On the last night of our Road Scholar Budapest tour, the group was treated to a buffet dinner cruise on the Danube. The weather was perfect, the food delicious and the photo-ops mind-boggling. The first seven images below were shot from the deck of the ship. The moderate speed gave me ample time to get off many shots. All were hand-held and shooting in the Manual Mode: 1/60 sec, f5.6 and allowing the camera to choose the ISO [3200 in all cases]. In the top two images, you can see both the illuminated Liberation Monument atop Gellert Hill and the Liberty Bridge (1894-99) [rebuilt after WWII restoring all its original features].
Next we come to Buda Castle and the Mathias Church, with the Chain Bridge below.
And now, my favorite structure in Budapest, the Parliament building.
At the conclusion of the cruise, we got a surprise; viz. we went by bus up to the Buda Castle area where there was an overlook that offered a magnificent view of the Danube and its bridges. Needless to say, a lot of other folks/tours knew about it, too; so I was fortunate to get myself into a position to get some good shots, despite the crowding and short duration of our visit.
This concludes our visit in Budapest. Next week I will start a new series of postings devoted to the Prague leg of the tour. {By the way, I learned that Westerners generally mispronounce Budapest. Phonetically, it is pesht [not pest] because a free s is spoken as sh; in contrast, sz is spoken like our s.} In German, Pest means plague or pestilence.
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