Last Post

Hi Everyone,

This is going to be my last post, seeing as how the semester ends in 3 days, and I'm coming back to the US in less than 2 weeks. Tomorrow begins the start of my finals, with what I anticipate will be my hardest one, Character Theory. I spent most of today working on problems and reading the book, and I think it could go either way right now. On Tuesday I have Graph Theory and on Wednesday I have my last final, Number theory.

As much as I would like to stay in Budapest, I'm excited to come home and see all my family and friends. It's going to be sad leaving, though, but getting used to the idea sooner rather than later will be better. I wish I had more time in AZ before I have to leave for Massachusetts, though. I don't know if I'll have time to see everyone from Phoenix and Tucson in just 2 days.

The end of the semester party is on Thursday, and then on Friday I'm leaving for Croatia for the last part of my stay here. My camera is officially useless, now, as my battery charger decided to fall apart a while ago. Hopefully one of the other people coming will have a camera, and I can steal their pictures. Anyway, I look forward to seeing everybody soon!

Szia!

Backpackers!

I seem to start every one of these post apologizing for the delay. Anyway, a lot has happened here in the last couple weeks. Scott (my roommate) and I have had a lot of friends and travelers stay with us in our apartment, and it's been a blast meeting all these new people. We signed up for couchsurfing.com, and since then have been getting requests from tons of people asking for a place to stay while traveling through Budapest. Our most recent guests were a pair of French girls and an Israeli girl. It's amazing listening to them tell about their lives and their travel stories. The Israeli girl, Rebecca, has been traveling since she was 14, and doesn't like to stay in places for more than a couple months, so she finds work and saves enough money to travel again. She speaks 5 languages and has some incredible stories about the places she's been and the people she's met. The French girls are studying journalism in France, and are on their way to Serbia. Tomorrow, I have two friends coming in from Padova, Italy, and in another week some French guys are going to stay with us for a couple days. A couple other people in our program are also couchsurfing, and so we get to hang out with their travelers also. Right now, our friend Olivia is hosting three Australians. This morning, we had a huge breakfast with some people in our program, and all of our backpackers. It was a lot of fun.

So, in a nutshell, that has been my last couple weeks (throw some math in there too). Right now, Budapest is having a transit strike, so no public transportation is running. It should be over tomorrow, though, so leaving the apartment won't be so daunting. I was originally going to put up pictures of Madrid, but as I was looking through the pictures, I realize that all I did was take pictures of the buildings in the city. So, they're not terribly exciting and for the amount of work it would take to put them up, I don't think it would be worth it.

On the plus side, a group of us are going to Croatia in early May. We're probably going to Split or Debrovnik, which are on the coast, so there should be some nice pictures coming then.

Back From Spring Break!

I'm back from spring break! Unfortunately, my only souvenirs are a cold, sore throat, pink eye, and an inability to hear out of my right ear. Luckily, I picked these up only in the last days of our trip. Jon and I spent the first couple days in awe at how magnificent the city was. Even the most ordinary buildings there were so ornately decorated that they could easily be the most attractive in other cities. We visited two parks while we were in Barcelona, one was the Park Guell, designed by the architect Gaudi, and the other was the Cuitadella Park, which has the Barcelona Zoo inside it. I didn't so much enjoy the Gaudi park (or his style in general), but it was interesting to walk through anyway. I didn't have my camera that day, so I can't show anything, but the park looked as if it was taken out of a Dr. Seuss book. To give an idea of the style of Gaudi, though, here is a picture of the Sagrada Familia Church, which is currently under construction:


This is supposed to be Gaudi's masterpiece. Anyway, the Ciutadella Park was probably to most amazing park I have ever seen. Walking through it was the most surreal experience I can remember. I can hardly describe how it felt, and the pictures probably won't do it justice, but here are a couple pictures of the park.
Bed's of tulips were everywhere, and all the bushes and trees were meticulously trimmed and shaped. Every little detail about this park was intented by the designers, and the end result was amazing.
Jon and I with some crazy trees.
There is a lake in the middle of the park, where people get in row boats and just paddle around.
This castle looking building is a museum in the park.
And this is the Arc De Triumph guarding the entrance to the park. As you can see from these pictures, the weather was treating us very well (at least for the first part of the trip).

The beaches were also really nice, although the got very crowded during the late afternoon. It was still a little too cold to swim, so we mostly just sat at the beach and played frisbee.

We also visited a big castle overlooking the port.


The castle is open for everyone. This guy is just practicing archery in the courtyard, and there were a group of old men playing hand ball against the castle walls. The military museum is located in the castle, so they had old artillery and cannons as decorations.


This is a mall on La Rambla, probably the coolest looking mall I've ever seen. La Rambla is a long street with a lot of shops, and entertainers trying to get tips. It was a lot of fun just to walk down it and check out the stores. Even though this probably isn't the most important building in Barcelona, I just really like the design.

I have to get back to studying for midterms, so I'll update more later with pictures of Madrid.

Happy Pi Day!

It's been a long time since my last update, mostly because school has finally started to pick up, and also I'm a little lazy about updating. I think I'm going to skip the pictures of Amsterdam, Bulgaria, and Romania because the weather was pretty bleak and the pictures aren't very exciting, but I will put up some of Greece, since it was really nice.

