Euro Trip Day 30: In which we get yelled at by an old lady on the bus, go to a Latin mass, get kicked off the subway, and end up at an apparently fascist rally

Ok, I’m a day late posting this. So sue me.  My excuse is the world’s.WORST.upload.speed.EVAR. Even my cell phone camera pics are going slowly, and the ones from inside the sanctuary are my big camera. I did get this post at least STARTED on Sunday, though. :-p

Yesterday we got up and took a metro to a bus to the top of Buda Hill, where we went to Matyas Church to go to their 10AM Latin high mass. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve never been to a Latin mass, and it sounded interesting. Besides, I figured I’d understand it better than a Hungarian service. :-p

On the bus on the way there, for some reason, a well-dressed older lady (I’d say mid-70s at least) started yelling at me for no apparent reason. I have no idea what she was scolding me about, as she was speaking Hungarian, but she was quite irate, and went on for a couple of minutes until we got off the bus. She got off at the same stop as we did, so I worried for a minute that maybe she was going to church too, given her nice attire. Thankfully, she walked a different direction. So I was kind of surprised when the service started and I realized she was two pews in front of us… Go figure.

Anyway, this following video doesn’t have video, just sound — it’s the choir doing part of the service. I didn’t want to be obvious about recording, and I really did just want the audio, so hit play for a bit of soundtrack and keep reading the post. :-)

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Standing in the back and looking forward.

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This door is actually not centered on this wall, so to make it less obvious, they painted the angels on each side. Look closely at it.

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I LOVE the quality of this picture. Not bad for handheld at 1/8 of a second and f/4. :-)

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Altar view. The balcony on the left is the former royal box. Oh, this was the church where all of the coronations took place. Neat!

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If I had to rank my all-time favorite churches I’ve seen, I think Westminster Abbey in London would be first, then St. Mark’s in Venice, then this one. Seriously. Fourth would be the Duomo in Milan, incidentally… this even comes in ahead of that. I’m not sure why I like it so much. I mean, it’s obvious I prefer gothic churches, but there’s something about the first couple and then this one that I really, really like. I know all of them have been extensively restored, but to me it’s not as obvious as some other churches I’ve been in… so maybe that’s it.

Outside of the church. Ignore the scaffolding -- they're doing restoration on the church.

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After church, we stopped for a bite to eat, then we went wandering on Castle Hill. We walked down the hill to the river, then took the funicular back up. Have I mentioned it was a gorgeous day out? Because it was. A tad warm, but not unbearable.

Danube River and Parliament.

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Hungarian Parliament.

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At the top of the hill, we headed toward Buda Castle (which is no longer an actual castle, as the Communists stripped it of anything cool and castle-like. It’s now three different museums.) On the way we saw several groups of kids scattered around, playing musical instruments. I’m thinking it was for a class or part of their music lessons or something. They were quite good! There was actually a string triplet (violin, viola, and cello) that I kept trying to get a video of, but we ran into them three different times, and they were always in the middle of what seemed to be their last piece before packing up and moving to a new location when I’d get to them. By the third time this happened, John thought it was hilarious.

Again, the video is kind of lousy, but just hit play and scroll down the page. At least both are short… they’re fun though! I really enjoyed listening to the kids. Ignore my sniffles — there’s something here in the air that’s causing both John’s and my allergies to flare up.

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Anyway, we ended up at the Budapest History Museum, where they had a bunch of stuff  from Budapest from prehistoric times to now. Very interesting stuff. And since it’s built into the castle, some areas are obviously old and castle-y. Neat!

It's either Han Solo in carbonite, or a 14th century knight's tomb. I'll let you be the judge.

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Stained glass window, with the castle wall beyond.

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Reflection in a castle courtyard window.

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After this, we headed back to our neck of the woods… only to be kicked off the metro for some unexplained reason several stops before home. We headed up to the surface to see if we could walk to the next stop, when we saw literally HUNDREDS of riot police in full gear (face masks, shoulder pads, shields, giant Halo-esque helmets. Much to John’s dismay, I insisted on crossing the (very large) street to see what was going on (hey, I like a good unexpected rally again and again…)

But this wasn’t a good rally. I took a few pictures with my other camera, but we both got a really really creepy vibe pretty quickly (despite the fact that everything was in Hungarian) so we left. After we got home, I Googled the name of the organization that was on the flags, and it’s an organization that Wikipedia describes as being extremely right-wing, fascist, and fairly racist. Ummm, WHOOPS. Yeah, glad we left that one. It’s not going to stop me from running toward every large crowd gathering I see — hey, stuff like that is interesting! but I understand why they had the riot police out like they did.

We walked multiple blocks until we found an open Metro station (we got turned away from a couple) but by the time we got there, our tickets had expired. GRRR. So we stopped for ice cream then bought new tickets to complete our journey home.

Oh! I have to mention the metro line near where we were staying — Line 1, AKA the yellow line, AKA the Millennium Line. It was built in 1896 (the same time as Heroes’ Square) for the Millennium Exhibition, which was World’s Fair type of event to celebrate 1000 years since the first Magyar tribes (Hungarians call themselves Magyars) settled in the Budapest basin. The subway hasn’t been updated since then, so it looks more or less like I would think a New York subway would have looked in 1896 — wooden ticket booths and paneling on the wall, white subway tile, cast iron painted support beams… I love it. So neat!

Oktagon station.

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And that was it for our Fourth of July. :-)

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