me. Some people don't see it and that's why when not called the Dancing House its called the Drunk House.
Too much sightseeing called a quick stop for some U Fleku beer -- brewed and sold only on-site. The beer, the only beer they sell, is dark but light - it tastes nice and smooth like McSorley's dark. Really hits the spot when out jaunting around the city.
We then walked over to the National Gallery and took this stunning self-photo before heading back to our hotel and grabbing dinner.
I love the night shots with the self timer...
The next day we saw the Jewish sights of Prague, which are pretty amazing. The most amazing is the Jewish cemetary, which is unbelievable...
The gravestones are literally piled on top of eachother. It is just amazing. What else was amazing, and I mean no disrespect by changing topics so quickly, was my moustache, which emerged from the goatee on our last day in Prague.
Here the 'stache checks out the Old New Synagogue. We also visited the Spanish Synagogue and I snapped this picture without security seeing.
The interior was incredible. Speaking of incredible, we stopped for a shot in front of one of our favorite buildings before we headed back to the hotel to pack up and go.
With our bags loaded up we hopped on the subway and headed for the airport...
...where we enjoyed one last crappy Eastern Euro meal (at least you can walk around the terminal with a beer) before catching our flight to Italy...
Of note is that there is not one single television in the Prague airport. It was the final round of the British Open, which we were watching at a bar in Prague, and we could not watch from the airport. Soooooo lame.
Speaking of lame, we snapped this picture near the Jewish cemetary. Since we ended the Budapest posting with a picture of a bad nerd, thought we'd do so for Prague also (and no the picture of me above would not have counted).
Wow - the entire tourist checklist. Ill-fitting hat: check, huge camera (with finger on trigger) around neck: check, extra camera in shoulder holster: check, fanny pack: check, map in hand: check, teva sandals: check, tiny short shorts: check. We should have severely beaten this man, instead we just awkardly took a picture of him from 5 feet away, which hopefully gave him at least a jolt of self consciousness. Keep in mind however, that I had a matching moustache, so he might have assumed we knew eachother from a moustache convention or otherwise.
Anyway, for all the photos of Prague, click here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mchamberlain22/PragueCzechRepublic