Our Danube River cruise ended in Regensburg. Having seen the river at this point I am surprised that it isn’t the end of the line for everyone. I can’t dig up the quote but I remember reading Mark Twain’s thoughts on what they call rivers out in the western United States; having seen the Mississippi river, it was strange to him that people would refer to tiny little creeks that even disappeared sometimes in the summer as rivers. The Danube isn’t quite that tiny but still, doesn’t seem like there is a lot of room to work with on that thing.

We spent the first part of the morning on the ship-arranged tour of Regensburg. Our German tour guide this day was less no-nonsense than Daniel but was very nice. She showed us the Roman bits of Regensburg along with several patrician towers, the fanciest way to flex on your neighbors in the 13^th century. There was also the Stone Bridge, Regensburg’s medieval wonder. It is a nice bridge though when I was talking about river navigation in the second paragraph this was more specifically what I was talking about.

We popped over the bridge to admire some of the sights but the real excitement was on the southern side anyway. There was the salt shed that was the heart of Regensburg’s medieval economy and which has a very neat little visitor center inside. There is also more importantly the thing I was most excited for in Regensburg, the Historische Wurstkuchl, i.e. what is probably the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world. They have been slinging meals for 900 years (sausages for only about 200 but boiled meat before that). We got lunch there, with the sausage and sauerkraut raising spirits slightly dampened by the rain.

Tell you what though, the REAL gem of Regensburg is the variously named Donau Schiffahrtsmuseum, or Danube Shipping Museum. This thing was so great. It is not hard to find, it is right on the river there downtown, but it did not seem to be very well-visited. My super amazing wife and I were the only ones onboard when we visited in the middle of the day. The museum actually comprises of several ships, but the flagship is the paddle steamer Ruthof, so you walk across the brow and pay your entrance fee there. That’s all where the very tiny little gift shop was, which delightfully carried lapel pins! (of the stick pin variety)

The ship was so great. It acted as a towboat on the Danube, and so would pull along barges transporting goods. I’m pulling these details from the above-linked website, but it was originally built intra-war, struck a mine during WWII (who knew the Danube was mined), and sat on the bottom for 12 years before being raised and then was in service all the way until 1973. Which is amazing when you consider its heart is a horizontal, double-boiler, double (?) expansion steam engine packing, apparently 800 hp, and again driving paddle wheels. The ship is pretty big too, and must have been a behemoth to navigate on the river with a two of barges behind.

But it is not a ship museum but a shipping museum, so the first part has tons of dioramas and ship models and other information about Danube shipping. They have models of shipyard and of the salt fleet we learned about in Passau, and even more fun stuff like schiffmühles or ship mills, a moveable river-powered mill. The museum documents a whole river-bound history and culture I don’t think you’d ever think about if you didn’t look into it on purpose, what with the modern world rending a lot of these things obsolete.

After the navigation museum the rest of the afternoon wound down with some wandering around Regensburg. I admired the Kepler house from the outside and looked at some more Roman walls and the like and there was some final bit of souvenir shopping to do. Our final dinner on the Viking ship Tor was a nice time to say goodbye to the crewmembers that had treated us so well during our visit, and finally we returned to our rooms to rest for the next day when we would finally strike out on our own once again.

With only a couple days left in the cruise, we awoke this morning having sailed into Passau and therefore our final country of Germany. And it was very quickly evident we were in Germany as we started the walking tour of Passau. Because we had moored outboard of another ship, the tour had to be bumped 15 minutes earlier, representing something of a nightmare scenario for our local tour guide Daniel. Daniel was very German and opened with a small lecture about how, as a German, he believes in being punctual, and that means not late and not early.

I loved Daniel so much, he was great. Unlike our other guides, he didn’t really have patter and didn’t talk while walking. This caused some of the people on our tour to think they had audio problems with their headsets. Daniel did do some funny stuff despite being no nonsense – he is normally a high school teacher, you see. One lady asked him what he meant by “virology” (she had misheard) and he simply said “I did not say that. I do not know that word.” Later my dad told Daniel he (dad) had looked it up and it meant the study of viruses, to which Daniel said flatly “I know.”

