Budapest captured my heart. In my short stay there I fell in love with a city. The only other time I had felt this was when I was in New York, but my love for Budapest was for a completely different reason. It is very rare that a city grabs you, absorbs you and makes you feel at home, makes you feel like this could be a place you would want to grow old. Its beauty, the kindness of its people and the endless history around the city ensures that any stay here will be remembered forever.
St Stephens Basilica is in the centre of Pest (the city is split into two parts - Buda and Pest dependent on the side of the river). The building is majestic with 6 bells and a viewing platform where Budapest can really be seen.





The forest surrounding the Citadel is magnificent with bright flowers and exotic plants. At the base is a water fall as shown to the right.
At the bottom of Gellért hill there is also the famous Hotel Gellért. Here some of Budapests iconic thermal baths can be found. We went in the midst of winter so the Thermal Bath usage was low, allowing us to use the outside pool all to ourselves.
M.John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
"Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation."