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Szentendre
(St. Andrews) ...Taking
a bus to Szentendre, which is quite an adventure in itself, you pass
the Roman settlement of Aquincum. It's right along the road with aqueducts
and all.
The mostly heavily
touristed locations in all of Hungary are Buda's Castle Hill and Pest's
Váci utca street. They are crawling with them! But, the little town
of Szentendre rivals them both. It's a "postcard perfect" village
settled along a bend in the Danube River. Tourists, as well as Budapesters,
come to Szentendre to stroll the galleries, museums, shops and cafés.
Fortunately, as soon as you leave the souvenir-choked main streets,
there are quite little back lanes under the colorful shadow of Baroque
steeples to enjoy to yourself.
When I was a child,
I loved the movie "If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium". (It's
particularly funny to me since I now live in Antwerp.) It was a film
about Americans on a speed trip through Europe on a "been there, done
that" experience. It was sort of like my Eastern Europe tour behind
the Iron Curtain. We visited so many places in so few days that it
all blurred together. I know I visited Szentendre, and still have
the embroidered vest to prove it, but I swear that none of it looked
familiar at all to me.
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