the last few days

Tomorrow morning I say goodbye to lovely Budapest and hello to Prague. I'm super jazzed about Prague because I've heard nothing but amazing things about the city, but first I wanted to share a few photo from the past few days.

I visited the Hungarian Parliament. It is one of the most incredible building I've ever been in.

Just look at this stained glass. Amazing! It was everywhere too! 

  A little blurry, but you get the point

 The tour took us to the grand staircase, the former house of lords lobby, the grand dome and the session hall. They didn't let us take pictures in the grand dome because the holy crown of Hungary is kept in there, but it was really something special. You should look it up! The picture below is from the session hall. Pretty spectacular! 

 

Budapest is also known for its coffee houses. There are 5 or 6 historic houses and a few of us ventured out to the oldest and most famous one, Gerbeaud. This is a beautiful macaroon tower. I bought a poppy seed blueberry mac to go. Yummy!  

 The lovely interior. I was a little bit obsessed with this ceiling. Love the green!

 My insanely rich and delicious chocolate cake!

 In between all of this eating and sightseeing, we did go on a few more company visits. One was to Raba- a Hungarian axle manufacturer. Raba used to make cars and was very famous for this super bus. I thought it was precious! Now they only make gigantic axles mostly for military and farming equipment. One of their biggest customers is John Deere and another is a US government contractor who makes tanks.

 Our next stop was to Zwack, the makers of a very famous Hungarian liquor, Unicum. The company is more than 200 years old and had a fascinating history that included interesting relationships with british and Austrian royalty, the facility being boomed, the owner's family being sent to concentration camps, another owner escaping Soviet occupation by hiding in a barrel with the secret recipe in his pocket. Crazy stuff. The liquor tasted like it could kill you, but it was a very interesting visit!

The have the world's largest collection of minis...

Their oldest barrel. Most of the barrels were destroyed by the soviets, but this one was so large, they couldn't move it. It was massive!

   Tonight we look at river cruise along the Danube at sunset. It was fun seeing all of my favorite building lit up at night.

Goodbye Budapest, it's been real!