Budapest
This weekend was definitely my favorite trip so far. I really liked the city, but even more important, I really like the people I was traveling/staying with. Before I recount my weekend in Budapest, here are three reasons why it’s an incredibly small word:
1. On the plane from Venice to Budapest, I noticed the man next to me had Medill bag. Turns out he went to NU and knew my dad.
2. I stayed with Stephanie Oh, a girl from northwestern studying in Budapest, and her room mate there was my next door neighbor in Allison last year.
3. One of Stephanie’s friends in Budapest went to high school with one of my friends from NU.
This happens all over the place, especially meeting friends of friends studying abroad various places, and it’s so strange and nice.
Anyway, Budapest. I realized getting on the plane in venice that I had never felt more like an ignorant American. I knew nothing about Hungary, so here are a couple facts. Little known fact (or possibly a widely known fact that I was unaware of), Budapest is actually two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by river. Hungary uses the Hungarian Florint, and 260 Ft. is equal to 1 euro (which was really nice. A beer costs about 500ft (sorry, that’s the only price I remember to measure against, which is weird because I didn’t even buy a beer).
We got to Budapest thursday night and stephanie took us back to her apartment in buda. We cooked some dinner (which was really fun because we can’t really cook with our host families) and then went to bed. The next day we walked around and saw most of the main sights, St. Stephen’s basilica, the Opera House, the Chain bridge, the Great Synagogue, and Parliament, then we rushed back and cooked dinner again (a spicy vegetable soup) and headed out to a sausage and palinka festival in a castle. It. Was. Awesome. Palinka is “is a traditional Hungarian[1]and Romanian double-distilled fruit brandy that is produced in Hungary and inTransylvania. It is most often made from various kinds of fruit; the most common varieties are made from plums, pears, or apricots. It may also be made from apples, cherries, mulberries, or quince.” I wasn’t a huge fan, but it was ok. The sausage was delicious, and we also bought this thing that was kind of like a cross between a doughnut and a cinnamon roll. It was dough rolled around a metal stick then cooked by rolling it over a fire pit grill thing, then it had sugar and cinnamon on the outside. It was really really good.
The next day we woke up at noon and headed to the thermal baths. They were inside a huge pretty building, and basically you walk around to the 25+ different baths of various temperatures and chill for a while in each one. After only having taken european showers for over a month, it felt really good to be like underwater. I missed swimming. After the baths we went out for a nice dinner and then spent the rest of the night hanging out at one of stephanie’s friend’s apartment. It was so nice to be able to hang out all together in one place. This is one of the biggest downsides of living with families in padova. We have no place to gather and just hang out. We eventually headed home, where I read for about an hour, then got in a cab at 4:30 in the morning, flew to rome, sat for three hours, flew to venice, sat for an hour, took a bus back to Padova, wrote a paper, took a tylenol sinus pm, and slept for 10 hours. The end. It was an awesome weekend, but these thursday to sunday trips are exhausting and really make me resent the fact that I have to take classes.
Additional thought: While we were cooking friday night the power went out, and emily and I went out to find candles. We went to the supermarket, and for some reason this was the only time we couldn’t find an english speaking hungarian, so emily had the brilliant idea to draw a picture of a candle and show it to someone who worked there. After doing this once, I’m surprised it’s the first time we’ve had to. Anyway, it worked, we got our candles, and as we opened the door to stephanie’s apartment, the electricity started working again.
