The Buda and the Pest

Budapest is the lovely capital of Hungary and we expected it to rival the beauty of Prague in every way. Budapest is a combination of the twin cities of Buda (West of Danube) and the Pest (East of Danube). The Buda side is the hilly and scenic side whereas the Pest side hosts the museums and other historic monuments and the Andrássy út.

We stayed at the Hotel Buda. An old hotel with really friendly staff, nice views of the buda hills and great connections into the city by bus and tram. Having gotten off at the airport, we got a bit of a shock. It was as if we had stepped out of Europe and into a developing economy (which it is). The ghosts of the communist era are still very visible in Budapest. Old delapidated buildings, an ageing subway system that looks right out of an old 1950s war movie and busses with seats ripped out and grafitti all over them greet the visitors coming in to visit what is touted as one of the prettiest cities in Europe. I wasn't as surprised by this state of Budapest as I was by the fact that we didn't see any of this in Prague.

Don't get me wrong, as you would see from the pictures attached to this post, central Budapest is a very very beautiful city. Everything from the Buda castle perched up on a hill to the chain bridge and to the neo-gothic parliment building is simply breathtaking, even more so at night than during the day.














Central Budapest is much larger than central Prague. We spent the first evening walking around the Pest side of the river. We took the number 4 tram, the most used tram in the world, to get to the Octogon and walked into the city from there. We passed by the St Stephens Bassilica, the chain bridge and the famous New York Hotel facing the chain bridge and the castle and walked over the bridge to look at the magnificent neo-gothic parliament.

The second day was spent walking around the Andrássy út. Andrássy út is the most posh street in Budapest with amazingly large and beautiful houses flanking either side of this street. It runs on either side of the Octogon. One side leading to the river and the other leading the the Hősök tere (heroes square). It being a Sunday, the road was closed to Traffic and there was a very festive atmosphere around. Street art (accidental art), little shops, hungarian stage plays and dancers, musicians and the odd eccentric with his two huskies on a grass patch in the middle of the street:). Couldn't not take a picture of him now.





The rest of the day was spent pretty much taking the local trams and buses around town and spending some time just getting to know the city.





I also snapped up a couple of interesting pictures of the castle and Budapest historical skyline.

A tiny Pisa Firenze

Previous night's trip had made sure this wasn't going to be a relaxed holiday. We had gotten back from Venice at 8am and had to be on our train to Florence at 10am. That left us with just enough time to take a breather, shower, have breakfast and head on back to the station which we were sadly feeling home now. The train ride to Florence was 3 hours long and fairly uneventful. The train itself was a swanky new Eurostar, much better than the ones that run from London.

Upon reaching Florence, we immediately picked up tickets on the next available train to Pisa. Pisa is only an hour away from Florence and I hadn't come this far not to see the much talked about leaning tower. There isn't anything else to do in Pisa other than the leaning tower, so we figured a total round trip to Pisa of 3 hours should do fine. Having gotten to Pisa we took a local bus ticket. Anusha insisted that we buy just a 1 hour ticket since we will be back at that station by that time. Even the ticket clerk expressed his surprise as the express nature of the visit and reluctantly gave us a 1 hour ticket. Luckily for us, there was a bus just about to leave for the tower complex and we quickly boarded that. 10 minutes later, we were at the Piazza dei Miracoli "Square of Miracles". The piazza has four main buildings: the Duomo, the tower, the Camposanto monumentale ("monumental cemetery") and the Baptistery.

There and a bunch of shops and cafes. The tourists are totally set up here. I bet these places are twice as expensive as any other place in Pisa. For the next 20 minutes or so, we were happy snappers, clicking away some pictures of the tower: from the front, the back, the sides, everywhere, with us in the frame, without us in the frame and so on. Hey we were still better than about a hundred others there that were very eagerly shooting the famous leaning on the leaning tower or holding up the leaning tower position. I clicked one of Anusha with those folks in the background, just to capture the whole silliness of it.

