Classes are finishing up here in Pest, and after finals, I'll be flying home next Sunday. I've been feeling very mixed emotions about the whole situation. For a while, I was dying to get home because of some issues with my living situation and a general inability to really feel any attachment for Budapest itself. However, the closer the end gets, the more I've realized, that there are many things I'll miss about being here, like cheap yet tasty food (I have mentioned I live in the restaurant district, yes?), easy public transportation, and the freedom to run off to some random amazing place simply because I want to. So in order to perk myself up and remind myself how awesome the states are, I present a list, in no particular order, of things I've missed while in Europe.
1) My mom and her amazing home cooking (Not that Transylvanian home cooking isn't good, but my mom uses more spices. Very important)
2) lunches at Rosa's with Brian
3) dark chocolate peanut butter cups
4) having everyone I want to talk to be only a text or phone call away.
5) being able to talk out loud in my own room. (Being weirdly polite I suppose, I won't skype or phone call out loud around my roommates. They do not practice similar courtesy)
6) Talking about the world and politics over the paper with my dad
7)Tabasco sauce
8) Dancing in the grocery store with Matt
9) My own room
10) a working well-stocked kitchen
11) Anthropologie runs with Erin
12) being able to cuddle my dogs
13) Good (and by that I mean from a non-sketchy establishment) chinese food
14) Coffee dates with all my home friends
15) Bagels
16) Dryers (my poor jeans are so baggy now!)
17) Hanging around the apartment laughing with my lovely roommates back at F&M
18) Professors without heavy accents
19) Free refills, and cups big enough to actually last through a meal
20) Ketchup, more specifically, ketchup that does not cost me extra money
21) non-cigarettey air
22) Chipotle
23) Bookstores
24) Everyone I care about being on the same side of the Atlantic as me, rather than an entire ocean and half a continent away
25) No time differences to calculate when I want to talk to people
If there is one big thing going to Budapest and Central/ Eastern Europe in general has made me realize, it's that I have an amazing life back at home and I must say, examining it like this is getting me pretty excited to go back to it. Maybe I'll try a list like this about Pest when I get home, just for comparisons sake.
Kristy Goes To Budapest
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Kristy goes to Krakow
I just got back from my final adventure of the semester. I'm quite sad about this fact, but I'm glad that this was my final trip. Krakow is a wonderful city. It's quaint and old looking like Prague, but it hasn't been discovered by tourists. I would recommend flying there rather than taking the train from somewhere else. It's ten hours away from Budapest. That is a very long time to be sitting in an uncomfortable train seat.
I arrived in Krakow around seven-ish on Friday morning after taking the night train. My one friend was exhauasted, so that morning we hung around the hostel and showered etc. while she napped. That afternoon, we headed into the Old town, which was lovely. We ate perogies and stopped at a little chocolate place where we gorged on pralines and hot chocolate that was literally nothing but melted chocolate. The check in guy at our hostel had told us the Wawel castle was the most important thing to see, so we somehow managed to find it, and wandered around for a while before catching a quick catnap on a grassy hill by the river.
After waking up from our little catnap, we decided to leave the Old Town and explore Kazimierz, the former Jewish Quarter. It apparently had fallen into a state of disrepair after the Holocaust, but now, it's an amazingly lively neighborhood. There were all these great little cafes and art galleries in beautiful historic buildings. I would kill to live in a neighborhood like that in the states. Our main goal was to visit a synagogue and restored cemetery. We found the cemetery easily, but it took us a little while to actually find a way into the complex.
My last full day in Poland was spent at Auschwitz. Before the war, 80% of the world's Jewish population lived in Poland. There are only 200 Jewish people living in Krakow today. I read this in a guidebook on the way there. I wish I could explain what being there is like, but that's really not possible. I started out taking pictures in Birkenau, but after seeing the ruined gas chambers and crematoria, and the memorial pond over one of the ash dump sites, I couldn't bring myself to take many more pictures. Auschwitz 1 was even more intense. The bunkers contains museum exhibits showing photos and diagrams and piles of the things left behind by the inmates. Possibly the two most disturbing things to see were the rooms filled to the top with victims shoes and the room of their cooking pots that were never used. Nothing of course quite compared to the sheer horror provoked by the walls of photos of the dead and the brief walk through of the one standing gas chamber/crematoria.
I say all this, but at the same time, I'm not sorry that I went.
Terribly sorry to end this post on such a depressing note. Next one will be more along the "fun and fluffy" vein, I promise
I arrived in Krakow around seven-ish on Friday morning after taking the night train. My one friend was exhauasted, so that morning we hung around the hostel and showered etc. while she napped. That afternoon, we headed into the Old town, which was lovely. We ate perogies and stopped at a little chocolate place where we gorged on pralines and hot chocolate that was literally nothing but melted chocolate. The check in guy at our hostel had told us the Wawel castle was the most important thing to see, so we somehow managed to find it, and wandered around for a while before catching a quick catnap on a grassy hill by the river.
Entering the Old Town
The Cloth Market
Spire of the Wawel Cathedral
Krakow's famous Dragon
I made a friend!
Hard to tell, but the animals are composed of Hebrew letters
Destroyed gravestones were added to the wall surrounding the cemetery.
My last full day in Poland was spent at Auschwitz. Before the war, 80% of the world's Jewish population lived in Poland. There are only 200 Jewish people living in Krakow today. I read this in a guidebook on the way there. I wish I could explain what being there is like, but that's really not possible. I started out taking pictures in Birkenau, but after seeing the ruined gas chambers and crematoria, and the memorial pond over one of the ash dump sites, I couldn't bring myself to take many more pictures. Auschwitz 1 was even more intense. The bunkers contains museum exhibits showing photos and diagrams and piles of the things left behind by the inmates. Possibly the two most disturbing things to see were the rooms filled to the top with victims shoes and the room of their cooking pots that were never used. Nothing of course quite compared to the sheer horror provoked by the walls of photos of the dead and the brief walk through of the one standing gas chamber/crematoria.
Entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Guard towers and barbed wire
Morbid math- Two chimenys = 1 bunker, 1 bunker= 400 people
"The Road to Death" prisoner's were forced to walk along this to gas chamber IV
The infamous sign
Dividing platform at Auschwitz 1
I say all this, but at the same time, I'm not sorry that I went.
Terribly sorry to end this post on such a depressing note. Next one will be more along the "fun and fluffy" vein, I promise
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
A visit to rural Romania
I have safely returned from this weekends trip to Transylvania. Sadly no vampire sightings. It was a school trip, so it was a 12 hour bus ride through Hungary and into Romania with lots of stops to look at little peasant churches and villages. The bus at 7 in the morning and arrived in our host village of Kalotaszentkiraly at around 9. As we got off the bus, we were surrounded by many small round shaped women with similar haircuts. These lovely ladies were our host mothers, and they were all related to one another somehow.
Mine was named Bubi, and she immediately whisked my friends and I home to feed us a "light" Transylavanian supper of a very heavy soup and an even heavier chicken paprikas. (It counts as light because there was no desert course) Her husband Janos also supplied us with shots of his home-brewed palinka, a kind of fruit brandy with a similar alcohol content to rocket fuel served at every meal in Transylvania. I quickly learned over the course of my meal that Transylvanian hospitality was going to be a problem for me. It is required for them to provide for guest in abundance, but I cannot eat in abundance. I grew terrified about how to handle meat dishes that I didn't want, because it seemed good manners dictated I have seconds. (I do eat meant, I'm just not a huge fan of it on a regular basis, and I'm highly suspicious of all members of the sausage family.) I discovered the way around this was to eat slowly enough to make it appear that I had taken seconds. Hungarian food has never been to my taste, and my poor digestive system really can't take it in large quantities, but I must say, this weekend provided me with some of the best hungarian food I've ever had. The host mothers are amazing at cooking large amounts of food for a large group.
My first full day in Transylvania had us wandering through the Turdo salt mine/subterranean health resort, walking through a quaint little village, hiking to a fortress hidden in the mountains, and visiting Cluj, the birth city of Matyas Hunyadi. All of which I did in vastly inappropriate ballet flats. The mines where fascinating, but being dark and occsionally forcing one to walk on wooden planks over very high drops, also slightly terrifying. The hike to the hidden fortress was a nice workout, and the view at the end was breath-taking. Cluj (Kolosvar, if you're asking a Hungarian) may have been nice, but as it was raining, most of the hour I had there was spent hiding in a cafe.
Sunday morning was spent in class, but afterwards we went to see a chess-maker and shop at a handicrafts market in a nearby village. Due to the rain, we couldn't visit the waterfall so instead we went to visit Kati Neni. Neni is the Hungarian equivalent of a Babushka. Kati Neni was a little tiny woman in a little tiny village who held onto all the traditional clothes and handicrafts that her children had left behind when they moved to Hungary, and she was incredibly happy to show it off and dress people in it.
Mine was named Bubi, and she immediately whisked my friends and I home to feed us a "light" Transylavanian supper of a very heavy soup and an even heavier chicken paprikas. (It counts as light because there was no desert course) Her husband Janos also supplied us with shots of his home-brewed palinka, a kind of fruit brandy with a similar alcohol content to rocket fuel served at every meal in Transylvania. I quickly learned over the course of my meal that Transylvanian hospitality was going to be a problem for me. It is required for them to provide for guest in abundance, but I cannot eat in abundance. I grew terrified about how to handle meat dishes that I didn't want, because it seemed good manners dictated I have seconds. (I do eat meant, I'm just not a huge fan of it on a regular basis, and I'm highly suspicious of all members of the sausage family.) I discovered the way around this was to eat slowly enough to make it appear that I had taken seconds. Hungarian food has never been to my taste, and my poor digestive system really can't take it in large quantities, but I must say, this weekend provided me with some of the best hungarian food I've ever had. The host mothers are amazing at cooking large amounts of food for a large group.
My first full day in Transylvania had us wandering through the Turdo salt mine/subterranean health resort, walking through a quaint little village, hiking to a fortress hidden in the mountains, and visiting Cluj, the birth city of Matyas Hunyadi. All of which I did in vastly inappropriate ballet flats. The mines where fascinating, but being dark and occsionally forcing one to walk on wooden planks over very high drops, also slightly terrifying. The hike to the hidden fortress was a nice workout, and the view at the end was breath-taking. Cluj (Kolosvar, if you're asking a Hungarian) may have been nice, but as it was raining, most of the hour I had there was spent hiding in a cafe.
Sunday morning was spent in class, but afterwards we went to see a chess-maker and shop at a handicrafts market in a nearby village. Due to the rain, we couldn't visit the waterfall so instead we went to visit Kati Neni. Neni is the Hungarian equivalent of a Babushka. Kati Neni was a little tiny woman in a little tiny village who held onto all the traditional clothes and handicrafts that her children had left behind when they moved to Hungary, and she was incredibly happy to show it off and dress people in it.
Monday was spent almost entirely on the bus with the exception of a pitstop in Oradea. Like much of Romania, Oradea was once beautiful, but was kind of left to rot during the Ceaucescu period. Some of the buildings are architecturally stunning, even in their current disrepair, and I can't help but imagine that with the proper care, the city could be truly beautiful.
My next and final big adventure is a trip to Krakow this weekend. Expect a post lots of gushing about perogies in the near future!
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Belle Paris
I went to Paris for Easter weekend. When I woke up on the morning of my flight, things did not look promising. I was sick as a dog. My head, was throbbing, my nose was running, and I was aching all over. Needless to say, I was miserable throughout the entire flight ordeal. I was lucky enough to be seated next to an extraordinarily kind russian woman on the flight from Munich to Paris. She got me tea with lemon and lent me some sinus spray. I haven't seen my own mother in four months now, so it meant the world to me to have just a little bit of mothering from this complete stranger. The tea helped me get through the flight, but I could barely stand by the time we got to our hostel. I felt no better the next morning, so I sent my friends off to Eurodisney (which luckily I had felt no desire to see) and spent the day resting.
Friday morning I finally felt strong enough to leave the Hotel, so we went to Versailles. I'd been before. In the off season. Nothing could have prepared me for the crowds waiting for us there. I did learn that because I go to school in the EU, I can get into museums for free in Paris. Yay!! Sadly i find the interior of Versailles ugly, but here's a shot of the gold gate.
The day after Versailles, we wandered around in the Louvre and through the Tuillerie gardens. We eventually stopped walking for a pick me up drink in some little bar on a street of the Champs Elysees. After writing some very odd postcards and getting in a less "I'm tired and dusty and my feet hurt" kind of mood, we left the bar and decided to think about dinner. Right then I notice a little place across the street called Le Taverne Suisse, with the word Fondue under it. I pulled my friends over for a closer look, and in spite of the empty look of the place, we decide to go in. It was the most wonderfully decadent meal of my life. The wine was good, the food was uniformly exquisite, and the owner was the sweetest little old man in the world. We capped off an excellent Parisian day by walking up to the Arc de Triomphe and taking in the sights and sounds of Paris at night, and I remembered why I loved this city so much when I came here back in high school.
Le Louvre
Rose and olives at the Taverne Suisse
Champs Elysees
Arc de Triomphe
My last day in Paris was spent strolling around Notre Dame eating crepes, visiting the Eiffel Tower only to learn the top was closed, and riding along on a hop-on/hop-off bus taking in the sights. We then got hopelessly lost trying to get back to the village our hostel was in after the one train that would take us there closed. (what's a vacation without a few mishaps?)
garden behind Notre Dame
Love locks
I adore Paris. It's beautiful and lively and contrary to popular myth, the Parisians are always very kind to me. Of all the cities I've been in, it's the only one I could imagine living in
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