big blog from budapest, written on the train...

We just got to Prague, so here's some easy reading for the folks back in the states... It seems to be one big wall of text so sorry about that... i'll fix it later but for now i'll leave it be. I wrote it in word so it screwed me over...lol


Budapest, one side of the city is the Buda side, and we stayed in the Pest side, they are separated by the Danube River with a few bridges in view every way you look, much like Portland. It was an amazing city and I’d highly suggest anyone able to, to make sure and check it out if they ever make it across the Atlantic. The language barrier is almost non-existant, since 90% of the people there speak great English. We never made it out of the city but I figure that’s something I can do if I ever make it back here, I could easily spend an entire week or two there. We stayed for 3 nights after only planning to be there for two.

Since I’m on another 7 hr train ride to Prague right now, I have awhile to catch up with the blog, since we stayed out til late last night and I pretty much passed out the minute I walked into the dorm. I’ll get to the rest of that night later, it was a pretty awesome day... We just passed a castle on top of a hill looking over some little Hungarian town just across the Danube River. That was pretty cool.
I don’t remember all that I spoke of in my last entry since I wrote it straight into the blog site I use, so I’ll just go ahead and recap the trip to Budapest. Our hostel was pretty awesome, we stayed in an 8 person dorm with 4 sets of bunkbeds. We stayed 3 nights and had a few different sets of folks come in and out in our time there. Three people were our roommates the whole time, Nikki and Colene, from California, and some suuuuper quiet girl who I’m pretty sure works somewhere around there since she was pretty much up at the same time every morning and hanging out at the hostel every night. We exchanged hello and bye a few times but for the most part, she didn’t seem to talk to anyone. The two from California were our homies for the remainder of our time in Budapest. We got along fine with them, due to being roomies, but both of us agreed that Nikki is probably a complete bitch. Both were pretty hot and had no problems flaunting it...lol.

The first night we hung out with them we went to a park where people just brought drinks and drank til they puked... well, at least the kids were... The grown ups pretty much people watched and drank a bunch themselves. We helped Colene get back to the hostel due to being shit faced. When we got their we all were pretty beat from our long day and everyone pretty much crashed the minute we got there.
The next day Anthony and I went to do all the touristy stuff that people do when in Budapest, we snapped some pics, had some Hungarian food (Pork with onions, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and little balls of bread) I’m sure I forgot someof the stuff in it but oh well. It was an amazing dish, and ended up being my one and only meal of the day... which, has seemed to be the norm on this trip so far. We’ve been gone for a week and a few days and we’ve only had more than one meal a day maybe 3 times. It’s our ongoing joke that we’ll probably end up just finding some pizza somewhere later on.

I snapped a few pics of some great architecture, saw a couple doing their wedding photos, and the bride may have easily been the best looking bride I’ve ever seen. I did snap a few pics of them so I’ll share them when I get online in a seperate entry with the rest of the pics from here. We found out that Rod Stewart was holding a free show near Heroes Square. We decided to meet up with the roomies and head to that around 7pm.

I can’t imagine myself saying this... but I’m gonna. Rod Stewart was an awesome show. It started off with a bunch of Hungarian singers doing some of their own songs, with some English songs sprinkled in. One girl looked like Pink and I said, I bet she does a Pink song at some point... sure enough I called that one...haha. There was a bit of Michael Jackson and a few other rock songs that I don’t remember right off. I’VE NEVER BEEN IN A PLACE WITH THAT MANY PEOPLE, SERIOUSLY. At leat a half-million people, but most likely more than that. There were screens up allover the place that people were watching and taking video of, because they were so far back they couldn’t actually see the show... if that puts it into perspective. I only know this because we decided to walk through the crowd and find a drink, but the place we were standing was in the area where you couldn’t drink. The funny thing about that though, the area was kind of gated off, but you just had to go through a little checkpoint when you go in there so they can check you for booze. They must’ve sucked at it though, since I saw a fair amount of people still drinking where we were.

So after going through the little checkpoint, we went towards the stage... we pretty much just kep walking until we were about 30 feet from the stage... at the end of the show, we were about 12 feet from Rod Stewart. Anthony and I are used to rock shows where we try to find a mosh pit, this was definitely not that type of show...haha It seemed like noboody knew they could get into the close in area so it was the only empty-ish area in about 6 football fields worth of place to watch from.