I had heard mixed things from people who had been to the tower. Personally, I thought that the tower was much more impressive in real life than it is in the pictures. It is leaning a fair bit, some by design and some not. I do think its definitely worth a visit if you are in the area. Happy with the captured set of pictures, we grabbed a slice of pizza and some gelato and were back at that station within our ticket hour to catch our train back to Florence. We still had the whole of Florence to explore.

We were back in Florence by 4pm and walked into the tourist information center housed in this old historic building. Whatever happened to inviting people with a smile. Any tourist center we have been to in Europe with the exception of Milan and Stockholm have really grumpy people running it. They are no way helpful or nice. Rather I think they go out of their way to be mean to tourists. After a hiss and a grunt, she finally parted with a map. When asked what are some of the key places to visit given that we had limited time. She refused to help, pointing to the map and saying "It's on the map". After that very helpful conversation, we decided to follow the map and go to the nearest and what seemed like the top place to visit, florencja-fort-centrum kongresowe. The doors of the fort clearly said - NOT OPEN TO TOURISTS! Now this is the kind of information that is not on the map that I would expect a helpful person on a Tourist Information center to impart to tourists and we weren't the only ones there. A bunch of people walked away from those gates disappointed.

Not to be deterred, we continued on what was going to be our walk tour of Florence. The city center isn't huge and is very walkable. We walked by many of the sights, quaint streets, old houses, silly statues and piazzas and ended up on this street with an amazing view of the Duomo.

It looked as if someone had painted a huge stage background of the Duomo. The entire Duomo looks is very well painted and dressed up with modest gold paint in places. The small building right opposite the Duomo has a gold plated door with each of the gold plates being the canvas for amazingly detailed paintings.

The whole Duomo Piazza is a key attraction and opens up to the main shopping street with all the major name brands and nice little cafes. This is where Anusha had a plateful of the best pasta we've have ever tasted. It did Tuscany proud. We walked on further through some more narrow and beautiful streets, a small local produce market and ended up at the Palace square, where we sat and finished the rest of the pasta and took some pictures.

Our next stop was to walk to the famous bridge, the The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge), over the Arno river. This bridge is lined up with houses on either side and we didn't know that we were on the bridge until we got to the middle of it. Believe me, it looked much nicer from the inside than the outside. As per WikiPedia: "It is said that the economic concept of bankruptcy originated here: when a merchant could not pay his debts, the table on which he sold his wares (the "banco") was physically broken ("rotto") by soldiers, and this practice was called "bancorotto" (broken table; possibly it can come from "banca rotta" which means "broken bank"). Not having a table anymore, the merchant was not able to sell anything".

We took a different walk back to the station stopping by a local Italian live concert - where the guitarists were jamming, the drummer was on a roll and the singer was singing really well but just not together :-). Whenever the singer shut up, the music sounded really good.

Anusha was pretty full from the pasta earlier but I was still hungry. On our way back to the station through local streets we ran into a small Pakistani hole-in-the-wall type of place. Of course I walked in :). This is where all the Bangladeshi street hawkers seemed to hang out. I guessed the food was decent.I ordered a full-plate rice with Cabbage and Daal. Amazing quantity and quality for 4 Euros.

Before I knew it, we were back in the station in the ticket line. Seemed like most of our time on this trip was spent at one station or another. We watched a movie on the laptop on our train ride back and made our way back into Milan by 11pm. Tired from being in trains and stations in-between walking around in the cities, we retired for the night and were completely knocked out for the night.

Paradiso Venezia

Our trip to Venice started off uneventfully but wasn't going to end that way. Little did we know that when we started our day with the nicely filling breakfast at the Splendido. Finished with our breakfast, we walked over to the train station and made our way to the ticket counter to buy tickets for Florence for the day 3 of our trip. Our plan for day 2 was to take the 8am train out to Venice and get back to Milan on the 7:45pm train which reached Milan at about 11pm. We had about 20 minutes to board our trains, got to the ticket counter to our favorite ticket counter lady. The day before, we had established some great hand signals to ease communication since she spoke only Italian :-) She greeted us with a nice big smile and after a few hand signals (the nice ones), we walked having bought tickets for Florence for day 3.