We learned a few things on the tour. At St. Stephen’s cathedral, Daniel told us the bulb-shaped domes atop the towers were indicative of the baroque style, so anything with bulbs was built 1600s or later. That’s a handy tip for you architecture-spotters out there. The cathedral had been rebuilt after a fire in the 1600s, and tell you what man there seems to have been a number of fires around that time that favored baroque architects (the same thing had happened at Gottweig Abbey, you see). The cathedral is in the midst of being restored, and so had just been cleaned while we were there, and it was very bright and beautiful. St Stephen’s claim to fame is that their pipe organ is the largest in Europe with something like 18,000 pipes. While we were there it was being restored, so it didn’t have all of its pipes this day. But tell you what, even with 80% or whatever of the pipes missing, it is still a rather large pipe organ. Also interesting is that in the church St. Stephen’s relics have been there since the 1400s or so, Daniel told us.

We then did some more wandering around town, learning things like Passau didn’t get bombed during the war because the Allies didn’t think it was important enough, and admiring the confluence of rivers. Passau is where it is because it is the meeting point of the rivers Inn (meaning “Wild,” according to Daniel), Ilz, and Danube, and it is pretty to see them come together. In our remaining time until lunch my super amazing wife and I wandered Passau, admiring cuckoo clocks and old books and buying Christmas decorations.

After lunch the plan was to go to the Oberhausmuseum. This required some commitment because the ship was actually sailing shortly after lunch but there would be busses you could take to catch up (though if you missed the bus you were stuck in Passau). Plus it had started raining. But we girded ourselves and went and I am very glad we did, the Oberhausmuseum was great!

To get there we took a bus up (it’s called the Oberhaus because it’s up on a hill you see) and started touring the castle. It is very big and has a lot of cool exhibits on various aspects of the history of Passau all the way back to Roman times and before. One thing I really liked is that they had a whole bunch of pictures of the castle through the ages because now we were there also in this long long history of the town. I also started noticing boats in the pictures, which soon enough led to the highlight of the Oberhausmuseum, a whole series of displays on the salt trade!

It seems that Passau got wealthy off of salt initially. I think I am messing up some of this history, but my understanding is that salt was mined for centuries and centuries upriver on the Inn. It could then be easily floated down to Passau, but to get it up to Regensburg (farther upriver on the Danube, our next destination) was quite the operation, and this is what the exhibit was about. The Oberhaus itself protected Passau and this salt transshipment monopoly. Since you couldn’t really paddle upriver on the Danube against the current, there were these whole long caravans of salt transport boats, pulled along by teams of up to 50 horses. The salt itself was packed into special small barrels called kufe. I loved reading about ancient systems of trade, it was so good and such a pleasant surprise in the museum.

Other great bits about the museum included the views, which overlooked the city of Passau and the confluence of the rivers. Like I said it had started raining, so the town and upriver valleys had a mist-shrouded look to them. Even the bathroom window had a gorgeous overlook. There was also an exhibit on the different craft guilds in the city. One of the most interesting things there is that the guild that made candles and the guild that made gingerbread were in fact the same guild because both candles and gingerbread use the products of bees (wax and honey). But we were rather worn out from a long day of walking around at this point, so we decided to make our way down the hill through the rain, which was very moody and scenic but meant we were soaked through by the time we arrived at the bus rendezvous. We warmed up for a while in a restaurant with a beer and a cheese plate before getting transported back to the ship.

Overall Passau was a surprisingly interesting and beautiful place to visit. We learned a lot about the salt trade and regional dynamics and what it takes to maintain Europe’s largest pipe organ. The evening ended with us sailing up the Danube one last time, my super amazing wife and I leaning out of our French balcony just admiring the peaceful, passing riverbank in the dark.

This day was potentially the highlight of the whole river cruise. It was, you see, the day with the most river cruisin’. We woke up cruising and went to sleep cruising. But in the middle there we did go to the extremely lovely Gottweig Abbey.

To get to the Abbey the ship pulled over at Krems and we hopped on some busses. The drive was only a couple of miles but very scenic, over the Danube and then up to the Abbey on the top of the hill. It’s a great spot for an Abbey, it overlooks the surrounding towns and forest valleys. The Abbey is a bit of a throwback, I am to understand, in that they own like 1300 hectares or thereabouts and lease it out to the locals while the monks also attend the parishes. I guess you can be a monk without being a priest but I haven’t looked into it.

