Budapest

So we finally arrived in Budapest, Hungary in the morning and went our separate ways. I had already made contact with a hostel, upon my brother's recommendation. So now I just had to find my way there., They had given me directions in the email exchange that were pretty direct and simple. Take the 7 or 173 bus, to the station right after going under the grey bridge, walk back under the bridge make a left and we are the third street on the right. What they didn't mention was it was really TWO lefts. Left under the bridge, and then left again. So before I figured that out I walked around for 30-45min trying to find this place. Finally I went to a cafe and asked nicely to use their internet, I had no money to buy anything at this point. I was able to bring up a map and find my way. Which reitereated the fact that if you give me a map I can basically find my way anywhere, but give my crap directions and not so much. But from the second I walked in I knew that this place was a great place. Thanks again Jonas for the amazing recommendation. The hostel, Backpack Budapest, or guesthouse as they like to call it was exactly what I had needed. Maybe not the cleanest or high tech place, but very family. From the second you walk in everyone, staff and guests all want to know who you are, where you're from, where you've been and where you're going. There's a very cool common room and kitchen. I had been staying in pretty nice hostels but none of them were very communal and I had had problems meeting people. Which has never been a problem for me in my life, so I was definitely a bit lost. But this really brightened up my European experience and it has been getting better ever since. So I immediately made a whole group of friends. The nice part about this place is the fact that almost all of the staff were guests at one point. It's just like being an involved customer before being a server or any other service job, it really brings an essential element to the service cycle. This place was so cool. All the different rooms had themes and murals. They had a backyard with a yurt and other sleeping areas, a campfire and a zen pond. They also had a great book and movie library, as well as acoustic guitars. Apparently every Aussie traveller knows how to play. Also they let you put your own music on or make requests for the sound system. I started speaking with a super friendly young welschman, Derry, and his new friend Melanie, an Aussie. They were both so nice and cute, I don't feel bad about saying that becasue they were both 19. God I'm old! We all went out to check out the amazing market open Mon-Sat right by the metro stop. I figured it would be nice to pick up and cook dinner for everyone so I made my specialty, pasta, with mushroom cream sauce with chicken and pancetta. Basically a carbanara without the egg yolk. We proceeded to pick up tickets to the Royal Hungarian Ballet's performance of Gone With The Wind. Yes that's right, I said I BOUGHT tickets to go see the ballet. A group of people from the hostel were all going and the tickets were only $5 so, why not. By the way, $5 is 1,000 furhint, the Hungarian currency. It takes a bit of getting used to when you get $4000, bar tabs etc. Sometimes dinner could be upwards of 10000 between a few people. We went to the ballet, which was at the National Opera house, which is gorgeous, my view on ballet was not changed, and considering the performance I feel no better way to articulate it by saying "Frankly my dear, I couldn't give a damn." I dozed a bit but fought through most of it. We went to a very cool art bar afterwards called Instant. It was a few differrent rooms with a larger more open room in the middle with many installations hanging from it. But it wasn't actually open air at all. Which brings me to another gripe with Europe, smokey bars and restaurants. I can't say I didn't know this was going to be the case, and even though it has some novelty, it wears off pretty quickly. As someone that's been known to enjoy a smoke or 4 when out drinking, I am so glad that you can't in bars in California. I mean, really, how hard is it to just go outside? I even prefer it, and that way you and everyone else, doesn't smell like an ashtray, can see and can breath next day. Eh, cost of doing business I guess, but seems pretty rational to me, at least during the non-winter months. Enough bitching, I have found that the more you concetrate on the bad elements the worse your entire trip seems. Well, I left instant a bit earlier, because the past two nights hadn't been sleep filled. Keep in mind, in Europe, leaving early is around 2-4am. I did decide to leave during the 3 hour window the Budapest metros don't run. So I trusted my sense of direction and started walking back towards the main stop by the market not too far from the hostel. My sense of direction is better than my since of distance because I arreved there probably about 45 minutes later and by that time just hailed a cab. Thankfully they have meters there, but mine seemed to be moving pretty fast. The important thing is, I got back home. I crashed. The next morning, most of my hostel mates were later to rise than I because they were out until 6 or so. I was very glad to have gotten some good sleep. We had decided the day before to go check out the City Park Baths. But after the nights activities only Derry, Melanie, and I made it out. Budapest is an amazing place. A gorgeous, friendly city. My favorite in Europe so far. Things are reasonably priced, and for the most part people are friendly. We got to the baths, and they were amazing. They are the largest public baths in all of Europe. They were built in and within a fortified building during the war in case budapest was attacked the citizens would have a place to bathe. They have a great 'proxy watch' system to get in and out and access and lock your lockers. It's a plastic band that has a chip in it that allows you to choose a locker, lock it and a display in the locker room to tell you which locker is yours in case you forget. Now most of you that know me well know about my dire oppostion to any type of public pool, hot tub, bath etc, but for I wasn't about to let that get in the way of this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience and I am glad it didn't. The baths were wonderful. Within in the building there are probably over 25 different baths of different shape, size and temperature. They also house about 15 steam rooms and saunas. The temperature of some of the steam rooms would never be legal in the states. I LOVE steam rooms and I could barely last for 5 minutes in some of them. But man do you feel great coming out of them. Take a quck splash in the cold pool for a bit and then back to the lovely thermal warmth of the other baths. The you go outside to the massive courtyard with has 3 huge baths. The middle one was under construction but looked as if when it was functional would have been magnificent. We spent most of our time in the pool closer to the back. This was due to one amazing feature. The whirlpool, and I mean that in the literal sense. The pool basically had three main features. A great statue that had a continuous waterfall flowing from the base, large square jets that would push a strong stream of bubbles up from the floor of the pool, and the whirl pool. To imagine the whirlpool, picture a