Thursday 25 June: Today we travelled from Vienna to Budapest. We stopped in a little place called Gyor for an hour or so to have a look around; an interesting little town.

Then on to Esztergom to admire the basilica (yet another one) and then to Budapest . Our arrival was delayed by extensive road works at one point on road but we still arrived before 4.00 pm and another member of the tour, and I, went out immediately to the Basilica of St. Stephan (patron saint of Hungary), the Synagogue (largest in Europe, and the first I have ever been in) and the New York Café where we had a drink, to admire the décor, which is extremely ornate. The price of the drinks matched the décor!

Dinner was a cruise on the Danube, and certainly Budapest looks beautiful by night, all illuminated.

On Friday we had a sightseeing tour in the morning; this took us to Heroes Square and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, then on to Castle Square where we went onto the Fisherman's Bastion with its great views of the city across the Danube, and then into the church (where else, you ask?).

In the afternoon, I went for a walk around near the hotel and went into the Franz Liszt Museum, which has been reconstructed in his house . But I was disappointed in the way they have let a grand piano from the 1860s, donated by an American company, deteriorate. I saw a small piano keyboard that has glass slivers instead of strings.

Back to hotel via the Museum of Terror (about the communist takeover in the 1950s), though I did not go in. I looked at the section of Berlin Wall outside and read some of the story boards – much food for thought!

Saturday, we had a tour of the Parliament Building. This was good, and the building impressive, but they kept stressing how similar it is to the British Houses of Parliament, and I don’t see it!. This building is much more ornate and since they have only just finished renovating it, it is in better condition. The "local guide" stressed that although now they are unicameral, they used to have two houses, called the Lords and the Commons, just like Britain! But the colour in their Commons is red (for the proletariat) and in their Lords it was blue (for the aristocracy) – at least as far as the carpeting is concerned - whereas we know that the British Commons is green and the Lords red . In any case the wing of their building that was the House of Lords is now open to tourists and for functions, etc. as they no longer have an upper house.

One amusing and interesting thing we saw was a number of “cigar holders”, each numbered, on the windowsills outside the chamber. Presumably they were not allowed to smoke in the chamber, and Members placed their cigars there when they went in to listen to a speech; if it was a good speech and they stayed to hear it all, the cigar may have burned to ash when they went to get it, in which case the speech was a “Havana speech”!

Later on, I set out for the Kerepesi Cemetery. An interesting place, and I saw some large and ornate memorials, and what I think may be a war cemetery section – pity I can’t read Hungarian! The place and concept is rather like Highgate Cemetery in London, but much more spacious with better-kept paths and lawns, at least from my memory of Highgate.

This expedition involved taking the metro, and changing once! But it is pretty simple; the first train was on the Blue line, their trains are pretty tatty and look as if they need a coat of paint. But the seats were OK. The names of the stations were a bit hard to find so you needed to count. Fortunately I was only going two stops on that line, before changing to the Red line. This was much better, the announcements were made in Hungarian and English and the station names were easy to find, and the trains were much newer and smarter.