Day 54 – June 8 Wednesday

Our last morning in Kikinda, so we tidied, repacked & reorganised this morning & some more chatting.  Antal showed us his collection of bank notes from when inflation was rampant in Yugoslavia.  The prize ones are the 500 million dinar & the one billion dinar notes, lucky to buy you a loaf of bread.  Cousin Bela & his wife Gyorgyi arrived from Subotica to pick us up, more chatting as we haven’t seen them for 14 years as well (apart from Skype).  Katalin had prepared a great lunch for us all & we enjoyed it amongst much laughter & merriment.  More too much good food & it was time to farewell the generous hospitality of Antal & Katalin, as well as Evike & family who also came over to say goodbye. We enjoyed our stay with Gizella & Kosta, Klara, Zoltan & family Dejan, Aleksandra & family, they have all been so loving & generous.  Always very sad after such a nice time together.  It is such a shame that we are so far from each other, but we don’t want our next meeting to be 14 years away.

Our journey with Bela to Budapest only had one small hiccup, the border crossing we went to would only accept Hungarians or Serbs transiting the border in this location, so we had to backtrack a little & travel around 30km to a major border crossing on the motorway from Belgrade to Budapest.  Thankfully the line up at the border was very short & we were through in very quick time.  Our arrival in Budapest coincided with the finish of work at 5pm so the traffic was busy.  Bela lives reasonably close to the centre of the city of Pest, but on the other side of where we came in, so we had to travel through the centre & out again, lots of stop start, but it gave us a great opportunity to get a feel for the city.  Bela has a very nice large villa in the city & we are staying in the other large house he has in the compound – again very nice. (When he invited us he said that they had heaps of room for us but we didn’t expect a whole house with a baby grand piano).

We had a look around, settled in, then off to catch the bus into the city centre.  The bus trip was also interesting, passing many landmarks & points of interest.  Pest is such a beautiful city, everywhere we look there is something more interesting & beautiful.  The streets are wide, clean & no graffiti – what a difference that makes to the look & feel of the city.  As we walked around the city the beauty of the buildings kept astounding us.  We walked to the banks of the Duna River (known as the Danube outside Europe) & the view from the Pest bank looking across at Buda is simply beautiful, the old buildings stretched up & crowning the hillside, with riverboats hugging the banks of the wide Duna River below, framed by the famous & beautiful Chain Bridge.  We caught the Number 2 tram the short distance to Parliament House at Kossuth Square, the scene of the 1956 uprising & massacre of civilians.  The Parliament building is stunning, the ornate carving & architecture of the building make this the best we have seen yet.  Again, everywhere we turned another magnificent old building or sight greeted us.  It was getting dark as we started to head back & a lot of the buildings are lit – another aspect to admire of these beautiful buildings.  We didn’t realise but it was 10 pm by the time we got back & Gyorgyi had prepared a nice meal for us & we chatted & ate until after midnight.