Monday, August 9th -- Budapest, Hungary
I woke up in the croweded dorm room this morning and realized that I really need some time to just relax in my own place with my own shower and no roommates. I've been traveling "alone" in Europe for some weeks now, but I've hardly ever really been alone. Maybe I'll get a hotel room for a few days in Vienna, my next stop. At least I think it's my next stop. Liam keeps trying to persuade me to go to Bucharest, Romania with him. It's tempting, as I'd like to see Romania, but I feel more like going west.
Wednesday, August 11th -- Budapest, Hungary
Monday, Liam and I did the tourist thing and went to see parliament. There
wasn't much to see, really. Very impressive building, though. I got my
picture taken with a statue of some famous Hungarian poet. We went a walled
city-within-a-city and wandered around. Not much fun, but we had a nice
view of Buda. I say Buda because Budapest gets its name from two separate
cities, Buda and Pest, one on each side of the Danube.
We had dinner in the same, great restaurant. I had turkey breast and broccoli in cheese sauce with roast potatoes. Yum! We met up with Jean Phillipe and his friend Julie. While searching for someplace to have a drink we picked up another American. He was pretty obnoxious. He observed that when you meet two American girls traveling together, one is always the fun one and the other is the spoiler. He told us that what you need to do is execute a good old "pick and roll" with a friend. He takes out the spoiler so that you can get a clean shot at the fun one.
We found a cool place called Morrison's Music Pub, but I was getting really tired we were planning on catching an early train the next morning, so Liam and I left. We started to walk back to the hostel, but we went the wrong way at some point and it took us forever to find our we back.
The next morning, we got up at 5:00. We had decided to visit Hungary's
large lake -- Lake Balaton. We arrived at the train station shortly before
6:30. There was only one 6:30 departure listed, and we didn't recognize
any of the towns it was destined for. The town you want isn't always listed,
so we went to the gate and asked if the train was going to Lake Balaton.
We were told it was, so we hopped on. A few hours later, we realized we
had made a mistake. The train was indeed going to Lake Balaton, but we
were on the north side of the lake instead of the south side, where we
wanted to be. We ended up in a dump of a town called Badacsony. There was
absolutely nothing there and yet the place was swarming with German tourists
and had bad food and cheesy souvenirs to cater to them. The only interesting
thing was a goofy old man selling whips. He'd swing a whip around his head
and then Crack! He'd grin as he scared little German kids.
We hopped the next train out of Badacsony, returning to Budapest with out heads hung low. On the way back, the train stopped at a station on the edge of the lake. There happened to be another train there that seemed to be going to the other side of the lake. We figured that our day couldn't get any worse, so we hopped off our train and on to the other. On the new train, we happened to run into Kevin, the guy from Dallas we'd me in Prague. He was traveling with a guy from Britain that he'd met. We all got off in Siofok. Kevin and his friend went to find a campsite, and Liam and I saw what there was to see in town. It didn't take us long to decide that we didn't like Lake Balaton. It seemed to be just an area for German tourists. The fact that it was cloudy and cold didn't help any, either. We had a beer in a park by the lake, a mime conversation with an old Hungarian man, and hopped the train back to Budapest.
We got in at 7:30 and made our way to our favorite restaurant. It was packed, so we were forced to go somewhere else. After dinner we went back to the hostel and went out for a drink with Horatio, the Romanian guy we'd met earlier. The conversation got pretty intense. Horatio had tears in his eyes at one point while describing how he can't change the way his parents are because they lived too long under communism and can't adjust to the changes. He also told us that he'd had trouble getting a bed in the hostel because he was Romanian. I guess there is a lot of prejudice in Hungary toward Romanians. After our conversation, I decided to give in to Liam's attempt to get me to go to Romania with him. While Czech Republic and Hungary have been fairly westernized, it seems that Romania is still much as it was under communist rule.
We went back to the hostel, picked up a Brit named Craig, and got a taxi
to Morrison's Music Pub. The place was completely packed. I talked with
two italians for a while and ended up sitting with a guy from Budapest
and a girl named Sylvia who was Hungarian but who grew up in Sweden. I
got back to the hostel around 4:00.
Thursday, August 12th -- Budapest, Hungary
I'm now on a train bound for Vienna. Yesterday, Liam and I got up and went to take care of the things we needed to do in order to go to Romania. First, we went to the train station. The woman we talked to said that tickets would cost $63US from the border to Bucharest. That sounded ridiculously expensive to us. We then went to the Romanian embassy to get visas. The guy we talked to said we couldn't get visas until later in the week. At this point, I pretty much nixed the idea of going to Romania. Liam planned on getting a visa at the border, but I was a little sketched about that. I'd had enough trouble traveling to Prague without a ticket that I didn't relish the idea of traveling to Bucharest without a visa. 
We went to the Millennium Monument and saw the changing of the guard, complete
with goose-stepping and all. We then went to find a bath house. We found
one, but didn't end up going in as they wanted a deposit that was more
money than we had on us. 
We had dinner at our restaurant and then Liam caught his train. I hope
everything works out for him. I went back to the hostel and tried to get
in touch with Torbjorn, my Swedish friend from Paris. I thought maybe I'd
swing up to Scandinavia. I talked with his father who said that he was
in Lulea, where he goes to school way up north. That night I crashed early
and I felt good and rested for the first time in a while this morning.
Send
me email