As our final days in Budapest approach, we are in need to get all of our Hungarian souvenir shopping finished. So today was filled with shopping. I (Anja) began my morning up on Castle Hill. Castle Hill, known as Várhegy in Hungarian, was first settled in the 13th century. There are shops, cafes, and historical buildings. These include, Buda Castle, Matthias Church, Fisherman's Bastion, and the Hungarian National Gallery. The views of Budapest, especially the Parliament, and the Danube are fantastic. After exploring Castle Hill, I made my way down to the Pest side of Budapest for some shopping. I went to a porcelain store called Herend. It is a Hungarian company founded in 1826 that specializes in hand-painted porcelain. It was really fun to look around. Some of the pieces were 1,000,000 forints! (About $4,490) Then I continued on to the souvenir shops, making purchases to bring home like everyone else!
I (Jessie) went shopping with some friends first down this one street (one that our tour guide from the first day told us was only for rich people) which featured lots of designer stores and widely known shops including the Hard Rock Cafe, a Rolex store, The NewYorker, and H&M which we all vowed not to go into on account of it being accessible to us at home. After picking up some knick-knacks, we moved on to a more exploratory stage. After a couple hit and misses, (getting off the tram finding nothing then getting back on) Natalie lead us to a giant underground mall that bore some resemblance at least to me to the Mall of America. There were five floors. We checked out each one except the fifth which apparently was just a giant movie theater. The first floor was part of a train station and me and Becca bought some really cool trendy European hats. I was very successful in buying myself lots of gifts and not so successful in buying any for my friends and family.... a good excuse to go back!
For dinner, almost all of us went to Cafe Vian. Some students we were missing took weekend trips to Germany or Slovakia. We had a great dinner and evening on our last Saturday in Budapest!
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