Upon arrival at the Abbey we watched a short video about the Abbey’s history while sipping on a welcome glass of sparkling wine. We then met up with our tour guide, who looked and resembled nothing so much as a young but slightly (only slightly) less buff Arnold Schwarzenegger. I can only assume all Austrians are like this and we got a standard one. He was acting as a tour guide while finishing up his degree, I think in hospitality. The Abbey was a very pretty place to walk around, and as we walked I noticed that the church had a painted-on clock along with some fake, painted-on windows (see top photo). These were meant to be temporary cost-savings measures. The Abbey itself isn’t actually even “finished,” with the latest renovation in the 18^th century having envisioned much more square footage. The second clock and painted-on windows were thus only meant to be there long enough until they could install a real clock and keep building the wing, but that never happened. And now the Abbey has a protected status which means they couldn’t install a real clock if they wanted to.

The Abbey’s other claim to fame is the largest Baroque staircase in Austria, topped by a big ole’ mural with Charles VI in the middle. That was nice, we spent some time admiring it. We also spent some time admiring the church. This was also impressive, but less pretty than Mattias church in Budapest I thought. However, what they do have is a skull. More specifically, the head of their founder St. Altmann is in a “precious Baroque shrine” down in the chapel where the monks do their prayers multiple times a day. Metal. The relics in Vienna were top notch with Jesus’ loincloth, but come on. You can see this relic from a bit of a distance, which our young Schwarzenegger was telling us. My dear sweet mother, though, is a bit hard of hearing, and couldn’t understand, and so was asking me what he was saying. So soon enough I was yelling in my mom’s ear about a dead guy in a box right there in the middle of a very peaceful church.

Following the tour we then went off to a dumpling demonstration which we had paid extra for. Besides heads in boxes, the other thing that Gottweig is famous for are their apricots. They like to do a lot with apricots; after this demonstration we also had a tasting of apricot wine which was great. But the dumpling demonstration was all about their special apricot dumpling recipe. I have it somewhere, though this appears to be it online. It’s an old-school boiled dessert and also very delicious with a whole apricot right in the middle. Since going to the demonstration I have just been waiting for apricot season to roll around so I can try making it myself again. Having been both wined and dined at the Abbey, we exited via the gift shop (they have some wonderful stuff) and it was back to the busses and ship for our afternoon of cruising.

And what an afternoon it was! It was us heading on up the Wachau Valley while Paul, our tour director, gave commentary. We enjoyed the tour up on the sun deck in the shade. The valley really is beautiful and cruising through while admiring a book is very nice. Just to run through the highlights, we saw the rabbits of St. Michael’s running along the roof, the Hill of 1000 Buckets (buckets of wine that is, referring to the Hill’s production capacity) apparently dubbed that by Charlemagne, the Ruine Hinterhaus, Willendorf (of Venus fame, so that was an enthralling brush with celebrity), and the Burgruine Aggstein. We were also on the lookout for nude sunbathers, which Paul sternly warned us were a hazard of navigation in these parts, but I’m not sure we saw any. Even without that though, it was simply a great afternoon on a boat in a river admiring the sights, the sort of thing you figure all of a Viking cruise is going to be until they occasionally kick you off to look at a castle.

Right around the time any sunbathers would have been packing up, we eventually head down ourselves for a strudel demonstration hosted by the ship’s pastry chef. This was very entertaining and as an added bonus of course we got to try strudel at the end. There was also tea, and once that was over the lounge cleared out and we spent the rest of the afternoon there lounging of course with our books. This is how every day should go.

Reading this week:

• Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa by Roland Oliver

The second full day of our river cruise on the mighty Danube I woke up while the ship was still moving, mist-shrouded Austrian-looking buildings sliding past in the quiet morning. Very neat! Right before we entered Vienna we went through another lock. Since it wasn’t our first it was much less exciting, and we experienced it as we ate breakfast, i.e. we watched a concrete wall slowly lower (from our perspective) until we broke out into the sun.

Ship operations continued to fascinate. After breakfast we went up to the sun deck again and enjoyed experiencing the ship cruise underneath low bridges, close enough to jump up and touch. In places the ship’s bridge descended even below the handrail, so we were looking down at the captain as he piloted us through. Then we were entranced by docking, followed by the crew getting the ship’s brow in place. This involved crane operations which was very fun and again I admired how carefully the ship is designed with the brow arranged to go in any direction. Also on ship’s operations one thing I wanted to mention from our initial ship’s brief is that I learned the ships are split up by language. I had wondered how tours would work if you had a whole mix of different people, but that is a straightforward solution, and meant our ship was mostly Americans with a smattering of Brits, Irish, and Australians.

