Mulberries and Pretty Views in Buda

As Emily mentioned in her last post, while in Budapest we stayed with friends of her family.

I think sometimes the Communist apartment block gets a lot of flak in the US for being drab, oppressive, you name it. One counter-argument to that idea is that, while the buildings themselves are not very decorated, they are usually surrounded by wide swaths of soothing greenery. Here, for example, is the view looking out the window of the room we stayed in in Buda:

However, old Budapest is plenty ornate! We made our mandatory pilgrimage up to the so-called Fisherman’s Bastion, a very beautiful if not very practical-looking faux fortification.

We were pleasantly surprised to find a group playing folk music, including this hammered dulcimer-like instrument.

Fisherman’s Bastion seems to have been devised with the sole purpose of offering awesome views of Pest, including the grandiose Parliament.

I’ve been marveling at the mulberries ever since Turkey when they were still green on the trees. Now a good number of them are ripe, and we found a very easy to pick tree in the parks by the Bastion.

Wandering over to the Castle (it seems we forgot to take pictures because of the steamy weather, sorry), Emily caught a candid of me:

Lastly, we stopped along the river one morning to snap this picture to show a little bit of how the flood waters were just a few weeks ago. The discoloration goes up maybe 10 feet above the current water level, covering a big part of the trees. This is a little island in the Danube in Budapest:

We are currently on a nice train headed through Slovakia towards Prague, and we’re taking advantage of the time to catch up on blogging. Two upcoming posts:

Hungary talks about Communism

We drink Bull’s Blood in Eger