Budapest! Caving and Other Adventures

I discovered this week that I am finally getting busy, and it is interfering with my blogging time. I had to turn in my very first assignment in one of my classes (in week 7...this is madness). I also have two papers due next week (right after Patty's Day, what are the professors thinking?!). I am getting SO EXCITED about my parents coming to visit me! They arrive on Wednesday the 20th! Anyways, this weekend is bound to be fun, as it is a four day weekend for the holiday. A friend of mine wanted to copyright the name "Saint Hangover Day" for Monday's "bank holiday" that we have. I love this country! :)

I guess you guys would like to hear about what I did this past weekend. Nothin', really, just went to Hungary for a a few days. I guess that is kind of a big deal. It was a blast! We (a friend and I) arrived on Friday afternoon, and we booked it through WSA-Weekend Student Adventures. They plan almost everything for you, so all we had to do was get to Budapest and find the hostel. We unfortunately got there late in the day, and missed a few tours around the city, and the one I am most sad about missing was the trip to the baths. Budapest is famous for their underground springs and Turkish bath houses around the city, and I heard it was relaxing and fun. I learned my lesson though: the next WSA trip I am going on (to Barcelona), I am getting there Thursday night so I don't miss all of the tours on Friday. Anyways, when we first got to the hostel, the group wasn't back yet, so we just hung around for a few minutes. When they returned, we were going to go to dinner and find a few pubs in the city.

The group. The girl furthest to the left is Bogi, our tour guide.

As it turns out, we were going to get to hang out that night with Andy Steves (the son of travel expert Rick Steves, and the CEO/founder of WSA) and his girlfriend Jenna. They were both super friendly and adorable, and we found some interesting connections. Andy went to Notre Dame, and studied abroad at John Cabot in Rome (where Elizabeth was, if you recall). I already knew this, but what I didn't know is that apparently his entire family went to Creighton! His grandma still lives about three blocks away from the school! Crazy. Also, there is a scary connection with his girlfriend, Jenna, as well. The two girls that I met (and am now friends with, they are coming to Berlin with us in a few months), Brdiget and Rachel, go to Maynooth (that is one of the other universities here in Ireland-where the girl on the plane from MN, Megan, goes, remember?). Bridget is from Waukesha, Wisconsin, and went to high school there. Turns out she went to the same high school as Jenna, and knows Jenna's younger brother (and her entire family-big family and name in the Waukesha area, I guess). I am super creeped out by our small world still. Dinner was fun, we ate a packed restaurant that had delicious food. I got a banana daiquiri to drink. It was delicious. After the restaurant, we headed out to the ruins pubs for a few drinks.

One of the ruin pubs

The ruins are what Budapest nightlife is all about: they are abandoned buildings from WWII that lay empty for many years (hence "ruins") and were recently converted into bars all over the city. They are known to be huge and have eclectic decor. The one we went to was the third best bar in the WORLD. There were some strange things decorating the place (I think I remember seeing a child's tricycle hanging from the ceiling), but it was pretty cool. Budapest is well known for hosting bachelor parties (they call them "stag" parties). We saw tons of them. In fact, on the plane from London there was a guy who had orange dreadlocks, to the middle of his back, wearing a "Party Girl" tiara, a white toga, a pink sash, and a necklace with shot glasses on it. That wasn't even the strangest outfit there....We walked around the city to different pubs (they don't have one concentrated area that people go, they have little spots all over). We hung out there for a while, explored the place, and headed back to the hostel for the night.

The Danube

The next day I got to do one of the coolest things I have done in my life. We started off the day with visiting the "shopping street". It is exactly what it sounds like: a square and street with a bunch of stores. It ran alongside the Danube, which we walked up to and took pictures of. The buildings in Budapest are beautiful: they all look so important and fancy. It is an extremely old city, so it makes sense. They also have more graffiti than I have ever seen. Unlike in the US and many other places, though, the graffiti doesn't mark abandoned or rundown places. It is actually a cultural movement: the younger generations are trying to add color and culture to their city after the years of communist oppression and restrictions. It is pretty cool. Next we headed off to go caving! We took a tram and a few buses to get to the location, the entrance to the longest cave in Hungary. 

