Budawin

This is what Kristina/Amy/Budapest look like at 6am.

     This past weekend, Kristina and I had the fabulous opportunity to spend a day in Budapest. We took the night train from Belgrade; not the midnight train, the 10:30 p.m. one that actually leaves at 10:10. Arriving in Budapest at 6 a.m., we immediately start sight seeing. The next fifteen hours are a blur of great photos and serious map consulting. We beasted through, and after spending a night in our hostel and waiting sketchily for tacos, we headed back home.

These are some of the best photos from the trip, but you can see all of them here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3402137454209.2127696.1293000428&type=3&l=4dc0bd3adc

I'm once again confused by the signage. Shocker. Is this offensively saying that only black hands aren't allowed to touch? Or maybe it is emphasizing the fact that you shouldn't touch men with unibrows. Ultimately unclear instructions.

Some of the statues had girly hair.

And some of the statues were upside down on the ceiling.

This is a nice man in a hat walking Dora the Explorer by the hand.

We rode insanely steep escalators to the middle of the earth and then back up to its crust.

This is Budapest at sunset. I had plenty of time to take this while waiting for Kristina.

Budapest is so fond of random statues that they build them into regular buildings, like this bank.

I took this photo to illustrate how far we were from the front of Parliament when Kristina decided she needed to get a photo of the front of it. This was hour 13 of sight seeing. She shouted out her intentions as she fast-walked away from me.

The first time having Mexican food. It's so unusual in Eastern Europe that they need to give pronunciation directions. Transliterated in their alphabet, of course.

This is in honor of Kristina. The supposedly seven-hour day-train home took closer to nine. She was awake the entire way and was out of her mind, complaining about how slow the train was going. We ironically saw this as we were chilling at the Serbian border for an hour on that same train.

We went to a fabulous hidden hospital and secret nuclear bunker. We weren't allowed to take photos, but we cajoled the tour guide into taking this one. We wanted to show off our Harry Potter capes, which kept us warm in the tunnels. Mine was so long Kristina stepped on it.

Then we had Mexican a second time.

And a third. All at the same franchise, but two different locations. I have no shame about it either.

The Jewish Synagogue that we spent over an hour locating. It was closed when we got there. It may or may not be the second-largest in Europe, depending on how reliable you deem hippies to be.

The less famous backside of Parliament.

There is a memorial to Jews killed in the war that is located right down from Parliament, along the river. The soldiers lined them up along the banks, arbitrarily asked them to remove their shoes, and shot them. The bodies fell into the river and many, many years later cast iron shoes were placed along the bank to remember the tragedy.

So in English it says, "keep the window closed and burn to death because we don't care enough about you to run the air conditioner regularly and you can't open the window to thwart that purpose." Also, what does this picture mean? I assume that whatever this means is allowed. There is no cross through it. It can't mean "throwing bottles allowed" because you can't open the widow. Maybe "you will see floating bottles." Like magic.

This was taken outside our hostel. We are convinced that they shoot all sorts of action movies here -- All of the ones where they jump balconies and scream in foreign languages.

We also tracked down the statue that could either be Peter Pan or a Little Princess. Everyone disagrees.

Our hostel had a big cat theme. We had respect of neighbours. Our neighbours did not respect us. They were crunching bottles for recycling at 3 a.m. Was that necessary that early?

So when you break a train window you get a snowflake explosion. Just so you know. Hope you brought your own hammer though, as they are definitely not supplied.