Budapest

Had a fun weekend visiting my boyfriend in Buda pest. He showed me some of the highlights of Budapest, but I really missed quite a bit considering we only had about 20 hrs.
Had a nice dinner on outdoor patio at Liszt Ferec Ter, where I got to try some Paprikash. It was a bit chilly that night, so the place was handing out wool blankets, which we quickly availed ourselves of. Our seats were directly in front of the guitar player, and the candles and orange party lights (not as tacky as it sounds) were just right.
Afterwards, we made our way to Heroe's Square, which is just down Andrassy Ut. Sadly, I didn't want Jim (my BF) to be the goofy tourist, so I convinced him to leave his new Nikon at the apartment. Otherwise, we would have had better pictures but we didn't look like we stuck out too much so it was ok.

Me at Heroes Square! You can see Vajdahunyad Castle in the background. 

Then we went and saw the riverfront all lit up at night, and i got to see Matthias Church, Fisherman's Bastion, Buda Castle, the Chain Bridge, the Statue of Liberty atop Gellert Hill and Parliament.

I was very concentrated on shaking this gentleman's hand.
This is down on the Metro Platform.

Me in front of Parliament.

In the morning,we got up and found our way to the Great Synagogue where we saw the Tree of Life Scuplture by Imre Varga. Sadly, we didn't have enough time to tour the building, but we could at least see the courtyard from the street.
















The Great Synagogue is the second largest in the world, behind only one in NYC.


As time dwindled away, we nabbed some lunch at the first McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain. On the way back to Ferenciek Tere, we stopped into Pariszi Udvar (Paris Courtyard) to admire the wood work.



















In this picture, you can see my Tom's on the left as prof that I was there.





I grabbed (rather, stole) his last two nectarines, collected my bags, and we took to the subway to make our way to Keleti.







On Saturday morning before I got here, Jim went out and wandered about for a bit.

Here are some pictures from his adventures.
























Liberty Square. Hammer and Sickle wasn't too popular with the locals, hence the fence around the monument.













The Opera House.


Overall Budapest is a beautiful city and hopefully I will go back during the semester.

Getting settled in

So it's been an eventful last few days.....

We'll start off with me leaving to go to Germany. Well I was flying out of Columbus Airport to go to JFK and then Frankfurt... (if only it was that easy.) It turned out that my flight in to JFK would be delayed and that I wouldn't be able to make my flight from JFK to Frankfurt. So instead of waiting and then missing my flight I decided to be proactive and change my flight to fly from Cbus to Detroit, then Detroit to Amsterdam and then Amsterdam to Frankfurt. After that getting to Amsterdam wasn't so hard but in the process I missed my flight to Frankfurt... so eventually I got to Frankfurt on a later plane and took the train to Mannheim. All in all it was an interesting adventure.

The Next day my buddy Mamy met me at my apartment and we went out to make sure I was registered and all that fun stuff. I believe I owe Mamy a giant debt of gratitude because I found out quickly I know little to no German that would help me get around as well as people would be confused if I tried to talk German to them. I don't know if this is due to me butchering German so bad or my accent but it was funny the looks on their faces when I would try to talk to them.

Later that night all the people in the summer academe went on a pub crawl in the city. I met a few people that you would never met any where else. The first person I met was Rhett who I was supposed to meet at the airport but wasn't able to due to flight problems. There were a few people that I met throughout the night that really stuck out to me. The first was Luke who is from Poland.  He stands out so much to me because he sound exactly like a British guy and even looked like it too. Later we met an actual British guy from London and the sad thing was that Luke sounded more British than him. All in all it was a very fun night and it should be interesting getting more aquatinted with the city.

The one thing I forgot was the cable cord to downlode pictures to my computer from my camera so it might be a while until there are pictures but I can see what all I can do.

Until then Auf Wiedersehen