Buda and Pest

3 cities, 3 countries, 3 languages, 3 currencies, 9 days. I never had any intentions of visiting Vienna, Prague, or Budapest. In fact, I didn't know a thing about these cities. However, I couldn't be more pleased with my spring break. I saw three amazing cities, I took 478 pictures, and now I will now try to summarize them in a few paragraphs...

I guess I will start at the beginning....

From Paris, I flew with my friend, Josh (UNC), to Vienna.

We watched the Vienna Marathon during breakfast from a cafe:We spent the night and took a train the next day to Budapest.

An interesting thing about Budapest is that the city was originally two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube river. I guess I expected to find a decaying city with old Soviet tanks scattered through the streets. Needless to say, this is far from what I found. Possibly the best part of Budapest was the low cost of living. We stayed in a hostel for 10 euros a night and we could go to a nice restaurant for the price of fast food in Paris.


The largest synagogue in Europe (2nd largest in the world):
St. Stephen's church:

Every guide book and everyone we talked to told us that we should go to a bath house. The bath house consisted of three or four large outdoor pools and about 20 hot tubs inside. Luckily for everyone reading this, I did not have my camera inside the baths. After about 10 minutes inside, we decided to leave. I have never seen so many disgustingly obese people, all of whom seemed to be playing the game "who can wear the smallest bathing suit". I'm glad I went, I'm glad I got to see this aspect of Hungarian life, but I would never go back.....YUCK!

Surprisingly, Budapest had the best food out of the three cities. We ate a fair amount of Hungarian food, goulash, stuffed cabbage, potatoes, sausage, etc. But Budapest had an amazing restaurant scene, I found myself walking around in awe of how many places I wanted to try. I even got Mexican food for the first time in Europe, and while it wasn't even close to Willy's, it made my day.



A view from the top of Buda:


We went out to a Hungarian bar for karaoke night. Most of the songs were in English, with a few Hungarian tunes mixed in. For less than two euros, we each got three good beers (Keep in mind that just one equivalent beer in Paris would have been at least 5 euros).



Without a doubt the funniest video I have ever taken. After a long day of sight seeing, we sat down on a park bench to rest. Within a few minutes, my friends began to doze off as I was there to capture it all on camera. It takes a few seconds to get good, but watch their heads!