hungary: visegrad and szentendre

one of the many reasons i like hungary is the possibility to stay in one city or town for a while, and do day trips to nearby towns...it's really nice not to have to pack up every day or two...i used budapest as my base for this entire trip, as it is easy to get to a number of nearby towns, yay!
remembering what i'd learned the day before about the necessary bus stop i got up around the same time, and out the door the same time, but this time got to the bus stop a good thirty minutes earlier...for whateva reason, i don't think i got to a town any earlier, but that's beside the point.

visegrad is another small town on one side of the danube river...the bus stopped quite regularly along it's route, i was never very sure which stop was the main one for visegrad...(even at the end of the walk around town i still didn't know)...
according to lonely planet, visegrad has the most history of the towns in the area, but very little of it is still visible...it's heyday was during the renaissance...its hard to believe the town used to be quite powerful, and used to control a sizeable area of the country...
i am sure that the stop where i got off wasn't the 'main' stop...i'm not sure what prompted me to hop off the bus there, but i did...thankfully i like walking, so it wasn't a big deal to walk a ways down the highway to get to something...

i found a tiny chapel on the river side of the highway, a very cute exterior...unfortunately it wasn't open...triposo tells me this is a roman catholic chapel, named after mary...built in the 18th and 19th centuries...
i managed to find the tourist information office; the man on duty was one of the rudest information people i've ever met...i walked in, he immediately asked 'what do you want?'...given that this was the information office, i would've thought that was obvious...he gave me a map, without pointing out any landmarks on the map, then told me i should go outside if i wanted to look at it more closely...i didn't feel at all as though he wanted to help me see the town...

the lonely planet guidebook mentions very few places to see in visegrad, the first of which is a palace...(triposo and tripadvisor don't even mention this palace)...only it isn't a real palace...well, it is, but it isn't, at the same time...
according to lonely planet, the palace once had 350 rooms...what exists now is nearly all a reconstruction, and even then it has only been partly reconstructed...i didn't like it at all...the reconstruction looks new, and the actual remains of what used to be don't make much sense at all...you get to see about 12 partly reconstructed rooms, i didn't feel as though i was seeing anything interesting
the gardens are nice, and i hope were much more extensive at one point in time...
i bought a few postcards on my way down the street after the palace, the
my next sight was a church...the front doors were open, but i wasn't able to go into the church past the front doors...there was an inner gate of sorts...too bad, as i would've enjoyed a few moments of quiet reflection...

what i could tell is that the central aisle had a carpet of flowers.  they were beautiful designed, i loved it. the pattern went all the way down the aisle, absolutely lovely. i'm assuming visitors were blocked from entering the church in order to keep the flower design looking awesome
i next found the beginning of the path that took me on a nice hike to the remains of the fortress overlooking the entire area...it was a nice hike...as i got to the fortress, i also found the parking lot, where it seemed most people started their visit to the fortress...the parking lot was surrounded by tourist stalls, none of which sold anything that interested me...

the fortress had a couple options for an entry fee, i opted for the one excluding the wax room...i didn't need to see wax representations of anything...each room in the fortress had an exhibit about one aspect of the history of the area...very well done, much more so than the palace i'd already seen...
perhaps the best part of the fortress was the ability to look out over the entire area...fantastic views...if there was a bridge to cross over to slovakia, i would've explored a couple of the small towns on the other side of the river :)
i wasn't able to find the path going down from the fortress, so i ended up going down the same way i came up...i didn't mind, since it was still pretty...

as i got back into town, i found the closest bus stop on the highway...i got lucky, and a bus came along within 10 minutes. yay!!
i got off the bus in szentendre...go figure, i hopped off at yet another stop that wasn't the right stop to get to where i wanted to be...i ended up wandering, and purely by luck ended up in the town center, the cute area of the town...
szentendre used to be ruled over by visegrad, but doesn't have a lot of history itself...it's now mostly an artists colony popular with tourists...there is a small central platz, with a memorial cross in the middle...

streets stretch out in several directions from this central area, all filled with shops and restaurants for tourists...i couldn't help but wonder where locals eat, because i'm pretty sure they wouldn't pay the prices these restaurants were charging...the shops had all sorts of kitchy stuff, none of which interested me...(except postcards of course, and i saw those in less than half the shops)...if i'd had the room in my tummy, i would've bought ice cream at the various shops, just to see which place had the best...hee hee hee...i exercised some willpower and only had one cone...with two scoops of course...
the one sight i enjoyed was the serbian orthodox church and museum on top of the hill in the middle of town...the church was quite small, but i was the only one in there at the time, so it was quiet and comfortable...the iconostasis was beautiful...
the museum was full of religious art...the signage was fantastic, in both hungarian and english...it was only two large rooms, but i really liked both of them...if art interested me more than it does, i would've enjoyed it even more...

also on top of the hill was a church dedicated to st john the baptist...again i got lucky with being the only person in there during my visit; it felt welcoming and comfortable...(i couldn't help but wonder if all the tourists down in the center platz saw anything on the hill)
there wasn't anything else to see in szentendre, so i wandered through the back streets to find the same bus stop at which i'd gotten off the bus when i arrived in town...not too long afterward, i arrived back in budapest :)