large built-in hot tub in the middle of the larger pool. The tub has a small entrance so as not to be a complete circle. Surrounding the inner area is a much larger ring also with a small entrance. About every fifteen minutes the jets would switch between the squares and the whirlpool and that is when the magic happened. The outer circle had about 8 jets that would pump high pressure water all in the same directions so if you just picked your feet up and floated it would fling you around circle. It's like the spa version of an astonaut's centrifuge training. It might not sound like that much fun, but when you saw the faces of all the adults that had the gall to step up and into the circle you would think otherwise. During one of the breaks I started a conversation with a woman traveller from Chicago, Laura. We instantly hit it off and soon after realized that we had just about identical travel routes both past and future. Although she is doing a full year and including the western part of the globe. We spent the next 4 hours acting childish while conversing like adults. It was an amazing day. By the time we got out we looked like prunes. Or my friend Mike Watson might call us the human version of Shrivels. We exchanged info and vowed to meet again down the line, which was basically inevitable because we were already going to be in the same place at the same time so often. Derry, Mel and I headed back to the hostel to figure out dinner. While we all said we wanted to go out, by the time we got back we were all so drained we decided to just stay in. Derry started a campfire and we just took it easy for the night. I crashed pretty early. Got up the next morning and headed out to the city to explore some more. I needed to try some of this amazing goulyas or goulash I had heard about. I went to the place the hostel recommended and was met with more amazing service. The waiter refused to serve me if all I was getting was the appatizer portion of the soup. I told him to fuck off and took my business elsewhere. I went and bought some various gifts for people and asked the nice lady there where she recommended. Ended up at a place called "For Sale." This was my kind of place. Big bowls of peanuts on the tables and ground littered with shells. Business cards, photos, brocures and other materials plastered the walls held up by tacks, tape and staples. They were more than happy to serve me the goulash, and for the equivilent of about $5.50 I was presented with a huge basket of bread, fresh paprika powder and spread, and a huge bowl of goulash with a ladel to serve into my smaller bowl. Easily a meal for two or three. It was delicious and I was left with another full meal. Laura decided to switch over to our hostel because we had spoke so highly about it and her's was a bit too crazy for her liking. So I headed back to meet her, coincidentally enough we ended up on the same train and headed over together. I got her settled and we both ended up taking a nap and catching up on emails etc. When we finally awoke our other dormmates had returned and we all wanted to go somewhere to try the Chicken Paprikash we had heard about. So we got ready and hit the town. We eventually settled on a place and 3/4 of us got the paprikash. It was very good, not amazing but maybe from a different place it would have been better. We were all feeling a bit under the weather so we decided to head back to the hostel for another quiet night. For Sophie (the dormmate) and myself that didn't end up happening. There were a bunch of people hanging out in the common room and we all were in the mood to have some fun. I decided to teach them the American drinking game of Kings. (old people you can google that one too). It got pretty heated and one of my new favorite rules is that you must end all or most sentences with "in my pants," give it a try for a second you'll see what all the fuss is about; in my pants. The next day I was planning on heading to Croatia to meet my highschool friend Arnaud, or Frenchy as he known outside of his home country. Our plan was to spend a night or two in Zagreb, and then head south to the beaches of Split and surrounding islands. He was coming from his current and original hometown of Paris. Laura was planning on going to Montenegro and then Croatia. Her directional and map-reading skills aren't the best and I informed her that it made more sense to do Croatia first becasue comng from the north it's on the way to Montenegro, she agreed and decided to tag along, and we both had new travel buddies. We went to the train station to catch the 1:30 train to Zagreb, we were cutting it close and had to scramble to get there on time, but it ended up the train was actually a 1 o'clock train not 1:30 so it didn't really matter. We decided we would just catch the 5pm train and walk around the city some more. We made sure we got back to the station with plenty of lead time just to be safe. We got back early enough that Laura decided to challenge one of the chess masters at the train station. I think we all know how this was going to end up, but she only lost 200, which is $1usd. Meanwhile I was keeping a close eye on the board to see which platform our train was on. Usually they tell you 20 min before hand yet our 5:00 train still didn't have a platform at 4:50. Finally they put Track 7 up on the board and we hustled over there. The train had a Budapest-Zagreb sign on it. So we got on, we quickly found out that train had just come from Zagreb and we had somehow missed the one that just left for Zagreb. This one was really not our fault, and got me very bitter towards the train system I had grown to love. Anyway, we were both pretty fed up and frustrated at that point we decided to just find a place close to the train station to make the next day easier. Our budgets vary slightly, her's is a bit bigger, but she has a longer trip. She is a bit older and used to nice accommodations so she was somewhat hosteled-out. So we agreed to go the boutique hotel we found, she would treat to hotel, I would treat to dinner. I definitely came out a bit ahead. So we got settled in. It was kind of funny because our respective beds were even smaller than the hostel beds, anywhere. But it's always nice being able to take a shower without your sandals on. We spent that evening getting to know each other better. She is a great person we have very similar travel interests. The funny thing is, is that likely in our normal lives we are two completely different people. She's 34 and got fed up with her coporate lawyer job, and it's demanding hours, and decided to travel the world for a year. I'm a 24 year-old recent grad, basically a slacker that said F*** it why not? But it's worked out really well because we both have a lot to learn from eachother and offer as far as travel skills go. We spoke with reception about dinner options and he gave us two close options. One of them was a very Jewish name, so us both being MOTC had an easy decision, and a great decision it was. We had one of the best meals of either of our trips. I had a wild boar ragu that was out of this world and she had.... I'll add later, something that was served with bacon wrapped grean beans. Both stuffed we headed back to the room to call it a night. We decided to make full use of the room and catch the second train to Zagreb instead of getting up around 6am.