Language was moot for us on this day anyways because my super amazing wife and I skipped the tour. She had spent a week in Vienna the previous year and so was an expert and we had no need of a tour guide. We stepped out into Austria (a whole new country from where we started! Wow! Travel! Very cool!) and made our way to the Vienna highlights. We started of course with the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (do you need some water for that cough), i.e. the State Hall of the National Library!

I have just noticed that its website describes the library as “one of the most important libraries in the world,” which that’s gotta be what every library thinks of itself, right? It is very nice, and older than the United States, like much in Europe is I suppose. And it is very ornate. Gigantic frescoes on the ceiling, gold everywhere, and filled with statues and globes. I enjoyed all the globes that still had California as an island. Oh and books! It’s a library you know. So many old books. At the library I read that all the books are digitized online if you want to read them (a cursory look online did not make obvious where that was) and I wonder how often the books are opened now. Once a century or so? It is not so large a library though. Like, it is a very big room, but doesn’t take too long to poke all around it. My favorite part was probably the not-so-secret secret doorways, where the shelves opened up into other rooms with more shelves and more books. They had a special exhibit on at the time, as they usually do, and after perusing that and fantasizing about more home-appropriate libraries we head out.

We were in Vienna of course, so the day’s itinerary was one sign of imperial power to another. Next up was the proof that we are all mortal, i.e. the Kapuzinergruft! It’s the crypt where they keep not all but a lot of dead Hapsburgs. Interesting place there. You kind of go through a doorway off the street and down the stairs and there is a person who will take your entrance fee and some lockers to store your bag and then you pop in and admire all the sarcophagi. They go up and up in ornateness until you get to Maria Theresa. She commissioned her massive sarcophagus covered in decorations to both signal her temporal power along with the power of life over death and here are tourists coming down to gawk for about $15 a pop. What would she think? I would so love to know.

This finally brought us to the Schönbrunn Palace tour. This tour we arranged via the ship though I think the average Vienna visitor would really be able to manage on their own. We had returned to the ship to get on the bus to the castle. We arrived and like, honestly, not impressed. I mean it is big but it seems like it is in a whatever part of town. It’s not bad there’s just like, a town outside. We did have 30 minutes before the tour started though and so we wandered around the back into the garden and like, okay, that bit really is impressive. We didn’t have too much time but we took some pictures and I think I helped an influencer out by taking pictures for her.

Anyways we went back around the front to begin the tour. Our guide started with some Hapsburg history I wasn’t too into and then we began looking at rooms. Again, for a while there I thought it was pretty dingy. The waiting rooms weren’t much for a palace and I kept comparing it in my head to Spain. But after a while we got into cool, decorated rooms that were really neat. We saw the deathbed of Napoleon’s son and the parade bed of Maria Theresa. I thought the Porcelain room was really nice, and there was another room done in parquet with illustrations cut out decorating the walls, apparently from a book presented by Mongolia. We had some more free time after the tour and so poked around the garden again, but it wasn’t enough time to give it a real good look.

After this it was a return to the ship for a quiet evening reading and admiring a lunar eclipse. The rest of the fam all reported they enjoyed their tours and cafés and chocolate cake and we went to bed excited to spend a whole second day exploring Vienna.

Alright alright, we’re finally getting out of Budapest here. Promise! But we still have a little bit of Budapest to go. We awoke on the ship still moored in good ole’ Budapest. This was our first real day doing ship stuff on a Viking river cruise aboard the Tor and we were pretty excited. Not yet used to the routine we missed my family at breakfast but don’t worry, we would miss them more when we were in separate groups for the bus tour (after this tour we would always be in the same group).

On the Viking cruise every day there is at least one activity already included with the cruise. You could in addition pay more money to do more stuff, but we only wound up doing I think two of the paid extras. The included tour this day was “Panoramic Budapest,” i.e. a bus and walking tour of Budapest. My super amazing wife and I had spent several days already in Budapest, but for most of the cruisers, including the rest of my family, this was going to be most of what they saw of the city.

