It was back off to visit the non-Palace-related parts of the Castle District. I don't know if there was anything terribly important to report here. For the most part I just strolled around and looked at buildings and stuff. I had wanted to see the
statue of the Holy Trinity (a plague pillar, built to celebrate the end of the plague) next to Matthias Church but it was being completely reconstructed so that was a no go. I did get to see a number of statues, including an equestrian one of
András Hadik best known for the fact that students are known to give the horse's testicles a shine for good luck before exams, resulting in them being much shinier than the rest of the statue. I also visited the much-touted
Buda Castle Labyrinth which turned out to be an
overpriced piece of junk. I saw the Mary Magdalene Tower as well as the tomb of Pasha
Abdi Arnaut Abdurrahman, the last Turkish Grand Vizier of
Buda. After scouting out some other buildings (and seeing a strange street seemed to imply that one was not allowed to walk him
grnadchild across the street), I headed back to the
Corvinus Gate and took a trip down the
Sikló, which is a funicular
railway that runs from
Buda Castle down to Adam Clark Square.
I hopped on the
HÉV line going north to visit the
Acquincum ruins, the largest site of Roman ruins in Budapest as far as I know. It was pretty quiet here, with only a handful of other people around. Apparently ruins are not as big of an attraction as
Buda Castle, although part of it was the fact that they were kind of out of the way. It took quite an imagination to think about what things looked back in the day, but there were a few identifiable structures and a lot of maps. The
Aquincum Museum occupied a small building, with most of the displays of stone carvings on the outside. Inside were the small blocks of
mosaics as well as the usual assortment of tools and armor and stuff.
At this point my throat was pretty parched so I decided to eschew the long hike south and hopped back on the
HÉV and headed south the Margaret Bridge Station where I planned to cross the Danube and come down on the Pest side and take some close up pictures of the
Hungarian Parliament building, the most
amazingest building in the whole world. Seriously I could just stare at the building all day. The tours are all around midday so there was no getting in but as you know if you've looked at
Facebook I spared no expense taking a million shots of the building. The Parliament is very large so it is hard to get a great shot of it with a better angle and camera but I did my best people.
I took the one of the left, but below I have attached one I found on the web below. Tonight there was some cheesy looking movie festival that was taking place in front of the Parliament which looked to me like the Hungarian equivalent of
Telemundo. Anyway I let you go with that, you'll be hearing a lot more about my adventures trying to get into a tour of the building later.
It was getting fairly late to visit anything else so I took a winding path homeward. I passed a monument to
Imre Nagy, a reformist Communist Prime Minister executed for his role in the
1956 Uprising. Then I passed the Soviet War Memorial (one of the few left standing in the city), the Contra
Aquincum ruins, and a bunch of other statues. I think the one I liked best (possibly because I had to go quite out of the way to find it was the aforementioned
Shoes on the Danube memorial to the Jews killed by the Arrow Cross Party.
It was back off to visit the non-Palace-related parts of the Castle District. I don't know if there was anything terribly important to report here. For the most part I just strolled around and looked at buildings and stuff. I had wanted to see the statue of the Holy Trinity (a plague pillar, built to celebrate the end of the plague) next to Matthias Church but it was being completely reconstructed so that was a no go. I did get to see a number of statues, including an equestrian one of András Hadik best known for the fact that students are known to give the horse's testicles a shine for good luck before exams, resulting in them being much shinier than the rest of the statue. I also visited the much-touted Buda Castle Labyrinth which turned out to be an 
overpriced piece of junk. I saw the Mary Magdalene Tower as well as the tomb of Pasha Abdi Arnaut Abdurrahman, the last Turkish Grand Vizier of Buda. After scouting out some other buildings (and seeing a strange street seemed to imply that one was not allowed to walk him grnadchild across the street), I headed back to the Corvinus Gate and took a trip down the Sikló, which is a funicular railway that runs from Buda Castle down to Adam Clark Square.
I hopped on the HÉV line going north to visit the Acquincum ruins, the largest site of Roman ruins in Budapest as far as I know. It was pretty quiet here, with only a handful of other people around. Apparently ruins are not as big of an attraction as Buda Castle, although part of it was the fact that they were kind of out of the way. It took quite an imagination to think about what things looked back in the day, but there were a few identifiable structures and a lot of maps. The Aquincum Museum occupied a small building, with most of the displays of stone carvings on the outside. Inside were the small blocks of mosaics as well as the usual assortment of tools and armor and stuff.
At this point my throat was pretty parched so I decided to eschew the long hike south and hopped back on the HÉV and headed south the Margaret Bridge Station where I planned to cross the Danube and come down on the Pest side and take some close up pictures of the Hungarian Parliament building, the most amazingest building in the whole world. Seriously I could just stare at the building all day. The tours are all around midday so there was no getting in but as you know if you've looked at Facebook I spared no expense taking a million shots of the building. The Parliament is very large so it is hard to get a great shot of it with a better angle and camera but I did my best people. 
I took the one of the left, but below I have attached one I found on the web below. Tonight there was some cheesy looking movie festival that was taking place in front of the Parliament which looked to me like the Hungarian equivalent of Telemundo. Anyway I let you go with that, you'll be hearing a lot more about my adventures trying to get into a tour of the building later.
It was getting fairly late to visit anything else so I took a winding path homeward. I passed a monument to Imre Nagy, a reformist Communist Prime Minister executed for his role in the 1956 Uprising. Then I passed the Soviet War Memorial (one of the few left standing in the city), the Contra Aquincum ruins, and a bunch of other statues. I think the one I liked best (possibly because I had to go quite out of the way to find it was the aforementioned Shoes on the Danube memorial to the Jews killed by the Arrow Cross Party.
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