Budapest and Katie's Forefathers

Budapest was one of my favorite cities in awhile. Buda is on the hilly side of the river Danube (which is not blue) and Pest is on the opposite side, and the two were united at some point in time for some reason, and now they are Budapest. The city smells pretty gross but other than that it was amazing: the architecture is beautiful, there's a ton to occupy your time, and it is DIRT CHEAP. Compared to the rest of the places we're going. I'm pretty sure that the bank thought that I'd died or something because I didnt have to withdraw money every 7 hours.

We did all the touristy stuff there, the coolest of which was the Turkish Bath. We figured that because we cut out Istambul, we might as well try one out in Hungary, where they are extremely popular and you get to wear bathing suits. Basically at the one we went to there were a couple dozen small indoor pools meant for soaking in, all at different temperatures ranging from 'when do you add the vegetables and reduce to a simmer?' and 'colder than most of the drinking water they serve over here'. There are also saunas and steam rooms, and outside was a pool meant for swimming and two other warm ones. The indoor pools were fun to try out but a little nasty because they arent chlorinated and Europeans are dirty. The only empty one in the whole place was the really cold one, which we all crept into and then sat down in for a second, just to say that we did. I went into a steam room for the first time, which I do not recommend. It's hard to see, hard to breathe, and really kind of scary. The sauna was better, and just like in the movies.

The highlight of the city was when I realized that when I tell people that my heritage is 'Italian Polish Hungarian Ukranian Welsh', I should really just say 'Hungarian!' Yes, not only are the names 'Ferenc' and 'Ferencz' super common in Budapest, but someone named Joseph Ferencz was imoprtant enough in Hungarian history to have over 3 metro stops named after him as well as his name engraved really big on the Chain Bridge, Budapest's second most recognisable landmark (for those of you who do not know, my grandpa's late brother was named Joseph Ferencz... but I don't think that he was the Metro guy, mostly because Budapest has Europe's oldest metro system, built in 1895 or something like that).

The lowlight of the city was the trip out of it to Prague, where we boarded the wrong train, paid as much to cross the entire country of Slovakia as we did to go in a cab down two streets, rode a train that broke down for a grand total of 2+ hours, arrived in Prague at 2am and got to walk through the park that all the homeless people live in to get to a taxi. That's a good story if you ever get time to hear the whole thing.