Budapest Opera House

"Shopping Street"

Don't know what this building is, but it looked important :)

This is what pretty much all of the buildings looked like! 

Made it through the smallest hole ever, just barely fit!

I didn't really know what I was getting myself into when I signed up to go to caving. When we got there, we put on jumpsuits to cover our clothes (it got really dusty in the caves), and were given the helmets with headlights on them. We all looked pretty hot, let me tell you. Before we went, we had to sign a piece of paper that said we weren't drunk or under the influence of any drugs. Kind of like when getting a tattoo...haha. We walked out and began the adventure. Right when we got inside the caves, we had to descend a 40ft ladder down into the caves. As we were going down, one by one, three guys with intense harnesses and equipment came running past us. Turns out, there was a girl ahead of us who had fallen and broken here leg. When our guide said this, we thought he was joking. He wasn't. She apparently had stepped wrong and broken her leg. We found this out within 5 minutes of entering the caves...doesn't necessarily reassure! It was all fine though, we just exorcised a little more caution from then on. We went through the caves for about two hours. I went through spaces I never thought I would fit into in my life. Many times, you could only army crawl for a few meters at a time, through small spaces. Let's just say, if you were claustrophobic at all, you never would l have even gone in. At one point, I was in a space so small that both sides of my face were touching opposite sides of the hole. I didn't really think about it; if I had, I probably would have freaked out. It was reassuring that the largest person that had gone through the same spaces was a 350 lb. American football player. If he could fit, so could I, was my entire thought process. My knees and elbows were covered in bruises for a few days. What I didn't expect about the caves was the complete lack of living things: there weren't any spiders or reptiles or bugs of any kind. They were formed from the same natural phenomena as the springs, so there were fossils (40 million year old fossils) of sea creatures in the walls, but that was it. There was so much dust, I must have inhaled at least a pound of it, but it was humid, so it didn't make me cough or sneeze, which was amazing. Caving was the coolest thing I have ever done.

Heaven

That evening, a bunch of people went to a party at the baths. They turn them into a club on Saturday nights, apparently, but I opted out of that one. I am glad I did. From what I have heard about it, I would not have had fun at all. That party is more for the crazy, partier people, which I am definitely not. Instead, a few of us went to a low key bar a few blocks from our hostel. It was great to be able to sit and relax, chat and have a drink. This pub was also a ruin bar, with strange decorations. This one had rabbit statue things suspended from the ceiling, a big pack of them like they were racing. The next morning, people were leaving at different times, so there wasn't much planned for the day. We all met up to say goodbye, and then split up and did whatever. My friend and new friends weren't leaving until evening, so we went back to the shopping street to buy souvenirs and then walked back. On the way back we went into a candy store, aka heaven. It had SO MUCH CANDY, I didn't know what to do. I bought a few things and then we went back to the hostel. I was exhausted at this point, and I had a cough that was started to develop. 

Sugar! These are all jelly beans.

We got to the airport that evening, and we were on a red eye flight. We had to spend the night in the London airport (which we knew we were going to have to do). It was miserable, and I got about an hour of sleep altogether. I ended up with a full blown cold, ears, eyes, nose, and throat. Awful. As our plane was landing from London into Shannon, it literally felt like my head was going to explode. I was about to cry. Next time I am bringing decongestant (my allergy medicine) so that it doesn't hurt so bad. I am still a bit sick, but it is tolerable. Monday I slept literally the entire day. I got home at about 10 am, showered, and fell asleep until 8 pm, woke up for a few hours to eat something, went to bed at 10 pm and woke up at 10:30 am the next morning. That sleep helped a lot, but I was extremely disoriented and confused for a few days. As I mentioned at the beginning, I had to write my first paper, and I have two more due this coming week. This weekend will consist of writing those papers and having fun on Patty's Day! I can't wait! 

P.S. If anyone would like to "send" me anything, you could possibly send it with my parents! They are bringing me a few things to last me the last two months! :)