Arrival in Budapest.  Very hot...not such a great idea to have jeans on.  We had a 3 km walk from the train station to the hotel.  It was roughly 88 degrees.

Hungarian Parliament Building.  Sure beats the Legislative Building in Olympia.

We crossed the Chain Bridge from Buda into Pest.  The Danube was about the color of the Willamette (kind of like watered down chocolate milk).

Another classy, delicious gift waiting for us in our room from Starwood.  Sunny, I hope you're taking notes. :-)

View from our room.  We had balconies around two sides of the room.  Unfortunately, you'd have to be about four inches wide to get out the door to go onto them.  The hotel also advised us to keep the windows and doors closed to due a high bug population.  I call B.S. though...when walking around, we rarely saw any bugs.

The House of Terror is a museum with fascist and communist exhibits as well as a memorial to the victims of those regimes.  The building itself was the headquarters of these regimes with the prison cellar in the basement.  There were former cells for different purposes.  A "wet cell" where prisoners were forced to sit in water, a "foxhole cell" to force sitting in a crouched position, a "standing cell" forcing the prisoner to stand 24 hours a day and standard cells with wooden "beds" and concrete walls.  They also had interviews playing from former prisoners that were in the gulag and work camps. It was interesting, but depressing. 

View across the Danube to Castle Hill.

This is the first McDonalds behind the Iron Curtain.  It was very busy today, but apparently when it first opened the line would go around the block. 

The building on the right has been converted to a hotel, the one on the left has not and is still soot-caked. 

We stopped at Central Kavehaz for a cappucino and a snack.  This was called Dobos and was very good..layers of chocolate and cake topped with a thick layer of caramel similar to the top of creme brulee.

The Great Market Hall.  Kind of like Pike Place Market, but with sausage and paprika instead of fish and flowers.