Living in Budapest!

May 3rd-8th 2011

Hi all!!! Sorry for the delay in posts! It's been kind of crazy since moving but I finally have some time to make some posts!

I'll start where I left off. So we made it to Frankfurt and then to Budapest without any major problems! All of our bags made it, including my dog, Candi! She wasn't thrilled after coming off the belt but she was fine once we got her out of her kennel. We exchanged 60 U.S. dollars in the airport which equals about 11,500 Hungarian forint! It's quite a task trying to do that conversion in our heads before buying something!

Getting through customs was a breeze! They basically looked at Candi's paperwork and said "welcome to our country!" We were picked up by 2 of Brian's co-workers from where he will be working in Cegled. They brought us to our new home and even ordered pizza for us! :) Needless to say we were exhausted so they left us to our own devices and we ate dinner. We went to bed shortly thereafter and jet-lag ruined our night! We were both up on-and-off until about 7am! Then we were out until 1pm!

After we finally got up we did some unpacking and grocery shopping at the store across the street from our place. What an experience! Nothing is in English and the Hungarian language is like nothing I have ever seen! I speak German and Brian speaks Spanish and we were no good at figuring out what was in which aisle just by reading the signs! It was slow going but we got what we needed! We then decided we needed to figure out how Brian was going to get to Vicenza, Italy for work the following week and websites were just not working. Luckily, the train (similar to the CTA in Chicago) is located right near our place. We took it in to the city to a larger train station and bought tickets for the 3 of us to Venice for the following Saturday night train. Then we ate!!! We had some delicious food at a restaurant in the train station! We then headed home to finish unpacking and we did it!!! Well, I did... I'm writing this about 2 weeks in and Brian still isn't fully unpacked. ;) He won't admit it though.

That Friday we decided to roam the city after we finally woke up! Ugh, jet-lag! We went down to the river. The city of Budapest is split by the Danube river which is absolutely beautiful! The hilly side to the west of the river is "Buda" and the flat side to the east is "Pest". We live on the Pest side in District 14... OR Kerulet XIV. After traveling to the river and seeing that they have a "Hop-On Hop-Off Bus and Boat Tour" (which we are totally gonna do) we decided to eat right by the river! We had some amazing food again! I had stuffed cabbage, which a Hungarian friend of my mom's used to bring over often when we were growing up, and Brian had "meat on a vooden plate"... yes, they said vooden, not wooden. We also had fisherman's soup... with a solid half of a fish in it... I don't think I'll order it again but it was an experience. I'm not a huge "fishy taste" person even though I llllooooovvvveeee sushi! We wandered around a bit, bought some postcards, took in the sites, then headed home on the train!

Saturday was fun.... we re-packed then headed to the train station for our night train to Venice! Then we found out the tickets we booked wouldn't allow for Candi to be with us! So we had to quickly change tickets and barely made it on the train before it left! We won't be taking the train again... It was a 14 hour over-night ride and we thought "great, we'll just sleep"! Not so much. We went through Croatia, Slovenia then to Italy, had our tickets checked about 20 times and our passports checked 15 times. So we didn't get to sleep but we did get our passports stamped a lot!!!! :) We arrived in Venice at 7am. What a beautiful city! We had to wait about an hour for our train to Vicenza and I couldn't wait to come back to explore the following weekend. We boarded our train to Vicenza and took a taxi to our hotel in Vicenza.

I'll stop there  because my next post will be all about our week in Vicenza! I should be getting my next post up before the end of this week!

Thanks for reading!

<3 Steph


"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
-Mark Twain