*
Pardon the blog interruption, we just pretty much bribed a ticketing agent to get a ticket through Slovakia, since it’s not covered under the Eurorail ticket that we have... even though we asked a ton of times about a ticket to Prague and they said every time that we didn’t need to buy a ticket, bastards. So we didn’t... now we’re approached by the ticket lady on the train as we head through Slovakia, and she says that we need to buy a ticket. Anthony talked to her and she said we can get a receipt from her for 44 Euro showing that we paid our way through the country... or just give her 20 Euro to not give us a reciept and go on through, while risking not having a ticket and having to actually purchase one from someone else... though she said she would be the only one checking tickets, so I hope that’s the case. We’ve agreed that neither one of us wants to end up in a prison in Slovakia...haha. We gave her $25 because we haven’t even seen a Euro in our travels yet. Hopefully she doesn’t hop off and let another ticket agent hop on while seeing us get screwed over... that would be fucked up.

Anyways...
So after the concert, we ditched the chicks and ended up hanging out at the hungarian pub underground of the hostel we stayed in. It was a good choice, we partied it up with the locals. There was a guy singing, playing the guitar, the piano a couple times, and yes... even a Kazoo. The one man show was pretty awesome even though it was in Hungarian and neither of us could understand a word he was singing. He did, however, do a song in English and gave us a thumbs up...lol When we got there, we got a few hard looks from some of the people there, but after chatting with the guy for a few minutes and actually clapping and yelling for him when songs were finished, everyone seemed to be cool with us. Apparently we even sat at a table with a few of them, but I don’t even remember that... Anthony mentioned it a bit ago. (We HAD to try some of the local shots damnit!) LOL. People even took pictures of us, most likely to include in whatever fac ebook or myspace type of site they’re on. Oh, and speaking of Facebook, it seems like everyone at every hostel checks in and then jumps on facebook about 5 minutes later... kind of funny to see... Though I can’t hate on that, I do that with my netbook for the most part.

So yeah, we both pretty much agreed that the random Rod Stewart concert and the really cool /locals only type of pub, made yesterday the best day of the trip so far.

Random thoughts...
*Trains are never on time here in Europe... so that sucks.

*We’ve ran into more and more Americans... we’re sitting next to an elderly couple on the train right now actually... All signs point to them being nice people.

*We’ve found a pool hall in Bucharest and Budapest, it wouldn’t be us if we still didn’t try to shoot pool at least once in every country. Especially when you only pay about $4 an hour on a beautiful table... as we’ve done in both places.

*We stopped at a little pint-sized mini mart and got a drink and a muffin... the best muffin I’ve ever had, literally. No real details for ya, it was just that friggin good. So much so, that we stopped and got one just like it the next day... the same amazing. I would have got a few for this long ass train ride but all the people selling them decided to close on a Sunday, as we’ve found that most places do. Strange as it may seem, most stores close on Saturday also. So if you’re really needing that new pair of Nike’s, you better grab them on Friday or you won’t have them by Monday when you go back to school.

*The pickles here are neither Dill or sweet pickles... This is something I’ve never thought of... what’s a pickle taste like when it’s not in a jar off the shelf??? Well, I know what it tastes like, and honestly I didn’t really like it.

*The other day my checking account had $4740 in it, and using the currency calculator, it came out to around 1,079,500 Hungarian Forint. So yeah, I’m a damn millionaire... that’s what’s up. 
I still have a 500 Forint bill that i’ll stick with my left over money from Romania... I figure I’ll have a nice collection of change and bills to show off when I get back home, and added all up together, it may be about $5 in all...lol. I had two 500 Forint bills, but I bought a 500ml Nestea for 370 Forint.

*We’ve watched a lot of World Cup matches, so I’ve been pretty happy with that thus far.

*I can last on one meal a day for the most part, but I can’t imagine it’s been the healthy way to go about it...lol. A diet of beer has worked so far though.
That’s about all I can think up so far, this took about 2 hours off the7 hr trip, so that’s nice.