Budapest and some rants

After Bratislava, we headed off to Budapest, Hungary. This is a cool town, but a bit touristy as well. The worst part about Budapest was the hostel we stayed in. It was so dirty and disgusting that I was constantly thinking about trying to touch as little as possible. There was also a lot of noise very late at night after we had been asleep for a couple of hours. The people also smoked a ton and I was hacking out a lung most of the time.

This would be a good time to mention that I pretty much hate all smokers (except my few smoker friends who have always been polite and been away from me and outside while smoking), but besides that… Oh, and Europeans stink (literally). I have never had such smells invade my space as I have in Europe. I can never (almost) get away from cigarette smoke, especially when eating, and this sucks because I come from lovely Oregon where people have to go outside or sit in a tiny room away from the rest of society to have their nicotine fix. Also, there is way too much cologne and perfume use and on top of which, those who use it, use way too much of it! I hate walking by someone and then getting an entire breath of chemicals instead of air.

Ok, back to the good parts of Budapest. One of the coolest parts was walking up the hill on the Buda side to see The Citadel because it was like being back in Eugene and going on a little nature hike. Seeing Parliament (Pest side) was also cool because it was like a palace and has really only been a true parliament since 1956 (I think). It was also cool to see the castle (Pest)(it was cute) and the other thing was to see Heroes Square (Pest), which is massive and honors 14 or so heroes. It has a statue for each and a depiction of what they did (from what I could infer). There was also a castle in Buda that was built into the hillside and looked like a sandcastle. The food in Budapest wasn’t the greatest, but was doable and we enjoyed ourselves for the most part. The only thing we didn’t realize was that the Buda side of Budapest is all hills (at least where all the sights are) and we wanted to do them all in one day, which meant climbing the hill three or four times! We also found out about the terror plot disruption while we were in Budapest, which was really weird because we were the only Americans or Brits we were in contact with. But that’s a different blog;)