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Jo napot kivanok (hello) from Budapest~
oh my what a crazy couple of days. THE TRAIN... Okay so it was our first kind of mishap. We get to the train station in Prague and we are waiting for the train which finally arrives and there is no one to explain what is what...so the doors are all locked and all the passengers are running from car to car and people are getting on the train and then this train door slams and Katie and I think oh my they are going to leave with out us so we find this open door and I throw my bag in and jump aboard and I am laughing so hard because this is just ridiculous and Katie is laughing so hard she can't lift her luggage and so I am pulling it up and she is pushing and then she gets on the train and we finally find a place to sit. Sean finds us later and we move to a different spot on the train. This is all very stressful. Well we had bought sleeper car tickets and we were not in sleeper cars. The train was NASTY! not just oh this is a European experience but just gross. The toilet has no water and the sink has no water and the our cabin...oh the seats were plastic with who knows what living on it. We figure we will be cuddling with the bugs for the night. The train people finally come by and look at our passports and tickets about 1 hour after getting aboard. They speak only like Hungarian or Czech and he tells Sean we are in the wrong spot and we are supposed to be in several train cars ahead so we get up there and the door is locked. We would have to get off the train and re board and it is like 12:30 at night and we are just too tired to go through the hassle and stress so we sleep on the narrow plastic benches. They wake us up like every half hour or so it seems. The whole thing is just funny because it is just crazy. We met up with Ana and Gabby from Sweden and they become our new traveling companions.
We get to Budapest and it is immediately obvious that the language barrier is going to be much more challenging. The money is in Forints and there are about 180 forints to a dollar. We are exhausted and we are trying to think and read Hungarian and ride the metro and buy tickets. The five of us make our way through metros and the streets of Budapest on zero sleep. The buildings are falling apart and everything is very old. Crumbling down old. An interesting thing I did not mention that was also true in Prague is that there is graffiti everywhere on all these old buildings. It is 8am in the morning. The train took all night.
We get to our hostel that looks like and abandon building and the first floor is empty and torn up. The second floor is our spot and the accommodations are "simple" but the people are nice and there are clean sheets. Things to be happy for. We have a pastry and drinks at the cafe down the street while we wait for our rooms to be ready. So Sean heads off with the Swedish girls because Katie and I really want to go to this museum. We are so tired that we don't really want to do anything except sleep, but we are here and so lets just keep going.
We shower which is an improvement in our condition. Katie and I head out with our new map. New language, new money, no sleep. We really want to go to the House of Terror a museum of WWII era, and we must go today because it will be closed tomorrow. We end up getting in for free because Katie brought her student ID. The museum is amazing. It is in an old building that was the former headquarters of the Arrow Cross the Nazi occupied Hungary's version of the Gestapo and the AVO/AVH, the communist Hungary's secret police. Hungary initially allied with Hitler to try and regain territorial losses in WWI but in 1944 the country was taken over by the Nazi's. The Budapest Jews were exterminated who had up to that point survived because of the treaty or whatever you called the agreement. They came in and murdered all the Jews, shooting them into the river. To save bullets they would tie groups together, shoot one person so they would all fall into the river and the others would drown. They executed hundreds in the basement of this building. I was on the verge of tears within 10 min of being in the museum. It is all just incredibly sad. At one point Hungary's population was 25% Jewish and now it is like a quarter of a percent. The exhibit is really really well done but mostly in Hungarian so we wish we would have had the English translation unit.
We leave and are now wandering the streets toward some other sites. I tell Katie I am too tired to talk and so is she, so she reads from the guide book and I point and shoot pictures. Too tired really to appreciate the things we see. We head off to Hero square and toward the city park.
Budapest is on a thin layer of earth above thermal springs which is why they have these many thermal baths to enjoy all over the city. We will go today. The word PEST comes from the Slavic word meaning "oven". Budapest used to be three cities and now is one. There is a Buda side and a Pest side split down the middle by the Danube river. The buda side is hilly and the pest side flat and with all the metros and much of the sites. This region used to b occupied by Romans and so there are old ruins on the Buda side. There are huge statues all over the city which are really like I said HUGE. The city in some places looks like an older New York, very metropolitan with all the lastest fashion sprinkled with souvenir touristy shops. Many times the service charge is included on tabs and so it is hard to figure out what you are paying for because everything is in Hungarian and the money is challenging and the servers usually are stoic at best, rude at worst.
Last night we went to a WONDERFUL restaurant and had phenomenal Hungarian food and had a really nice waiter. The restaurant was in the basement and it was old and brick with no windows. The walls and floor were covered with rugs. We came home after dinner and went to sleep. MUCH needed sleep. It is around 9 am in the morning now. We are going to explore the Buda side today and walk across the chain bridge over the Danube and go to the thermal baths....I did bring my bathing suit.
Szia,
Renel
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