So off we went with our guide Andresh for a cruise around the city. As a novelty in our particular trip we focused on the Pest side, driving past Heroe’s Square and glancing at Europe’s largest synagogue and various other things all apparently built in 1896, that year being one millennium after Hungary’s founding in 896.

But enough of Pest. We were heading back to Buda castle once again for another look around the castle district. The highlight here was Matthias Church. Given how experienced we were with Buda my super amazing wife and I had already walked past it a lot and even admired the roof but we had mostly ignored it. This was a tour of Europe so it was inevitable we were going to see a lot of churches. The tour director on the cruise even said our ABCs would evolve – starting by admiring “Another Beautiful Church” and ending with hating “Another Bloody Church.” But Matthias – man what a church!

The place was gorgeous. You go inside and the entire church is absolutely covered in painted motifs, each apparently representing the different Magyar tribes that founded Hungary. We had never seen a church like this and it reminded us not so much of any other church as it did the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba. The Matthias church was actually a mosque there for a while the Ottomans were in charge and we had wondered if that influenced the decoration but according to Wikipedia not so much; while a mosque the decorations were plastered over. But if you’re in town it is def worth a wander to see what has to be a uniquely visually stunning church.

And with that the tour gave us some time for some souvenir shopping and then the moment came – we were leaving Budapest and off to rendezvous with the ship. The ship had gotten underway while we were touring about so we had to drive up-river some to enable it to pick us up. This rendezvous point was our second church of the day, the Esztergom Basilica (so already here we go with all the churches) but we only admired it from afar. There was lunch onboard and the afternoon and evening were entirely river cruising, which was great. Being such a fan of ships my biggest problem with cruises is that you seem to spend so little time underway, but on this river cruise there was actually a fair amount of cruising time, allowing you to read a book on the sun deck as the European scenery slowly slid past.

The day finished with a very exciting event though: our first lock! At this point my super amazing wife and I had been watching a whole lot of Kris Atomic and so were thinking about canal locks a bunch and were excited to go through one. Clearly though the English canal system and the Danube were two different beasts. This first lock was to get us past the Gabčíkovo Dam and it was actually a quite popular event on board. We arrived in the lock as after-dinner drinks were going on and a good crowd of people ascended up to the sun deck (moon deck at the time) to watch the goings-on.

A few observations. The Viking longboats are very well designed for Danube navigation. While most everyone was crowded around the bow my dad and I had noticed the ship’s bridge and all the controls so we were hanging out back around there. He was bold enough to duck his head in and after the captain returned to his post got the full run-down. The ship has four controllable thruster pods underneath (I’m having trouble fact-checking this) which makes it very maneuverable. Parallel parking is not an issue for these boats.

Where was the captain returning from? The neat auxiliary control stations that must be more convenient for docking or, as we were in this case, navigating a lock. The ship also has autopilot which apparently does a lot of the work, which sounds nice. Meanwhile the boat is also designed to go under very low bridges. To accommodate bridges, the ship’s bridge goes up and down on hydraulic lifts. The deck railings can also be lowered, and to go under the very lowest bridges the ship’s bridge can go all the way down to be flush with the deck, with a hatch in the top for the captain to stick his head through until the very last moment.

But none of that was needed for the lock, which was a pretty staid experience. We went slowly up and when the water was at the right level, the upper gate lowered and away we sailed into the night. As King Matthias (Corvinus) would have said, on to Vienna!

Today would finally be the day that we joined the boat portion of this river cruise vacation. Not the river cruising itself! That would be the next day. In the meantime we had the morning to poke around Budapest more before embarking on the ship, and then after embarkation we would still have more time to explore Budapest.

I keep saying “explore Budapest” but man we spent a lot of time in Buda. For example, this morning we were heading once again up to Buda castle. The previous day we had taken a tour of the castle but now we were seeing the Hungarian National Gallery, housed in the castle itself. We were going to take the funicular up to the top, but turns out it is $15 each, which is a bit steep (funicular joke there).

The gallery is really great! Lots of 19^th and 20^th century art. I suppose they had older stuff but it was very religious or Hungarian in a way I didn’t understand enough to get. The interior was redone in the 1980s and it looks it. On the Buda castle tour the previous day our guide was complaining that the interior now lacked the grandeur it once did, but I thought it was great. If you did find the interior a bit stuffy though a surprise for us is that you could go all the way up to the dome on top of the building and step outside for some stunning panoramic views of the whole city. Worth the price of admission alone.

