Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Political Protests= Walking Home

One of the reasons I love the 2 Tram is because it is easily the most scenic transportation route in Budapest. It runs parallel to the river and provides great sights of the bridges, royal palace, Buda hills, the Vigado building and finally the Parliament.
However, as the nation’s capital, Parliament is a popular site of political protests and on numerous occasions I have had the misfortune of the tram stopping about three stops from the end of the line due to protestors and had to walk the rest of the way home—quite thrilling considering there were police at all the intersections and many of the roads to parliament were blocked off. As a result I kind of wandered in what I thought was the right direction by myself after dark not really sure what was going on.
The first time it happened was pretty exciting. I was confused of course, but once I got to Parliament there was a large gathering of people who held signs and were waving flags—plus there were vendors selling food and pins and other trinkets.
However, on most following occasions there have been no more than 30 people hanging around at most and I feel it’s quite unnecessary to stop the trams.
For a while I experimented with taking the blue line, metro, home but found that once I walked to the metro station and then from the train station it took just as long as it did to walk from Roosevelt ter.

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