Adam and Cat's Blog: March 2008

Friday, 21 March 2008 - Monday, 24 March 2008

We spent Easter in Budapest, and really enjoyed our time there, despite some inclement weather at times.

We stayed at the Art'Otel Budapest (http://www.artotel.de/budapest/budapest.html), on the Buda side of the Danube. The hotel was really nice and we had a great room that overlooked the Danube, with wonderful views across the river to the Parliament building.

Having checked into the hotel, we spent Friday afternoon at the Gellert thermal baths, which was quite an experience. The staff had fairly limited English - or at least a limited inclination to speak English - making it a bit difficult to work out where to get changed, where to leave our clothes, where to hire a towel, where to find the baths etc, but it was good fun, and we enjoyed our time there (despite the slightly gross concept of sharing a warm bath with about 100 people). We returned to the hotel that evening via Gellert Hill, which provided great views over the city. We finished the day with a really brilliant meal at a little French restaurant near the hotel, Le Jardin de Paris. Exceptionally good food and service.

We headed across the Szechenyi Chain Bridge on Saturday morning and spent the day in Pest. After an enormous breakfast at the most famous cafe in Budapest, Gerbeaud, we visited the House of Terror, a museum housed in the same building that served as the headquarters of the secret police, and which focuses on the atrocities committed by both Hungary's facist and Stalinist regimes. A pretty shocking place, particularly the prison cells in the basement of the building and the Perpetrators Gallery, with pictures of those who committed - or permitted to be commited - the various atrocities. We spent the afternoon visiting the Hungarian State Opera House and the hugely impressive Basilica of St Stephen, including the upstairs viewing platform. After checking out a market and sampling some traditional Hungarian delights, we made our way back to the hotel for a late-afternoon nap, before venturing out again that evening for dinner at a nearby pub.

We spent Sunday exploring Castle Hill, including Buda Castle and its underground labrynth of caves, Fishermen's Bastion and Matthias Church. All very impressive (though Matthias Church was unfortunately covered in scaffolding), and the sun came out, which really improved the views back down over the city. We returned to the hotel for another late-afternoon nap, before heading out for dinner at another nearby pub.

We spent Monday back in Pest, this time via the Margret Bridge. We visited the incredibly ornate Parliament building, a really interesting blend of neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque architectural styles. We also visited the Shoes on the Danube monument, one of the most moving monuments that either of us have seen - 60 pairs of old-style boots and shoes in cast iron, arranged in the spot where hundreds of Hungarian Jews were shot and thrown into the Danube by members of the Arrow Cross Party in 1944. Afterwards, we had some lunch at Gerbeaud, then spent the afternoon strolling through Pest for one last time. We returned to the hotel, collected our bags and made our way to the airport, and it was then a smooth trip back to Heathrow and home.

A great 4 days in another great European capital.

The view from our hotel room

The Szechenyi Chain Bridge

The Elizabeth Bridge

The Gellert thermal baths

Gellert Hill and the views back over the city

Breakfast at Gerbeaud

The House of Terror

The Hungarian State Opera House

The Basilica of St Stephen and the views back over the city

Cat and I at the Basilica of St Stephen

A market in Pest and Cat enjoying some Hungarian delicacies

The Danube

Castle Hill

Matthias Church (somewehere under the scaffolding)

Fishermen's Bastion

Cat at Fishermen's Bastion

The Parliament

The Shoes on the Danbube monument

Friday, 7 March 2008 - Monday, 10 March 2008

Together with our friends Elliot and Miriam, we flew out of Gatwick at 8.30pm on the Friday and arrived in Oslo just before midnight Norweigian time. We were quickly through passport control and after a very short taxi ride, we had checked into our airport hotel soon after midnight.

We were back at Oslo airport early on the Saturday morning, for an 8.25am flight to Tromso. After a spectacular 2 hour flight, we arrived in Tromso just before 10.30am. It was a really stunning day, with hardly a cloud in the sky. We were met at the airport by May-Tove Widding, who, together with her husband (who's name we were never sure of, so for the purposes of this post, I will call him "Massive Unit"), runs Widding Gard farm, a small farm just outside of Tromso. We spent the next couple of nights there, in a 2 bedroom cottage that they rent out to visitors. May-Tove drove us through Tromso, past the Mack Brewery (the world's northern most brewery), Tromso University (the world's northern most university) and the Arctic Ocean Cathedral (the world's northern most cathedral). As you can tell, there is a lot of "northern most" about Tromso. After stopping at a supermarket to stock up on provisions for the weekend, we arrived at the farm just before midday.

