Settling into Budapest

I woke up as we were on final approach to Munich. Actually, Colton woke me up. Then he asked me why my shirt had turned a faint shade of red. I gave it a sniff - it was the cabernet I had ordered several hours earlier, and I had beeen wearing it for so long that it had completely dried. That tylenol PM I took before takeoff had worked as advertised, and then some.

Munich was a disaster. What should have been a quick 2 hour layover with a nice German lunch and maybe a big, beautiful German beer in an air conditioned lounge didn't happen. Someone had snuck past the security checkpoint and disappeared, so they made everybody exit the airport, then re enter through security. Thousands of people. Its was not good at all. 4.5 hours later we arrived at our gate, a couple of hundred feet from where we had de planed on the previous flight.

After a short flight we were finally here - Budapest! We quickly found our hostel. The room is way more spartan than we expected, even by European standards, but its close to everything and we don't plan to do much sitting around. After a quick shower we set out to join a pub crawl that Colton had located. It was about 25 people, all tourists from all over Europe and was led by a young woman named Anna. She gave a very humorous speech about what we’d be doing. "There is only one rule she said. "don't be a jerk". She didn't actually use the word Jerk - it was much more colorful. The group went to several Ruin Bars - thats the cool thing here these days. Most buildngs here are very old, with large central coutryards. In some of the older, more abandoned buildings, outdoor bars have popped up in the coutryards. After 3 ruin bars, the group headed to a dance club. We decided that a club wasn't for us at that point in time so we said good bye and headed home for the night.

We would need the sleep for the next day, as some interesting things were in our future including 'statue of the liberty', the crazy violinist on the hilltop an unexpected gig at a French restaurant and making some new friends.Read more