Today we’re on our own to wander about Budapest so we decided to hop on the bus and head up the hills on the Buda side of the city, we even got to take a little open sided shuttle all the way up the hills. Up at the top there’s a church called Matthias Church that is really tall and grand and the Buda Castle (but there’s lots of construction happening on the castle walls so we only got to see glimpses of it). We were still allowed to go to a place by the wall and get to look down the hills and see the whole city.
We also went to the Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum near the Buda castle. We learned that the mountainside under the castle is limestone and there are some caverns that were used to store food and other things before the 1900s, but then abandoned. At the beginning of WW2 the mayor of the city decided to use these caverns as a emergency hospital and bomb shelter as to was a secure place. After that the hospital space was modified to be a nuclear bunker, in the 1950s when there was threats of nuclear bombs when Hungarians revolted against Soviet rule.
It was an interesting display of what the hospital would have been like when it was operating and we saw examples of the equipment, technology and typical things that may have happened there with ‘dummies’ that looked so real that it was a bit creepy.
Our day ended in a more pleasant way by sailing along in front of the Budapest Parliament Building all lit up in the dark, quite a spectacular sight.
This building is one of the biggest parliamentary buildings in the world, and is the tallest building in Hungary at 96m, except the big church down the road.
Well Behaved Kids Travel 