Budapest!

Soo, where to begin here. well i think i should fist explain that my long study tour started with a 23 hour bus ride from copenhagen to budapest (thats in Hungary for all of you non-geography majors). Surprisingly the bus ride wasnt that bad, in fact if was a pretty good bonding time for all of the highschool-esque clicks that formed on the trip. It was also a very informational time where i learned a lot, and i might even be so bold as to say too much, about some of the people i was traveling with. The major downside to the whole bus ride was the impossibility of finding a comfortable way of sleeping even if you had two seats to yourself. If it wasnt a belt buckle keeping you awake it was and arm rest and if it wasnt an arm rest it was your neighbors foot which somehow worked its way onto your second seat from across the isle. In one daring attempt i had actually swung my feet at odd angles up against the bus window while my head hung off the end of the other seat right in the middle of the isle (i was desperate). All was going well until someone walking back from the bathroom walked straight into my head, but let me tell you those 15 minutes of sleep i got were glorious and worth the injury.
Ok but enough about the bus ride lets get to Budapest, oh but before i do i should say that the amount of pictures i have from the first two days of my trip is, well, zero. I accidentally deleted my memory card on the second night in a misguided attempt and determining how much space i had left on my camera. If i remember correctly there were some of a cathederal...quite picturesque actually (kind of lord of the rings looking), and then some of the parliament building and maybe a palace or two...oh right and there were actually a lot from when me and some kids went walking across the city and climbed a hill and got all these great pictures right as the sun was setting of the city and of these monuments we had climbed to see...yeah those would have been amazing. I really think you guys would have enjoyed some of those...but what can you do, lets just focus on the amazing pictures i DO have.
Where my pictures start off is when we went on a tour of the old castle caves under the old castle hill in Budapest, which sounded pretty interesting i thought. But, it was amazing how wrong i could be. It turns out the tour we took actually had very little to do with the historical aspects of the caves and instead focused on the symbolic meaning of different rooms in the caves and how they related to the History of Hungary. To give you an example, at one point we were actually told to walk down a pitch-black dead end tunnel to give us a feeling of what it felt like when when the Hapsburgs took over Hungary. I did feel a sense of despair at this point in the tour but it was less because my connection to the symbolic history of Hungary and more due to the fact that that was when i realized how bull shit this tour was and that we still had another half an hour of it left to go.
There was one redeming part of the tour and that was when we entered a room that traps a lot of moister and so the walls and ceilings were covered with some kind of sliming mold or fungus. I noticed that some people had stuck coins onto the ceiling in this mold stuff so me and this other girl began to smoosh coins into it as well, which was surprisingly entertaining. The small gold circle near the top of this picture is one of the many coins we stuck into the cave mold. Id say all together we stuck maybe 100 florence worth on that ceiling, but we weren't sweating it since the exchange rate is something like 150 florence to the dollar. A fun little fact about my stay in Budapest is that the first night i was there i pulled out 10,000 florence (about 57 dollars) which i was given in a single bill from the atm and which lasted me the 3 days i was in Budapest. In situations like that is it any wonder that sometimes foreign currencies feel like monopoly money?. Drinks at a bar were around 1.50-2 dollars and so even a night out on the town ended up being absurdly cheap. This is where it would have been wise to do my gift shopping but instead all i bought was a Budapest t-shirt for myself...but just think of it like this, if i do get you a gift now it will be of much higher quality.
Ok i realize this has been heavy on the words and light on pictures so far. So lets get some pictures in here. This ones of the hill i mentioned climbing earlier which has a gigantic statue on top which, if i remember correctly, had something to do with liberty. Sorry thats all i got...it was very beautiful though, and from the top of the hill you could get some very impressive pictures of the city...which i of course deleted not long after taking them.











This is just a picture of three of the kids i hung out with the most on my trips to Budapest and Vienna. From left to right we have: Meg (she goes to to an all girls school and really hates it when you call it that), Debbie and Sam (who is from Portland and goes to school at RIT, strange coincidences huh?). One night in Budapest though me and Sam ended up going out with a different group of girls and we thought it would be fairly easy to find a bar so we just started wandering through the city. After about an hour we found our selves in the sketchier part of town where homeless people, prostitutes and all night liquor stores became quite common. We actually got to see a 'lady of the night' doing that classic leaning into a car window pose at a red stop light...i was really upset that i didnt have my camera at that point, although in retrospect that probably would have only caused trouble. The last thing i needed after an hour and a half of wandering in a strange city in the freezing cold was to be slapped araund by a Budapestian pimp. (Budapestian might not be a real word but a google search didn't provide me with an answer so i figured i'd just make one up)
This last picture is just one that i like. i took it from the window in our Budapest hostel. I dont really have any interesting stories relating to our hostel, although it was very strange how in Hungary they have lots of American TV shows and movies on TV but they are all dubbed in Hungarian unlike in Denmark where they usually just use subtitles. One night when me and Sam were waiting for someone to ask us to do something we just laid around and watched 2 Fast 2 Furious in Hungarian. It was strange how after about 15 minutes i completely forgot that it was in a different language because it was so easy to follow what was happening even though i had never seen the movie before...i guess Paul Walkers amazing acting abilities transcend human language, kind of like Cirque de Soliel...