Here’s my past week in Budapest! Photos are at the bottom of the post, and in the Photo Gallery page! On Friday, Sam and I went over to the Urban’s house for a barbeque. They are the family that have graciously loaned us their apartment on the Pest side of Budapest and they are amazing people. After dinner, I was told to go sit down outside. When I asked why, I was told “it is not a cake”. Then there were bowls and spoons brought to the table “for the not cake” (these are direct quotes; you’re real funny, Marci). Are you suspicious? Because I was. I mean, who could really think otherwise! Of course, it was a cake, although it was an ice cream cake so perhaps the aforementioned quotes weren’t total lies. The cake said “Happy Birthday Anya!” on it and they had also bought me a few things to take home with me to remember Budapest. I cannot even begin to describe to you how lucky I felt. I wasn’t expecting it at all, especially given that it had been a whole week since my birthday. I am so very humbled by their generosity and thoughtfulness when I am someone that they hadn’t known until a few weeks ago. It makes my time here feel that much more special; I know I’m building relationships with people who truly care and that I am so thankful for that. Also, we basically ate the whole cake. Our excuse is that it was melting. Which it was, by the way. The weekend was nice and relaxing. On Sunday we went to dinner with the Urban’s, where I had a traditional Hungarian dish called paprika chicken. It was so good. In case you didn’t know, the English word paprika originated from the Hungarian language and it is used in a lot of Hungarian cuisine. There are stores that are devoted to the different types of paprika, since it can range from mild to extremely spicy. And according to CNN, which I discovered when I googled paprika to make sure my facts were straight, it contains a lot of vitamin C. Pretty neat tidbits! Saturday we hung out with a couple of the guys from the Canadian world marathon team who were still in Budapest. We went out to a few of the famous Ruin Pubs near-ish to us. One was Szimpla Kert, which was apparently voted the third best bar in the world by Lonely Planet’s public vote in 2012. It was pretty cool! It has two levels, and the first opens up to an open air courtyard while the second is a background around it. As for the decor, it’s a tad hard to explain. It’s a lot of graffiti-esque writing on the walls and random...other things...I’m not sure how to describe it! But it was awesome. Of course I forgot to take photos to back up my poor descriptions, but honestly I didn’t want to be that tourist that takes photos of a bar. I’ll try and snag some next time we go. After leaving Szimpla, we went to another ruin pub called Instant. This one was also pretty cool, but for different reasons. It was like a labyrinth of rooms. There were three stories, when you included the basement with a few rooms in each. All the rooms played different styles of music! Downstairs was more rock, the first floor more popular music Hungarian music, one of the second floor rooms was sort of EDM, and another one on that floor was more pop, which was more similar to what is played at bars in the US. And also like bars in the US, I was carded at both places. Without fail. But all in all, the venues were really interesting and we had a ton of fun! Monday brought another English lesson with my new BFF Laura. She is the cutest thing. When I got there, she was in the process of making me a present. She had already finished one for me that included a homemade Christmas tree ornament because Christmas is coming, you know. The ornament has a picture of her on it, and she told me that was for if we weren’t together at Christmas then I could remember her. So adorable, I shall treasure it and all the memories that go along with it. Later on she asked if I was going to stay in Budapest forever. I had to tell her I wasn’t going to be able to stay forever, to which she responded with “well, if you leave, I am going to cry”. I told her that if I didn’t go home eventually, that my mom would cry because she wouldn’t have seen me for a long time. Laura is a clever girl though, and she thought up a good solution to this problem: “Okay, so you can go home for a little bit, like a few days, and tell your mom that you love her and that you’re going back to Budapest and then you can be here forever.” Hard to argue with that. Tuesday morning was nice for a little bit of sightseeing. We walked across the Chain Bridge to the Buda side of Budapest, which is where Buda Castle sits. The Chain Bridge was the first permanent bridge to connect Buda and Pest together across the Danube and it was built in 1849. The bridge is guarded by a pair of lion statues at both ends, and there is a story to go with those lions. The tale is that the man who commissioned the bridge’s construction asked the artist to carve the lions anatomically perfect. When the artist revealed them, he proclaimed that there was no imperfection on them; no matter how hard they were stared at no one would be able to find anything wrong with them. The man who had commissioned them spent a long time walking around them, studying every piece. In the end, he said that they were perfect in every detail except one: all four lions were