Rainy day

It's rainy and in the high 30s in Budapest today, but I bundled up to take a look at some sites of special interest.

This is the Museum of Applied Arts designed by the Hungarian Art Nouveau architect Ödön Lechner. He designed Bratislava's Blue Church and a few other buildings there over a century ago. This is on Üllői út, just north of a stop on the #4/6 tram line.

Lechner designed this Post Office Savings Bank in 1901. It's located at Freedom Square, east of the U.S. Embassy. Between renovation on the ground level, traffic, trees, and rain, it was difficult to get a good shot, but you can get a sense of the intricate design here.

Another striking landmark is this Jewish Synagogue, the largest in Europe, designed in the mid-19th century by Ludwig Förster. Reportedly, it seats 6000 people. It's located just north of the National Museum, on Károly körút.

I also visited the Christmas Markets to see how they compared with those in Bratislava and Vienna. This is the biggest and nicest, located at Vörösmarty ter., at the north end of the pedestrian shopping area. The crafts and food were Hungarian, but the idea was essentially the same. Even on a chilly, rainy day, plenty of people were visiting. That huge modern building on the left houses the New Yorker clothing chain on the ground level and offices upstairs.

Those temporary Christmas booths are shoehorned into every available open space around the city, especially subway stops. This one is on a little side street just south of the Oktagon.

I found a post office opposite the National Museum to mail some postcards. As in Prague and Bratislava, they only take local currency, but they do provide currency exchange that is reliable and fair. (The Austrian post office takes credit cards.)

I didn't stop for coffee at the California Coffee Company on the west side of the Museum, and couldn't tell from the menu in front what was Californian about it.

I also didn't stop at any of the underground WC's, which are everywhere in this city for the truly desperate. I do see a lot of homeless street people here carrying around shopping bags, and I wonder if they use these as "apartments," as they do in Santa Monica. I'll let somebody else find out the answer to that question.

As for that National Museum, it was a huge disappointment. It was designed by Pollack, who designed the glorious Pest Concert Hall I saw yesterday. This seemed just a very pedestrian, unimaginative neoclassical monument.

Before I found the Museum, I saw this beautiful building on a side street to its southwest and thought this must have been designed by him. Unfortunately, I could not find any information about this at all.

In between all of this trooping around, I took another spin on the #6 tram -- a great way to rest your feet and absorb more of the city out of the rain. No ticket inspectors on the trams today, but teams of inspectors were waiting at almost every subway exit.

NOTE: Click on any image in this blog to see it full-size.