Right up my alley

I'm sure some will find this post title irreverent, and to those I mean no disrespect, but there are so many aspects of Budapest that correspond to my personal interests that when I experience one more it is exciting for me.  Budapest is a city of monuments.  On our city tour the first day, this monument was pointed out to us and Karen B. and I decided to go back on our next morning walk to see it up close.

Hungary was not exempt from the Holocaust, but for a variety of reasons most of the Jews living in Budapest were not deported to concentration camps unlike the Jews of the Hungarian countryside.  Adolf Eichmann was even sent to Budapest in 1944 to organize the Final Solution in Hungary.  But when the Russians were approaching to liberate the city, thousands of people were rounded up (Jews, Catholics, Homosexuals, etc.), brought to the banks of the Danube and simply shot and thrown into the river.  These metal shoes on the river bank commemorate that event.


And one more for my brother...near this monument was an old guy fishing.  When Karen pantomimed that she'd like to take his picture, he grinned, put down his gear and jumped up.  We were afraid he had misunderstood and thought we were asking him to take a picture of us.  But he ran over to a pillar and starting pulling on a rope, at which point we realized that he had caught a fish and had it in a net.  He was very proud of this fish, and very proud to tell us he was in his seventies.  I was very proud to have understood the number seventy in Hungarian by this kind (and toothless) fisherman on the river!