Rivers & Roads

     Spending the weekend in Budapest was exactly what I needed after my crazy week in Morocco. Budapest was cold but not freezing, the food and drinks were very cheap, the city was very easy to navigate, and they have thermal baths! In other words, Caroline and I decided it was a "Treat Yo Self" kind of weekend. We ate lots of amazing goulash, drank hot wine (which tastes like christmas), and got a massage and soaked in the thermal baths for about three hours. The bath house itself was not as clean as we were expecting, but little things like that seems to slip through the cracks when you are in eastern Europe. This was also my first hostel experience (which seems crazy for how many trips I have been on) and it was so much fun! I met so many people from around the world, lots of Australians, some French and Belgian guys, a Brazilian and a Canadian! Everyone was really friendly which made going out at night a lot more fun.
Its funny Budapest is such a beautiful city with all of its bridges and colorful buildings, but there is this kind of creepy communist undertone to everything as well. For example, a very popular thing to do at night was to go to a bar and complete what they call a puzzle room. They put you in a room and you have one hour to solve all these different puzzles in order to get let out of the room. We knew a few guys who did one and they said all the questions were really hard math problems, so Caroline and I opted out of that activity. But we did go to some of Budapest's famous "ruin bars", which are these old factories or houses that they have made into giant bars and have decorated with the most obscure things you can think of. Lots of animals, weird paintings, and graffiti covering every wall. There is really no way to describe them for you to understand how crazy and weird these places were. Overall I really loved Budapest, and it was nice to see a more eastern part of Europe. It is so much cheaper I might have to explore a few more eastern countries before I leave. Here are some photos: