budapest...and things

So, we went to Budapest a few weekends ago (my birthday weekend), and I never posted about it! I've been meaning to post, but other things have been getting in the way...like:

a) the immigration office. grr. they can't speak english and give us the runaround like whoa. just grr.

b) the fact that I had school on Saturday....Since we had a 4 day weekend last weekend (Because Tuesday was March 15, a national memorial day here), but Monday was not a holiday, we had to make it up on Saturday! What kind of crap is that? It really wasn't so bad, I just watched movies and played Scattergories (oh yeah, they LOVE it) with my students. Also it rained, so we couldn't be outside anyway.

Here are pictures of the March 15 parade of people coming out of the castle dressed in folklore!

c) generally enjoying life when it's not raining....biking, walking, reading etc. It's nice not having homework and a part-time job to do after school...I actually have time to do things I like! It's pretty weird...I've never had that before, and I better not get too used to it, because Grad School's a-coming.

d) and when I'm not lesson planning, learning hungarian! which is actually pretty fun :)

So Budapest. We went to the Buda side to see the castle and crazy church that always interested me from across the Duna! Both were awesome to see up close, and the weather was great, so we had a nice day walking everywhereeee. I felt like I was back in my backpacking days when we were too poor to take the 1 euro bus, so we would walk everywhere...like 5 miles sometimes all around the cities we visited sightseeing! Eger isn't THAT big, so we never have to walk all that much, 15-20 minutes at the most....But we did a lot of walking in Budapest, which is pretty awesome on a nice day!

We were staying with Ben's aunt and uncle, so the next day we went to SzentEndre (a nearby city right on the river) which was adorable. Just one of those cute little cobble stone cities with nice churches and a nice vibe. What made this little town different was the really narrow alley ways connecting streets randomly. It was fun to run down the alleys (only big enough to fit like 2 people width-wise) and see what street you end up on on the other side! We also got treated to an awesome lunch...I got gypsy roast, gotta love that stuff! Oddly enough, gypsies played music while we ate, one on a violin and one on a special Hungarian instrument called a Cimbalom. They played songs that had to do with wanting money, because they wanted tips! THEN, the played "If I was a rich man..." which I recognized! But it was still about wanting money, which is pretty obnoxious, but not for me really since I couldn't understand the lyrics!

We also visited the Visegrád Castle, which is outside of Budpest, on top of a mountain! Here is the panorama I took from the top, when we were up there, as well as a view of the castle from down below!
This castle has a lot of awesome history as well, but we didn't go inside because it was closed by the time we got there!

We need to go back to Budapest though because there is a lot of things we still didn't see!