Other sites around Budapest

The Central Market is certainly worth a visit if you're ever in Budapest. This is a massive building (looks like a train station) filled with vendors selling mostly food. On the ground floor the vendors are set up in little cubes selling fresh produce...









...and various meat products.





Meantime, on the first floor (in America we'd call this the second floor, but that's how they do it in Europe), the vendors were selling prepared food. I had a very tasty turkey in paprika cream sauce for lunch. As you can see, the hall is packed with shopper and tourists, but believe me, many of those people are local Hungarians who do their shopping at the market each day.










Elsewhere, I toured the House of Terror. This isn't some amusement park fun house. Rather, it's a Hungarian museum dedicated to memorializing the past 70 years of oppression, first at the hands of the Nazi Germans, then from the Communist Soviets. It's a chilling display of the brutality realized under both regimes, and I read that it (understandably) is too difficult for many locals to enter. There are pictures of many of the execution victims at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets, and there are photos and names of many of the Hungarians who worked for these governments...some of them still living in Hungarian society. So, it's easy to understand how a place like this could trigger such emotion.

This picture symbolically captures the Hungarian uprising of 1956, in which a group of nationalists attempted to overthrow the Soviet dictatorship. For a matter of hours Hungary achieved independence as students and protesters took to the streets and the Parliament Building in Budapest. But, when Soviet tanks rolled into town, thousands were killed and the revolt was crushed. The phrase on the wall reads "Go Home Russians." The flag is that of Hungary at the time. In the center of the flag was a symbol of the communist regime. Protesters took to cutting these out and flying them as displayed.