Being that it is a holiday, most of the locals got out of the city. We decided to join them.

We hopped on a bus to Eger. The town has many sites – I’ll let you read about them through the wikipedia link. Instead I’ll share two of the highlights for me:

1) Climbing the minaret: As well as providing a visual cue to Muslims, the calls (prayer) is given from the top of a minaret, and generally it is not open to the public. In this case, the mosque had been destroyed and only the minaret was left standing, and the hungarians have turned it into a tourist attraction – So for $1.50, you can climb a very narrow, windy staircase to the top for an incredible view of Eger.

2) Szépasszonyvölgy (“The Valley of the Beautiful Woman”): Hungary’s wine country. I know you must be thinking Napa. This is different. The valley on the southern edge of Eger has vinyards, and in a separate area, each wine cellar has their own bar where you can do tastings, drink wine, and purchase some to take home. We seemed to be the only tourists in the town – most of the others were hungarians from other parts of the country, coming to picnic, shop the local market, and most important, fill up their empty 2-L Pepsi bottles with some good hungarian wine. A 2.L plastic bottle was about 1000 HUF ($6). Needless to say, we purchase made our fare share of purchases (Sorry, they don’t ship or export to the US and I bought it all in pastic jugs as I can’t carry it through the trip – you’ll just have to make a trip to Hungary and try it yourself or befriend my sister who bought a couple bottles.)