April 11

4-11
Hi everyone! I just got back from spring break and I have so much to tell!! I think I’ll divide it up into separate blogs by city to make it more manageable. So I’ll start with last Friday.
Jen and I caught a plane from Madrid to Budapest in the evening. The plane was delayed an hour, and then the gate was changed without an announcement or anything, so we didn’t even realize it at first. We started getting confused when the tv screen that had previously said Budapest said another city, so we went to the information desk to ask and she said that it was at another gate. It was really stupid. How would we have known? They should have at least made an announcement. But it turned out ok. So we flew in a purple and pink plane (that amused me vastly) to Budapest and arrived after 1 am. The metro was closed, so we decided to walk to the hostel rather than pay for a taxi. It was interesting to walk through a strange city at almost 2 in the morning. It’s a side of Budapest we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. When we got there, we collapsed into bed without even changing. In the morning, we first had to exchange our money, since they don’t use the euro in Hungary. They use the forint, and there are about 280 forints to a euro. I exchanged 50 euros and walked out of the store with more than 14,000 forints! I felt like I should be nervous carrying that much money around! It was really confusing, because we never knew how much something cost. I spent a lot of time with my phone’s calculator that day.
We decided to take a Hop On-Hop Off tour. For those of you who don’t know, you get a 24 hr pass to get on this tour bus that stops at various points around the city, and you can get off whenever you want to explore something and then hop back on when it comes around again in 20 minute intervals. It was very nice because not only did we get the chance to see a lot of the important sights in Budapest, we also got easy transportation around the city. We saw St. Stephen’s Basilica, which I think is the most marble-encrusted church I’ve ever seen. It’s all reddish-pinkish marble inside, and really beautiful. We also saw the Opera House, which was exciting for me. There was a statue of Liszt on the outside, along with lots of other Hungarian composers like Bartok and Kodaly. There were also various monuments to these composers around the city. We also saw the academy of music where they studied. That was just the beginning of a music major’s dream trip! J I would have liked to go inside the opera house, but we didn’t have enough time. I think Jen thought I was weird cuz I was nerding out with all my music knowledge (here and in Vienna), but I just studied all these people in my music history classes and it was very exciting to see everything in real life. We also saw the Synagogue, which was a gorgeous building with two tall towers and lots of arches. We couldn’t go in that either, though, because it was Saturday and closed for the Sabbath. One of my favorite buildings was the Vajdahunyad Castle (yeah, we had fun trying to pronounce all this Hungarian!), which looked straight out of a fairy tale! It had towers and spires and a moat, and inside there was a little park and a church and the museum of agriculture. It was the cutest little castle! We walked by it again that night and it was all lit up and so beautiful! Right next to it was the city park, with a big zoo and the Szechenyi Spa, which is a Roman bath. But more on that later. Another of my favorite things was the Fishermen’s Bastion, which is a sort of wall that overlooks the city with little towers and crenulations and spires and stuff. It was really pretty.
Our tour came with a booklet of coupons, one of which was a free boat tour on the Danube! So we decided to take full advantage of that! It was a beautiful day, and it was lovely to be out on the water. Most of the important buildings in Budapest are on the river, so we got to see them from the street side and the river side. One of the most stunning buildings in Budapest is the Parliament building, which is just off the river. I never thought of government buildings being this ornate, but it was beautiful. It had tons of spires and arched windows, and a dome. I would have thought it was a palace.
The thing Jeanette wanted to do most was to swim in one of the Roman baths. We had a 20% off coupon in our booklet, so we went to the Szechenyi bath. It was nothing like what I expected. For one thing, the building was bright yellow! It was like a big courtyard with changing rooms and stuff in the walls and three outside pools: one for laps, and two thermal pools, one warm and the other hot. Both of the thermal pools had jets in various places in the walls and floors. There were roman fountains spraying water into the pools, and pillars all the way around the courtyard. I can’t imagine that it could have all been original Roman stuff. It looked too new. And they wouldn’t have let people play around stuff that old and priceless. It must be copies, or a roman themed pool using the same thermal waters as the Romans. But it looked cool. It was so relaxing to sit in the warm water being massaged by a jet after a day of walking around the city. I could use another bath right now! The only downside was getting out into the open air soaking wet. It’s only the beginning of April, after all, and it was quite chilly!
We were going to go the bus station sometime during the day to see what time the bus to Vienna left and to buy our tickets, but we ran out of time. So in the evening we still didn’t know when we would be able to leave, or even where the bus station was. I was getting pretty nervous about that. We got up at 6 the next morning to make sure we would have time to get everything figured out and still get an early bus. Turned out that there was a bus at 7, which we didn’t have time to get to, and the next one wasn’t until 11. So we had lots of free time. I wish we could have gotten an earlier bus so we could have gotten into Vienna earlier, but that’s all right. It was nice, because the bus station was having a special: 50% off bus tickets for youth! So my bus ticket was less than 20 euros! (I don’t know exactly how much since I paid in forints . . . .) It was a 3 hour drive to Vienna through pretty, though unexceptional, countryside. I read for a while, and slept. It had been an early morning, after all.
More about Vienna in the next post!