Europe Is a Little Chilly This Time of the Year

I moved out of Alaska for the first time in my life at age eighteen and found to my surprise, in the lower 48, it is possible to drive for 5 hours and be in a completely different state, as opposed to just being still in Alaska. Similarly I have recently discovered since moving out of America that one can hop on a fairly cheap flight and be in a totally different country!

On this note I just spent the last weekend in Budapest. A friend of mine on the program found an amazing deal on the Internet for a $200 ticket that included a nice hotel. So off we went. Other than a small run in with the mob, freezing cold weather, lots of Goulash and drab communist housing, the trip went flawlessly. Below are the details of the fun and beautiful things we saw.
Continued ...
2/3/06 First Day

Walking Tour on Our Own
We spent the first morning checking out the sights on our own. First walking down a cute street with lots of little shops. I went to my first H&M, and there were pink phones in the telephone booths! Budapest was once two cities Buda and Pest. They are divided by the Danube River, which you can cross at several bridges. The oldest of which is called the Chain Bridge. It was huge and beautiful. At the other side is the Buda side of town which is on a hill. This was the transportation to get up to the top. The view was awesome, but definitely a bit chilly.


The Matthias Church
This church was so gorgeous. We got lucky because there was a free English tour right when we showed up. This is the building where all of the Hungarian kings had been crowned and had also been destroyed several times through out Hungary's history. Both the Nazis and the Communists had their way with this place, putting stables in the church area and using the crypts underneath for sewage storage. But each time it was rebuild. Now it was almost completely restored.

Fishermen's Bastion and St. Steven
St. Steven was one of Hungarianain kings. I think his statue sorta looks like the old man guarding the holy grail in the last Indiana Jones movie.

Labyrinth Caves
Umm.. this was a mistake. So Budapest is apparently on top of a huge cave system and there are places to go explore and crawl through them. We thought this was it so we paid the admission fee and went inside. It started off a little cheesy, but with potential. The guide booklet told us the beginning was supposed to represent the beginning of the world and center of "our soul” and some other weird hippy stuff. The air was dense and damp and it was really dark. There was also this drum beat sound like a heartbeat that was honestly a little freaky especially when my friends would run ahead and jump out of dark corners. It was complete with fake cave drawings and odd heads coming out of the ground. Sorry I can'’t offer more of an explanation - there was nothing that made sense! When we finally meandered through all this craziness, we got to this one thing that said while they were "excavating" they had to stop because of a miraculous find. A fossil from the extinct species "Homo Consumpionous”. And the fossil was a Ked shoe print! It went on to show a fossil of a computer and the last straw - a Coke bottle! Are you kidding me???!! We only had two days in Budapest and we wasted an hour of it here!

More Walking
It was night by the time we got out, so we went around the rest of the sites in the dark. This was okay because most of them had really cool lights,but the museums were closed by then. Also what was really a bummer was we missed being able to see the great synagogue. Hungry had a Jewish population of around 40% before the Holocaust and there was the Dohany Street Synagogue built in 1859 in Budapest that fit around 3,000 people! We saw it from the outside, but it was closed when we got there.

2/4/06 Last Day

Opera House
Our first stop was to see the opera house and get tickets to Swan Lake, which was playing that night. Unfortunately the tours were later in the day and that’s when we were planning on going to the bathhouses so we missed that.

Turkish Bathhouses
When the Turks took over in the 1500s they put these amazing bathhouses all over Budapest. The one we went to was this huge structure with three swimming pool sized hot tubs in the courtyard and inside there were all these rooms with fancy columns and all these different tubs of different temperatures! It was AMAZING! And there were saunas and steam rooms all over the place.

Swan Lake
Then we saw the ballet Swan Lake in the opera house. I'’d never seen a ballet besides the Nutcracker and this was so cool. The dancing was absolutely amazing and kinda made me wish I had stuck with ballet lessons when I was little.

Authentic Dinner
For food that night, we got recommendation for a real authentic place for Hungarian food. After wandering super sketchy alleys to find it we arrived. It was so worth it at the moment, but not so much on the stomach later. Hungarian food is very heavily fried meat and potatoes and fried. A little too dense for my taste.

And that was it. The next day we hopped on a plane and headed back to Israel. Not such a bad way to spend the weekend!