Budapest!

We stayed in the most amazing hostel. In its description it says ‘you can sleep when you are dead, so don’t expect to sleep here. If you expect to sleep before atleast 3am bring earplugs, a charged ipod or drink enough so that you pass out’ it held up to this nicely. It also had two rules.

1.) No complaining about the noise.

2.) Don’t break shit.

It was set around a car park type thing, filled with trees and vines (like a jungle) with the rooms all around the outside of it, at the top. So basically the bar was a jungle of drunk people. Naturally we went straight to the bar to join this jungle. Such cheap beers! We then joined the rest of the hostel on a pub crawl (the bar was open to the public as well). We went to three places.

The first was a swing dance/jazz bar. Which felt like walking back in to the 50’s. There was a huge band with people swing dancing on a dance floor and in the corner was an old projector playing old black and white videos of swing dancers. It had such a great atmosphere – I loved it!!!

The next place was an outdoor bar. Nothing special really, same as an outdoor bar would be anywhere.

Lastly we went to a club with two layers, one being on the roof. By this stage the hosts of the pub crawl were drunker than us! It started thunder storming on the roof, not long after we got there. Everyone bailed but I thought it would be much more fun to sit in the rain and watch the thunderstorm – I’m still convinced it was! Ben sat with me too. How often can you say you sat on the roof of a club, in the rain, watching a thunderstorm, in Budapest? On the downside my shoes are still drenched, too many puddle fights. Went to bed at 8.30am and a few minutes later there was so much noise in the room. I turned around and our room was full of police. I thought they were going to do a bag check or something. Turns out they wanted to steal our roommate. He had been pulling number plates off cars. They took him to jail, he was crying. The rest of the room – oh so concerned – cheered when he left because he could finally go to sleep.

Andy and I were our own tour guides the next day; we managed to find an amazingly big and very impressive statue. We had no idea what it was but took lots of photos like good little tourists – it is the statue of hero’s. Until that day we had no idea how huge and beautiful the city was! So many old buildings, many of which are totally going to be my future homes. We concluded it was good enough to stay another night.

The last day we showed Hugh our statue and then went to the other side of the river (Buda or Pest – we still aren’t sure). Saw the castle and other beautiful things.

Now off to Croatia – super excited!!!! I’m having so much trouble staying awake as the train is moving! I can never stay awake on something that moves. Except maybe a horse or camel but they don’t count. But I am on gypsy duty after Andy was convinced a gypsy tried to take our things on the last train.