Day 24 - National Museum and Hungarian State Opera

Our first stop was the National Museum at Kálvin tér. To get there we had to change from the historic M1 metro line to the communist-era M3 line. This line is very different, it's much deeper for a start; The 'escalators-of-death' as we called them go very fast, much faster than any other escalators we've been on. Strangely, the handrail moves even faster, so your hand creeps up faster than you do.

The collection in the National Museum is very well presented. It is arranged in roughly chronological order from the stone age through to the 20th Century. Many facinating and varied items are on display. We found the last century particularly interesting, especially the treatment of the two World Wars and the 1956 Revolution. Throughout the communist-era, the propaganda machine denounced the revolution as a counter-revoluntionary revolt, so it is interesting to see it come full circle and be portrayed now as a popular uprising.

The Hungarian National Museum.

We had planned to visit the Electrotechnical Museum (with the world's largest collection of electrical meters) but it was closed. We stopped at at Cafe Károlyi and had a traditional Hungarian lunch.

Fantastic buildings like this are all over Budapest.

We were walking over to the House of Terror museum in the old secret police building when we found ourselves outside the Opera House. We thought we should go in and have a look and we ended up buying tickets to the performance that night. Suddenly, we didn't have much time left, so we rushed back to the hotel to get changed.

The opera tonight was Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. The Opera House is very grand and very ornate and we had great seats. It was a talented performance and very enjoyable, even though the story was silly. It was a fantastic experience.

Getting out fairly late, we had dinner at a restaurant near our hotel, the Premier Étterem. It was very nice in the hot weather to have dinner outside at this Art Nouveau restaurant. The food was very good and the service was very, very polite: Something we noticed as a trend in Budapest, almost everyone is very polite.