After our day in Budapest, we went back to our hotel to rest up a bit. After all, we had been out and walking for 6 hours. G had a nap for an hour and I did the blog stuff.
Later at around 6:00 we left again without any purses or stuff to carry because it was too hot. Also we try to spend a part of our day not taking pictures so that we can just live in the moment like real people so no pictures of our evening. Sorry. We later found out that the temps for today were 38 and 45 with humidity. We were also looking quite normal in so little clothes, no hats and bags that we almost looked Hungarian. (that's a stretch, I know but go with it) We walked towards the tunnel just before the bridge and went through it to end up on the Buda bank. Because today is a huge celebration, there were more than the normal amounts of huts and artisans lining the road up the bank but, usually it costs 7€ to enter. I went up to ask the fellow and he told me that at 7 everything was free.
So G and I started walking along the bank and began to work our way up to the castle and the huts. We got lost, of course, but after some returns, I call them returns cause you usually have to go back to somewhere you've already been, we finally found the top platform up on the castle where all the huts started. We got a Hungarian beer and walked around enjoying the culture. We were really two of four English people there as our tour mates chose to go for a Hungarian meal and music.
Finally after walking around we decided that we had to go down the hill to eat. G always sends me to ask the questions because he says that "pretty" gets more responses than "old and a man" but really I think it's just that I use so much body language that everyone understands me. So I went to ask the police how to get down the hill to the bank and he says to me "I speak German." Well then I had to haul G over and talk to him. Funny thing was that he really didn't speak German and told us to go a certain way and, knowing better what we wanted, we ignored him totally and did our own thing - as usual. We found the perfect way down and started our trek heading downwards towards the bank again, because real people have to eat. I kept asking people all the way down, actually there were 200 000 people on our bank alone and so I talked to about 1/2 of them I swear.
They told me after some acting lessons that there would be fireworks to end the St. Stephan's day festivities at 9. So we hurried into a pub to have some good ole goulash soup, famous here, and a some more Hungarian beer, also famous here. Well, when we asked for both the waiter looked at us as if we were stupid, and I'm sure we did look like it but still, he responds "This is Belgium restaurant!" And so goes our life story,,, but what an interesting story. We had soup and beer, Belgian style, and with the first crack of noise, we, or rather I - leaving G to pay the bill, ran out into the street - really I had to swipe David some beer coasters first.
Now after all that preamble comes the main part of my text. We saw the absolute best fire work show in our lives. All three bridges were closed and each of the two outer bridges had a show and in the middle the show was set off on a barge in the river.
The entire show was coordinated and synchronized where each set was done at the exact same time, burst at exactly the same time and because we were in the middle area and had a set on either side of us, our peripheral sights made it feel as if the works were wrapping around us.
Every so often they would throw up sets of red, white and green circles or works - the colours of their flag. The blasts were so big and there was no wind that things hung in the sky forever and because we were right down low on the Buda bank, we felt so small underneath falling stars.
There was a momentous blast that burst into a star and then let out long fingers of strings which then let out little bursts of trailing fingers and these fingers burned and fell for a long time. It was like watching my spider plants grow and move in time-lapsed photography. Then another set of 1000 pure white dots were sent up which then burst into pinpricks of popcorn and hung there as if we could reach them to eat.
30 minutes of pure delight and it could only ever be bested by showing the same show but only done with music. I don't need pictures to remember this evening because only the birth of my two kids are more burned into my memory.
Wow, what an evening.