We ran to the train and got into the first available seats that we liked since we weren't able to read what coach or seat numbers we were supposed to be at. After about 20 minutes of watching people pass by, we were evicted from our seats, told which ones we were supposed to be on and we made those seats our home for the next 3 hours. Along the way, we were joined by a group of older Irish women travelling around northern Italy for a week. We exchanged travel stories, their dated back since the 1960s. Made for a very interesting train journey into Venice.

It was yet another fantastic day. A warm 28C and sunny.

Getting out of the station in Venice, you are greeted by the glorious Grand Canal. we bought the 12 hour pass, really expensive at nearly 14 euros each. By the way, this was the only tourist information center that didn't have a free map and were selling a basic map for 2 euros.

Standing at the steps of the station, we were thinking how Venice really does look different. Its really amazing to visit a city that was built on marshy lands. Did you know that the city of Venice stretches across 118 small islands, has about 150 canals and 400 odd bridges. We were fortunate enough to visit 3 or 4 of the islands and some countless bridges and canals on this trip.

You have to take the ferry into the city or you can walk. Since we had the pass, we took the main vaporetti (water bus) to the Piazza San Marco and passed some along amazing sights along the water: Beautiful old buildings, Gondolas, other water buses, water taxis running crisis crossing the canals etc.
Piazza San Marco was bustling with tourists. Actually more like splitting at its seams. Any more people and there would have been some falling into the canals. The Piazza is the only on in Venice. All the rest of them are called campi. This is the heart of Venice and has been around since the 9th century. It is lined with state buildings and St Mark Bassilica. We started walking into the city. Small streets lined with restaurants and shops and thousands of people pouring out of every one of the narrow streets. I didn't think the islands could host as many people as it does.

Although there is a map, its not of much use. The really tiny streets aren't even on the map. The only way to really find Venice is to get lost in Venice and we did exactly that. Walked on through streets that had no names, over bridges and by the canals, in and out the various campi. We grabbed food as we walked from one of the many local shops and stopped by a fresh juice store. The guy running the store had been to India 6 times: everywhere from Dharamshala to Gokarna to Kerala. We had a nice long conversation with the dude and fantastic smoothies. Finally he showed us on a map where we were and then found our way back to the Ponte di Rialto (Rialto bridge).

Rialto bridge is the oldest of the four bridges over the Grand Canal and is the beginning of the Rialto Market. Its a bustling part of Venice and definitely an important stop over. Important tip to remember is that the prices in the street shops in Rialto are a decent bit cheaper than most other places in Venice. After a little bit of shopping to buy an Asterix & Obelix made in Murano glass, and a handbag for Anusha, we got back on the ferry to visit some of the other islands. We decided to take the waterbus to Lido island and got some really nice pictures along the way.

History lesson: Murano is a small island just off the main venice island. Earlier all the glass factories used to be on the Venice island and since most of the houses were made of wood, the then rules of venice decided it wasn't safe to have the factories on the same island as the city. So he setup this Murano Island and moved all the glass factories there. However, the factories are not the best place to buy Murano glass. People say its about 2-300% more expensive on the island. Go figure.

We had a bit of something to eat in Lido by the water and then set out on the next bit of our journey. The agenda was to take a road-bus to just go around Lido and were we in for a surprise. The bus ran the length of the island and then got on to a ferry and ended up driving all the way across another island to a small village of Pallistrina. A good chunk of Lido and Pallistrina is all beaches. I am sure it would have been completely packed, had it been a weekend. Of course Anusha must have been a fish in her previous life. The moment she sees water, she hits a level of joy that is seldom seen. We were at a beach and Anusha wanted in. We spent about an hour just walking along the beach. Well in all the excitement of the islands and the beach, we forgot to keep an eye on the time. We were pretty far away from the station in Venice and had to catch the 7:45pm train.