missing tongues. The story says that the artist, in embarrassment and shame over the fact that he had forgotten the lions’ tongues, committed suicide by jumping off the newly constructed Chain Bridge. But that’s just a story, nowhere is there actual evidence of this. Except that the tongues are definitely missing. I promise you that part is true! While walking across the Chain Bridge, I glanced at another tourist with a camera and her camera strap was the exact same as mine. She pointed at hers and said “Nice choice.” I replied with a “Hey, you too.” There’s something about seeing someone that also ordered their camera strap on Amazon for $5 that builds a sense of camaraderie with humanity. We walked around the outside of Buda Castle, which offers a great view of the Pest side where Parliament, St. Stephen’s Basilica and the Budapest eye are located. It wasn’t too much of a hike to get up there either, which was nice. It now houses the Hungarian National Gallery and and the Budapest History Museum, which we didn’t do because we got off to a little bit of a late start and Sam had practice. But I’m excited to go back! While we were there, we wandered around the square near Buda Castle and we saw some soldiers guarding Sandor Palace, which is the official residence of the President of Hungary. Every 10 minutes, two of the guards had a miniature “changing of the guards”; basically they switched places, but in a very fancy, gun twirling, feet prancing way. Finally, Wednesday was long but good! I went for a run on Margaret Island in the morning, and I ran the slowest that I’ve run around that track since I got here. Okay, so it wasn’t THAT bad, but still. So, as a form of self-punishment, I have decided that I’m taking my cleats to the field tomorrow and I’m running sprints. I say punishment, but I’m actually kind of looking forward to it. Anyway, after grocery shopping, Sam went to practice and I went to tutor English, but I left early and went to St. Stephen’s Basilica and the Hungarian State Opera House before getting on the bus. The Basilica was gorgeous, with the dome, huge organ and stained glass. The Basilica is Roman Catholic and it is named after Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary. It also houses a very interesting artifact. In the back of the Basilica is the mummified right hand of Saint Stephen. Allegedly. And I don’t mean it’s an alleged mummified right hand, because the hand is definitely real and it’s definitely in the back of the Basilica. Supposedly it belonged to Saint Stephen, but we don’t know that for sure. There’s this whole story about how it came to be removed from his body (due to the belief that it could help perform miracles) and how it was moved around a few times before coming back to to Budapest. I think the weirdest thing, though, is that every year there is a Holy Right Hand procession in which the hand is carried around. Not going to lie, this kind of grosses me out. But interesting all the same. I didn’t go in the Opera House because they offer a limited amount of tour times, but the outside is super cool. There are statues of some of the world’s greatest composers around the outside at the top of the House, obviously including Mozart and Beethoven. It’s a pretty amazing building. There was also something pretty neat and random that happened on my walk from the Basilica to the Opera House. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll recall that in London we went to see a play at the West End called The Play That Goes Wrong. We also learned that they had also opened the show in Budapest, but I’d kinda forgotten about it. Until yesterday, when I walked down a random street and found a poster for it! I took a photo of it; pretty awesome little coincidence! I’ve recommended it to the people I know here who actually speak Hungarian, so perhaps they will go. Chris, I’m sure it’s not as good as your show. My Wednesday afternoon and evening was spent with Laura. In addition to reading books in English, she tried to teach me how to pronounce things in Hungarian. We had three categories : good, bad or “ehhhh” (also called middle). I am proud to say most of my pronunciations were either good or ehhhh. Today was very fun! We spent the day with Judit, the one who bought me the amazing cake I talked about earlier. She competes in agility with her dog, Cinke, and this morning she had a training session, so we tagged along. She also brought Chelsea, another one of her dogs, so that Sammie could try it out. I was documenting everything on video. It was very neat to see how it worked! And the dogs were so cute and excited to be there. Cinke and Judit are alternates in the mini dog category on the Hungarian national team that will be competing at the Agility World Championships in Italy in a few weeks, so I’m excited to hear about how they and the team do! Click here to see Sammie at work! Judit is taking me to yoga tomorrow morning, and even though I have to wake up early I am SO EXCITED. I’ll let ya know how inflexible I am in my next post. Búcsú!
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Meet AnyaHi, Hola, Bonjour, Ciao!
I’m Anya Phillips, a data analyst and travel enthusiast who is always on the lookout for the next adventure! Categories
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