Tried to wake up at 7, was having none of it. Ended up getting up a little before 8, was still showered and dressed just after the start of breakfast. Breakfast was unpretentious but yummy. Cereal, yoghurt, fresh rolls, sliced meats and cheese, juice, and tea. I actually liked the grape juice, it wasn't as cloyingly sweet as it is in the US.
Everyone at the B&B communicates in English. The other guests are a nice middle-aged German-speaking couple and a somewhat younger couple with two small children. I didn't catch the second group's native language, but they appear to be from somewhere in Europe east of France.
While waiting for Jess to arrive, I checked mail and livejournal. Still have lots of trouble finding punctuation, and every attempt to type a ‘z’ or ‘y’ is a failure on my first — and often second — try.
Jess arrived a bit after 10. (This journal shall now revert to our usual "we/Jess/Jer" format.) While she had some tea, the proprietress' husband happily scribbled restaurants all over our map.
Thus prepared, we headed out to the supermarket for drinks and snacks, then to the metro to start our sightseeing. Unfortunately, we hadn't quite adjusted to Budapest's compactness and walked some way beyond our destination. Fortunately, we were just a few minutes' walk away. We walked back along the Danube (still not blue) to Spar supermarket. Mountain Dew in Hungary is packaged in a neon-yellow bottle that makes it look even more radioactive than it regularly. We spent some time examining the candy selection (those Hungarians have a real sweet tooth!) and the mineral water option (note: pink cap is still, blue is sparkling).
Having made our selection, we took the metro to Astoria and walked to the Great Synagogue, only to find it closed for the next two days. (We failed to account for Yom Kippur.) Undaunted, we set off for the Central KÁvéhÁz for lunch. The coffeehouse was lovely, with renovated art nouveau ceilings and antique mirrors. Jess had a delicious tomato salad and gnocchi with ewe cheese and bacon (tasty, but a bit heavy). Jer had a tomato, cucumber and dilled cabbage salad (the cukes were a bit disappointing and covered in sour cream, but the dilled cabbage was tasty), followed by catfish in a paprika (sweet pepper) cream sauce with pasta. Jess tried one of the house desserts, Central creamy coffee cake with marzipan. To her surprise, this was vanilla cake with chocolate cream and marzipan, topped with a coffee mousse! It was tasty, though very rich. Jer manfully assisted her in finishing it.
After lunch, we headed back toward the Chain Bridge, to tour the Buda Castle district. Along the way, Jess had a near-miss with very nice, apologetic bicyclist who endoed to avoid hitting her.
After Jess recovered, we continued without incident to the funicular up to the castle district. The view was excellent. We wandered around the Royal Palace grounds a bit before making our way along the narrow, cobblestoned streets to Matthias Church. It was spectacular — we spent an hour and a half wandering around, admiring the painted stonework, the brilliant stained glass and the replica of St. Stephen's crown. Once we finally tore ourselves away, we walked along the ramparts to the Fisherman's Bastion. It was built from white stone and ornately decorated, lovely but rather frothy and unbastionlike.
The castle district is home to a wide variety of museums, ranging from the Military History museum to the Telephone museum and the Pharmacy museum. It was a lovely day, and so we managed to avoid the museums. All but one, that is. Jer could not resist the siren call of the Marzipan museum. This two-room marvel is filled with paintings, dioramas, and sculptures all of marzipan. Notable were a set of embroidered couch cushions, replicas of Parliament and the Matthias Church, an enormous wedding cake, a Smurf diorama, and a trannie-looking Snow White with a subset of the seven dwarves.
After leaving behind the marzipan wonderland, we contemplated having tea and a snack, but were still full from our lipid-laden lunch. We wandered off to the labyrinth, but decided that our feet hurt too much for us to properly enjoy a long undergound stroll. We decided to go back to the marzipan cafe and have a restorative tea while we made plans for dinner. Unfortunately, the cafe was closing up by the time we got there. We sat under the Fisherman's Bastionand spent several minutes failing to decide where to go to dinner. We then took a short walk down many stairs to the B&B, where Jess typed at the journal and Jer drooled on his pillow.
Eventually, Jess nudged Jer back to consciousness, and we set off to find some dinner. We walked by a few restaurants, but none of them really appealed. We wound up at a pancake house our proprietor had recommended, which had dozens of options ("salty" — a/k/a savory - and sweet). It was very busy and we kept on bumping into people, but we eventually acquired an English menu and ordered. Mistakes were, it must be said, made. Mostly we failed to realize that 5dl was, in fact, 500ml. We walked out to an outside table with 5 "salty" pancakes and a litre of hot chocolate between us. Jer had one mushroom, one spinach and one Hungarian pork stew, while Jess had ham & mushroom and cheese (it was supposed to have dill, but that got missed). After a few minutes' wait, we got sweet pancakes (poppy for Jer, chestnut for Jess), which Jess had to order (very haltingly) in Hungarian, since the nice order-taking lady didn't really speak English. The poppy was good, and the chestnut was very good (and quite boozy). Stuffed, we waddled back to the B&B, and collapsed into bed at 10.