Then the panic began. We had to wait for 20 minutes at the stop to get the next bus that went over the ferry and then took the ferry from Lido back to Venice only to miss our train by 10 minutes. When we went to the ticket counter to get the next train, we found out that the 7:45pm was the last direct train to Milan. We thought of just staying over in venice for the night, but then we had the train to Florence the next morning. We simply had to get back that night.

After about 15 minutes of contemplating and discussions with the Railway assistance folks, we finally booked ourselves on the 11:30pm train which got to Bologna a2 2:30am and then take a connecting train from Bologna to Milan at 4:30am which would end up in Milan at 7:30am. We bought the new ticket and also pushed our train for the next morning back by a couple of hours to 10am.

Things turned for the better after this though. We met two of the nicest people in Venice. One was working the front desk of a hotel by the station. He not only showed us our way to the only Indian restaurant in Venice, but also called them to make sure they were open and made a reservation for us. He talked to us about Venice, its history etc. A really nice conversation.

We made our way to the Indian Restaurant, where we were greeted by this guy from Delhi who was running this restaurant for an Italian lady. The food was great and also he explained to us how Venice really works. About the fact that everything has to come from outside of Venice since there is nothing really in Venice. How the cost structure affects the people who actually live there and how there is a Venice for residents and a Venice for Tourists. Just an example is that the ferry ride that cost us nearly 7 euro would cost a resident 1 Euro.

After the meal and some walking around the streets, we made our way back to the station to start our night journey back to Milan. The night trains in Italy are very much like the Trains in India. The coaches can be compared to the first class AC coaches on a Rajdhani just that the seating structure within the cabin is a bit different. Instead of 4 berths, the cabin has 6 seats , 3 on either side, that would recline and join in the middle to form sleepers. Here we met our third nice guy for the night and we spent the first hour talking about the economic differences in the rich North Italy vs the poorer South Italy. The two hour layover spent in the waiting room in Bologna was painful and the follow on train journey on a very packed train with no reserved seats, even more so. But we managed to find two seats to sit and snoozed lightly while sitting.

We finally made it to Milan at about 8am. Lucklily our hotel was just around the corner from the station. We checked back into our room, quickly showered and had breakfast and got ready for our next train ride, our journey to Florence and Pisa.

Gucci’d and Pucci’d in Milan

Our last trip to Italy was all about Rome. Rome had more than enough to keep even us, an attention-span challenged couple, interested for three days and we still came back wanting more of Italy, its wonderful pizzas, gelatos and people. At one point Anusha and I were debating taking a 2-week backpacking trip though the boot-shaped country, starting off at Milan and making our way through Venice, Florence, Pisa, Napoli and then onto Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. I know that would have been a wonderful trip but schedule clashes and the impending move to the US made that trip impossible. Not willing to give up completely on our Italian dreams, we decided on 4 days based out of Milan but with day trips to Venice, Pisa and Florence.

We landed at the Milan Linate airport around 10 in the morning. Milan Linate airport is probably has the smallest arrival lounge I have seen in a big city in Europe. The old Bangalore airport was bigger. What is keeping this airport ticking is that its only 7 Kms from the city centre. Talking to people I gathered that it is probably looking at either a major facelift or the same fate as the old Bangalore airport as the new Malpensa airport (56 Kms from Milan) is the bigger airport for Milan and has better connections to different parts of the city.

As usual, we found the best public transport means to our hotel. We had to take a bus to the city centre and then either walk or take any of the other means of public transport to get to our destination. As with any other major European city, Milan has a good public transport network consisting of three Metro lines, plenty of Trams and busses. The bus dropped us off in the city centre and we had our first glimpse of the magnificent Duomo. I will tell you more about the Duomo a little later.

