Day 7: Echo!

The day began in Esztergom, where we again ate our delicious breakfast of Nutella and bread (best purchase of our lives!), then were off searching for adventure. The first order of business, as usual, was to do the most challenging thing. So we climbed up extremely steep and narrow stairs to get to the Esztergom Basilica on top of yet another Castle Hill. Yet again, this 1822 Neoclassical church is not the origional, which dated from the 12th century...the first church was destroyed by the Turks. Go figure.

The basilica was enormous. So obviously, the next step was to climb to the top of the cupola. By far, the best decision of the day. Not only were the views spectacular, but we also got a personal concert to demonstrate the acoustics inside the top of the cupola. The guard, who had to be 75 years old (how the heck did he get up those stairs every day?!?!?), lead us into a gated artea of the cupola, then ran around to the other side and sang, whistled, hummed, and clucked to demonstrate how near he sounded. It was incredible - although he was literally as far as he could be from us, he sounded like he was whispering into our ears. It was the coolest thing we've done so far.

After recovering from the winding steps, we walked back down the hill to the Christian museum, which houses 15th and 16th century masterpieces. Although neither of us love medieval art, we were blown away by the ingenuity of the pieces. It was amazing how different they all were, despite the fact that they were all telling the same story.

After a hamburger that tasted like salami, we gathered our 4-months worth of possessions, and took the train home to Budapest. We were greeted here by all the people that were missing from all the other cities...and then some!

We came back to our same hostel, and were enthusiastically greeted by the owner, who blabbed on for a bit about Croatia, then we dumped our stuff and had a quick dinner. The challenge of our evening came in trying to spend the last 275 HUF (roughly equivalent to $1.50). We wanted to a) get the most for our money and b) spend everything we had. All in all, it took us back to St. Stephan's Basilica, the Chain Bridge, and the lovely tram, before we ended up back in the neighborhood by our hostel with baklava. Unfortunately, we fell short of our goal as we have 25 HUF left.

Szia in Turkey!