23/6 Michelangelo, heroes square, and a night cruise

On our last day in Budapest we ad a late start with a late breakfast. We lingered over breakfast because we wanted to spend just a little more time with some of the people from our previous group who were leaving that day.
After then heading upstairs for our showers we lingered a little more in the lobby, having a decent cup of tea made with actual boiling water.

It had rained all night and showed no signs of stopping so on with the raincoats and off we went into the rain.
We had seen an exhibition of Michelangelo advertised at the fine art gallery near Heroes Square, so we headed for there along the wide boulevard called Andrassy Ut.

This style of flower boxes with height is used quite a lot here. When blooming fully it is a great sight.

We only had to line up for about 20 minutes to get in to the exhibition and then spent a few hours looking not only at the Michelangelo (with a shared audio guide) , but also at the magnificent rooms of the art gallery and some of their other permanent exhibition.

This particular hall was closed off for many years  , with the roof damaged from war , water leakage, and basically used for storage of objects of no interest. The beautiful frescoes have only been recently restored and are very impressive.

The central room that everyone walks through is not to be sneezed at either.

one of the articles in the general collection.  We were not allowed to take pictures of the Michelangelo exhibition

Exhausted from our culture binge, we headed out of the door to Heroes square and found ourselves a cache in Budapest before going off on a search for the huge timer (like an egg timer) that only needs turning once a year.  We found the timer, but unfortunately could not get right to it as there were workman's partitions up. It is currently on a building site, so we looked at what we could see over the barricade and went away again.

one of the heroes

The ice skating rink. 

The timer

Since it was still raining , we decided to hop on a bus again, and caught the bus back over the river to the lookout, where we hopped off and had ourselves an icecream reward while we waited for the next bus to head back again.

Walking from the stop closest to our hotel, we only just made it back in time to have a quick wash up and head out again with mates from our first tour who were still around. For one reason or another we had all failed to use our second boat trip voucher, so had planned to make the night trip at 9.30.

We sat at some street tables under umbrellas for our last meal (pasta) and then headed for dock 10 again.  We arrived in plenty of time to enjoy the sunset as we waited to board (and even found a cache on the way) .

The night trip was very different.  Budapest has done a great job of lighting their beautiful riverside buildings, and it was really quite spectacular.

By the time we headed off on our walk home we were all pretty weary.