I was a bit suspicious of our hotel in Milan. It’s name, Splendido, sounded more like a Spanish underwear brand than a hotel and didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence. It had decent reviews and was supposed to be right next to the central station making our day trips easier, so I picked it. True to the reviews, the hotel was about 100 feet from the central station, has a fancy reception area and very nice and decent sized rooms. The only complaint I have with the hotel, as with the ones in Vienna and Dusseldorf, the AC does not cool! We were early and had to putz around the station square for about an hour eating, watching the pigeons and people before our room was ready for check in. Taking these early morning flights isn’t a time saver really since we end up crashing at the hotel for a couple of hours recovering before we head out in the city. By the time, we made it back into the city centre, it was 4pm.

The magnificent Duomo greets you as you get out of Duomo metro station. It’s a gothic style cathedral made from what looked like White Marble. This whiteness gives is a very distinct look unlike any other cathedral we had seen before. Like with most things, it’s true image cannot really be captured by a camera. It has to be seen in person to get the full appreciation of its beauty.





Beside the Duomo is the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The GVE is the one of the top shopping arcade of Milan where big name brands such as Prada, Gucci, Pucci, expensive restaurants and McDonalds have learned to coexist peacefully. The Duomo Square was extremely lively and we walked through north from the side of the Duomo through the shops and restaurants and out to the Piazza.

The next stop was the castle (more like a fort). This 800 year old structure has been built and rebuilt multiple times by generations as with the case with any other castle. However, unlike the Prague castle, this one isn’t glamorous at all. It’s a dull red brick building and we even passed by one of the walls in the tram earlier without really noticing it and had to come back to see it. Although our first impressions of this castle weren’t great, it started to work its magic on us as we walked into and around it.







What we needed was to understand the past to bring the present into perspective. This old map of Milan depicting the old city walls and the castle hammered the point home for us. We spent the next hour of so sitting around the castle park people watching.

Exploring the non-touristy parts of Milan was the next item on the agenda for the evening. We transferred a couple trams and took them to the end of the line watching the city unfold from within the tram. We decided to take a bus back so that we take a different route. We looked for a bus which travelled to the Centrale FS. Just to give you some context, we took the bus from the east end of the city and had to get to the north-central part of Milan. A journey of about about 7-8 Kms, 30 minutes max, according to the map or at least so we thought. Shortly after we left, the bus left the map and I could no longer follow where it was headed. We travelled for about an hour and still we were in untraceable territory. Directions for the San Siro appeared and disappeared. That’s what got me thinking, the San Siro is in the West of the city and we weren’t supposed to be West. We finally managed to trace what the bus was doing. We were on one of the city orbitals. We had gone South and then West and now were finally heading North. We were never really off the map, I was just looking in the wrong direction. A little over an hour and a half after we had left, we got off at our stop. Since it was an orbital, had we taken the same bus number one from the other side of the road we would have made our stop in 20 minutes or so, but then we wouldn’t have been able to see the parts of Milan that we did.

There was one episode still left in this chapter. Anusha was absolutely famished after this unplanned journey all around Milan. We got into a local Pizzeria and ordered a Pizza with cheese, onion, tomato, olives and anchovies. Yeah yeah, I know Anchovies is fish. I confused anchovies with artichokes. We asked them if we could change the order but they had already made the pizza. We ended up ordering some pasta and having that instead and paying for the whole lot anyway and also a hidden cover charge. This is one thing to look out for when eating at local joints in Northern Italy. Find out upfront if there is a cover charge. Most places have a cover charge of anywhere between 3-5 Euros on eating in.

I was somehow expecting more from the Fashion capital of the world. The dressing sense for most Milanos seemed either too sleazy or too trashy, maybe because it was a Sunday? The town and the people seemed very unwelcome and cold. I guess there is more in common with Paris than just the craze for fashion. We do have a day during the week as well. Maybe we will feel different about Milan by the end of it?

Anyway, having learned a couple of lessons for the day, we turned in tired and weary. We had to be up at 6am the next day to make our 7:30am train to Venice.