Today, though, was awesome. We met with Julie and Laura at 1 at Oktagon, and then walked down Andrassy Blvd until we got to the House of Terror, a museum about communism in Hungary. We just happened to choose a day when students got in free, so we got to avoid the $7 admission charge (in case you haven't noticed, I've been approximately converting forints to dollars to make it clearer for you non-Hungarians reading this). The museum was set up very similarly to the Holocaust Museum in DC. We went up an elevator to the 2nd floor (technically, the 3rd), and began our visit there. Each room was dedicated to a different topic, and almost every room had an info sheet to give you some historical information. It was amazing. There was video footage, sound recordings, photos, artifacts, recreated rooms, actual furniture, interviews with people involved...unfortunately, much of this was in Hungarian, which was disappointing because I think we missed out on a lot of what the museum had to offer, but even so, it was still a great experience. There were two rooms filled with communist propaganda, a room with an antique car in it, a replica of the office of a communist leader, and a memorial at the end. The location of the museum actually was the site of a communist center at one time, where people were jailed, tortured, and/or hanged. There were example gallows and torture chambers and jail cells that we could see and sometimes even enter. There was one tiny space just big enough for one person to stand in, that presumably was some sort of isolation chamber. Photography was only allowed on one floor, but I did sneak out my camera at one point when there was no guard around to take a photo of the room about religion.
After the museum, we decided to go to Treehugger Dan's a nearby English bookstore established by an expat. As it is Sunday, it was closed, but a sign said that there was a second location near the Opera House that was open. We were hungry, so we stopped at a Burger King along the way. It was huge. There was a second floor with seating, and the decorations were cool. Europeans take their fast food seriously.
Finally making it to Treehugger Dan's, we spent about 15 minutes browsing until I finally caved and bought a Stephen King book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, because I absolutely love that book and because it was used and therefore not expensive. As we exited, we noticed a segway tour starting up, briefly considered doing that one day, and then changing our minds upon finding out that it costs over $50 per person. That's crazy.
We then noticed a gorgeous looking building down one of the nearby streets, so we turned to see what it was. It turned out to be St. Stephen's Basilica. We went in to see when tours would be held and ended up doing some unguided exploration in the parts that weren't roped off. It is the most beautiful church I have ever seen. Truly magnificent. On the way in, I'd seen a table advertising a concert of the Duna String Orchestra to be held there tonight, so I picked up a flier and asked how much tickets were. The $30 price would have been fine if I hadn't already gone through most of my budget for the week (they do weeks Monday-Sunday here), so we all decided to come back next Sunday night for the second date. I'm really excited, and I wish Emma could be here to go with me, because they're playing stuff like Vivaldi's The Four Seasons- Winter, parts of Mozart's Requiem, and Schubert's Ave Maria. As we left the area, I dropped 100 HUF (about 50 cents) into the violin case of a street musician.
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