After some pizzas back in the cottage, we spent the afternoon playing in the snow and enjoying the views over the fjord, and then preparing a spot for a bonfire in the snow that night. Initially, that spot was going to be just a few metres from the cottage, but as I was in the process of shovelling snow from that spot, May-Tove politely informed me that I was hacking up their strawberry patch, and so we found another spot a bit further away from the cottage... and from the strawberry patch. We lit the bonfire around sunset, and it (together with some reindeer skin rugs that Massive Unit had found for us) kept us warm (well, at least stopped us from freezing) as we watched the sun set over the snow capped mountains across the fjord. Just beautiful. We spent a couple of hours by the bonfire, but decided to return to the warmth of our cottage when the winds really picked up (and when Elliot's and my feet started to freeze, after we had both managed to get our shoes wet). By this stage, the temperature had fallen to about -10 degrees, though May-Tove told us the next day, that with the wind chill factor, it was more like -25 degrees. We had some fajitas for dinner, and just as we finished those, the Northern Lights arrived, in all their splendour. Our camera is far too basic to capture the effect, but check out (http://www.destinasjontromso.no/english/useful_info_photo.html) if you're intereted in what they look like. I've read a few different explanations for them, but for what it's worth, our guidebook suggests that they are a metereological phenomena caused by a conflict between the Earth's magnetic field and solar winds around the poles. Apparently, the energy given off by this conflict creates charged particles that cause the gases in the atmosphere to glow, producing a beatiful and eerie display of light. I'm not sure about the scientific stuff, but I can definitely vouch for the fact that they produce a beatiful and eerie display of light. We spent the night in and out of the cottage, watching the ever changing light show.

We had a bit of a sleep-in on the Sunday morning, which was really nice. The day was a lot more windy and cloudy, so we didn't have to feel too guilty about staying indoors, although Elliot and I did venture out for a walk along the road on which the farm is located. Around midday, May-Tove and Massive Unit drove us out to a nearby frozen lake for some ice fishing. We spent a couple of hours there, walking on the ice, and doing some fishing through a hole that Massive Unit cut in the ice. Unfortunately, the fish weren't biting on our line, although other nearby fishermen had a lot more success. We returned to the cottage and warmed up with some lasagne for lunch, before heading out for some tobogganing in the late afternoon, which was a lot of fun (until I broke one of the toboggans... between the strawberry patch and the toboggans, Widding Gard is quite scarred by my visit). We remained in the cottage that night, and had some spaghetti bolognese and watched some bad Norweigan TV. Unfortunately, the cloud cover meant that there were no Northern Lights to be seen that night, but at least we had got a really good look at them the night before.

We were up very early on the Monday morning, and May-Tove drove us to the airport for our 6.55am flight back to Oslo. We arrived in Oslo shortly before 9.00am and after dumping our bags at the airport's left luggage facility, we caught the express train into the city. We spent the next few hours walking around the city centre, and visited the Royal Palace, the City Hall and the Akershus (a fortress looking over the bay). We then caught a train up to the Holmenkollen Jump Tower, which was the main arena for the 1952 Winter Olympic Games. There, we had some lunch and climbed to the top of the Jump Tower, which extends 60 metres above the ground. It is fair to say that we have a new found respect for ski jumpers. It was then back on the train into the city centre and a bit of a stroll through the shops, but when the rain intensified, we decided to return to the airport a little ahead of schedule. Our flight left on time at 6.50pm (4 on time flights in 4 days - Noweigian Airways is the way to go) and we touched down at Gatwick just before 8.00pm UK time, and were home just over an hour after that.

It was without doubt one of the best and most memorable weekends that we have had since arriving in the UK, and we're so grateful to Elliot and Miriam for suggesting it, and for being such great company.

The Arctic Ocean Cathedral