But back to the art. Since its the Hungarian National Gallery, clearly there is a big emphasis on Hungarian artists. They were well tapped into the art movements of the time and so is just as gorgeous as everything else. Of the two paintings below, the first is Bathing House (1872) by Pál Szinyei Merse and the second being A Visit in the Afternoon (1879) by Mihály Munkácsy. I liked the bathing house scene for being slightly cheeky, the trio of girls obviously being sent to gather up the boy swimming and trying to maintain some propriety while doing so. The second I liked for being a colorful and breezy look at friendly domesticity.

A lot of the even more modern stuff really struck a chord with me. Occasionally I see some art and I want to take a stab at recreating it myself, these pieces now that I’m thinking about it typically being sculptures. Two from the museum are below. The first is Sphere (1965) by François Morellet and the second is Energetic Sculpture (1977) by Adolf Luther. I like Sphere as it reminds me of nothing so much as a depiction of crystal lattices that is on display in the Smithsonian. Plus recreating it seems like a good excuse to get a spot welder (having just did a quick search man you can get some dangerous stuff for real cheap). The second sculpture with its mirrors and geometries just seems like it could create so many possibilities. So far attempting that has been a good excuse to get a heat gun, but that is about as far as I’ve gotten.

Another aspect of what I liked about this gallery is clearly the gallery designers had done a lot of work assembling and juxtaposing different artworks to create a new statement. Below is a photo of two paintings placed across a doorway, both by Károly Ferenczy. On the left is Painter and Model (in the Atelier) (1904) and on the right Double Portrait (Noémi Ferenczy and Béni Ferenczy) (1908).

And then I’m not so sure the below juxtaposition was intentional but I do think it is funny. It is Sitting Worker (1934) by György Goldmann (already clearly a comment on The Thinker), along with a “no sitting” sign:

Intellectual work, physical work, no rest from work, man what avenues we have for self-expression. The exhibit that really blew me away the most was a whole exhibit on Art Nouveau they had going on at the time. All that work was so intricate and gorgeous and if I was anything resembling an artist I think I would be trying so hard to master the art nouveau style. I like the bold dramatic colors and outlines and how more can be more.

But I promised a boat. With the afternoon rolling around it was finally time to embark on our Viking longship, in our case the Tor. We picked up our bags from the hotel, hiked across the Chain Bridge, and were intercepted by two very nice men from the ship who carried our bags direct to our room while we checked in. What luxury! And then we pretty promptly turned around again to head back into town, pausing only briefly to reunite with my parents and brother who were coming down the gangplank. My dad didn’t actually recognize me standing right in front of him (he was distracted) but don’t worry my mom did. They were exhausted, having come directly from the airport, and so we left them to the room to do some souvenir shopping.

I write this paragraph mostly to plug a particular gift shop the Hungarian Folklore shop. It is located here. The big tourist spot to go to in Budapest is the Great Market Hall, which is pretty neat and filled with all sorts of stuff, and great stuff at that. If you go on a tour they’ll take you there, and on our official ship tour of Budapest the next day (where we would once again visit Buda castle) we did indeed visit the Hall. But we had spotted the Hungarian Folklore store on the map and tried to visit our first day, only to find a planned power outage blocking us. So it was a priority for us to visit once we were able and we are glad we did. They had all sorts of handicrafts authentically made from around Hungary. The prices reflected the craftsmanship, and so there was a lot of neat stuff beyond my price range, but we did get some really gorgeous affordable souvenirs. So make sure you go when you are in Hungary!

Having finally managed to visit we returned to the ship where we had dinner (my dad, continually convinced he should be on a diet, only ordered the appetizer for dinner, then discovered it was European portions instead of American portions, and so ordered the main as well, but refused a dessert until he saw how small they were, and then ordered his own, but then also ate my brother’s after my brother discovered the dessert was not to his liking, so that is my dad’s diet, a full three course meal plus an extra dessert). Once evening hit we head out into town once again to admire all the buildings with the lights. We were not alone in this and I was most amused to see women all dressed up and posing in front of the Hungarian parliament building. It is perhaps the most dramatic building in Budapest’s skyline, but I struggled to imagine women doing the same for the Capitol building. But some décolletage for democracy can’t be a bad thing, right?