Tourists in Budapest

Last weekend we went to Budapest. Mike preached in the Örömhir Misszió Church on Sunday morning. We were so happy to be able to take the books to them for their first INSTE group which begins on Tuesday. (The Shalom Open Bible Church in Debrecen is starting two groups on Tuesday also.)


Since we were going to be in Budapest anyway, we decided to take a vacation day and go early to visit some of the sights on our own. Soon people may come to visit us and we wanted to be able to show them around Budapest in additon to Debrecen. There are several bus tours available, so we chose to go on one of them. The weather was cool and a little rainy that morning, but since we were on a bus most of the time, it didn't bother us.

The best part of the tour was our guide. This little lady was a ball of energy and talked constantly the entire tour--for three hours! She gave commentary on every place we went in both English and German. And, she kept talking to the bus driver in Hungarian, telling him to slow down, turn here, stop there, etc. And she gave us interesting facts about many of the things we saw. (Did you know that the double cross the kings of Hungary carry represents the fact that they ruled over the country and the Catholic church?) We went to all the tourist stops including Hero's Square, Parliament, Castle Hill and the Citadel. Our only disappointment was that we could not take the tour of the Parliament building because of political demonstrations planned for later in the day.


For lunch we found a Subway sandwich shop. It sure tasted good. The only American fast food in Debrecen is McDonald's. We walked around the city for a while on our own and saw some extra things not on the tour including a lot of policemen in riot gear getting ready for the demonstrations. We walked away from Parliament and got to see a street performance in the theater district. The part we saw was singing and dancing including some Broadway hit songs. We also walked past the Chinese and Indonesian embassies.

By the time we got back to our hotel, we were exhausted. But we got back in time to be rested up for services the next day. We enjoyed our day off and God blessed in the services on Sunday. He is a good God!