We made it up in time for breakfast on the Monday and it was very nice: we sat in the conservatory part of the breakfast room and the buffet selection was good. Unbelievably full yet again, we went up to the Royal Palace on the Funicular (near the Buda side of the Chain Bridge). The Funicular was more fun that the Royal Palace – which was a lot less impressive up close than it had been by night from near the river.
We walked around the top of the Buda hill to the Mattias church, which was far more impressive but crowded. We had heard good things about Ruszwurm’s cafe nearby so that was next on our list of places to go: the cake selection was very good (as we had heard) but the drinks were a big let down – John’s iced tea was more like weak Ribena and by mistake my milkshake was coffee flavoured – bleh!
It was past midday now and the sun was beating down so we wanted to do something out of the sun – and with perfect timing, we stumbled upon the Buda Castle Labyrinths. This cool (in both senses) series of tunnels stretch under the whole of the castle district and were sometimes a little scary and other times far too cheesy. More history about the caves and less pantomime would have been better.
After that respite from the heat, we couldn’t face being in the hot sun again so we headed back down the hill to the hotel. However, we got diverted by a Belgian brassiere a couple of buildings down from the hotel and decided to have a light lunch and drinks there. John was woosy after a couple of glasses of beer (the lightweight) so he went up to the hotel room and had a snooze, while I went on the internet.
Later on, we headed back over Chain Bridge to Pest again to find a Syrian/Middle Eastern restaurant, Al Amir, that we had heard good things about it. While there were no veggie main meals as promised, we made do with a tapas-style selection of starters – it was all very nice and it cements our love of the falafel.
Since that was in a part of the city we hadn’t been to before, we wandered around there for a while and found ourselves at the Tree of Life and the Great Synagogue – which was truly great in my opinion, because it had a collection of black cats and kittens living in its grounds! After I spent far too long admiring the felines, we went to Spaghetti Ice on Andrassy for a late pasta-shaped ice cream (I had canneloni; John just had a sundae) then we took a last night time stroll over the Chain Bridge back to the hotel.
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