So, tomorrow I leave for Barcelona for spring break with my friend Jon. Basically, our plan is to stay the weekend in Barcelona and then make our way down the coast and see as much of Spain as we can. Also, the weather is supposed to be about 70 degrees and sunny, so a lot of beaching is to be expected also. My battery charger recently fell apart, so hopefully I have enough power left in it to last me through the trip.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Greece:

This is an amphiteatre at the Acropolis
And this is the Acropolis, as seen from the temple of Zeus.
This is the temple of Hephaestos. This shot in particular took me forever to get.
We went to a coastal city called Napflion, which was absolutely incredible. That hill has a big Mycenean castle on it which is famous for having to climb 999 steps to get up to. This next picture is a view from the top
The water was so blue, I wish it was a little warmer when we were there so we could have gone swimming. Hopefully the water in Barcelona will be as picturesque.

This is a picture of the bay which the city surrounds. On the other side of the peninsula there is a castle in the middle of the water. We didn't get to go to it, but it was pretty cool.
This is me on a ferry to Crete. Crete was pretty lame because there are no tourists in the winter (even though the weather is really nice), and so there is nothing to do. We went to a small restaurant on the island while we were waiting to leave, and this guy was amazed that we were from America so he bought us a lot of food and drinks.

So, Greece was probably my favorite country (it also had the cleanest metro system) and Paris was my favorite city. I want to go back to Greece someday, but that probably won't happen this semester. I still have to go to Croatia and Austria before I leave for the US, which is in about 7 weeks. Everytime I think about leaving, I realize how lucky and happy I am to be here. Anyway, the fun has got to stop sometime I suppose. I'll make another post when I get back from Barcelona.

Updates and Paris

Sorry it took so long, we still don't have internet at our apartment, so I'm using the wifi from our campus. It is currently the second week of classes, and so far I like all of my classes a lot. I also just finished applying for all my summer research positions, 5 in total, so hopefully I get accepted to at least one. If not, I'll probably end up stuck in Tucson doing research there. School hasn't really achieved its full momentum, so it feels a little slow right now which is giving me time to relax a little bit. We're planning some group trips this semester, and so it looks like I might be going on a trip to Norway in May and Barcelona in March. Time for some pictures of my favorite city:

This is the French Pantheon. It's much bigger than the Roman one.

We spent a day at the Louvre, which is famous for having the Mona Lisa as well as the Venus De Milo. We missed the Venus, and the Mona Lisa was so packed that we couldn't get a good view.

This is just a cool picture at night.

Of course, we visited the Eiffel tower. It's much bigger that I thought it would be. We came back on New Years, but they had the whole area roped off so that nobody could get near the tower. Every half hour or so the eiffel tower has a light show which is pretty fun to watch.

This is Todd and in the courtyard of the Luxembourg Palace. Unfortunately for us, we came in winter so all the trees were dead.

This is us in front of the Arc de Triumph

This is an example of a translation blunder. I'm assuming skinned is being used as a replacement for peeled.
This is the eiffel tower on New Years

And this is the famous Notre Dame, but from the back since I liked the back of it better

Paris was a lot of fun, and there was always so much to do and see. The people were also extremely nice, which is contrary to the stereotype a lot of Americans have of French people. Our next stop after France was London and Amsterdam, so I'll post some pictures of that soon, too.

Back in Beautiful Budapest

Alliteration aside, I arrived a couple days ago, and in lieu of internet at my apartment I have not been able to upload any pictures. But, I have discovered a way to steal internet from my neighbor just long enough to make a post.

I'll start from the beginning. I left for Rome on December 19th and met Julio there a couple of days later. I imagined that I would love Rome since I always admired Roman culture, so I had high expectations for the city. With respect to the monuments and ancient ruins, I wasn't disappointed. The Pantheon, the forum and the Colosseum were amazing the look upon, and walking around inside the Colosseum was one of the highlights of my entire trip (rivaled only by my Athens experience). On the other hand, my other experiences were not as savory. The hostel we stayed in had no heating and the receptionists were rude and unhelpful. In general, the food was just as bad, and often we were charged for bread, water, and sitting down to eat. Possible the worst food I tried was a desert cake that Julio ordered which started off as a perfectly good pound cake until they poured Vodka all over it, which it made it taste a lot like burning. The only thing worse than drinking Vodka is eating it. Anyway, I'll indulge your eyeballs with some pictures. Keep in mind that my camera flash was broken this entire trip, and so any and all night pictures are a little blurry.

This is the Plazza De Emmanuel, the picture doesn't do it justice, but the building is enormous and inside are a lot of war relics and statues of war heroes. It was a lot of fun to walk around, and the architecture is beautiful. Since we were traveling in winter, a lot of the buildings were being restored for the big summer tourist season, so most have scaffolding on them.


This is a view from on the building. Those trees in the back are really funny, and the grow everywhere.

From the Plaza, you can see the Colosseum. More awesome trees, too.

This is inside of the Colosseum. The inside was stripped of all its decorative stone over the centuries to use as building materials for other buildings. What's left is only the brick structure.

This arc is right outside the Colosseum.

For christmas, we went to Vatican city to watch the pope speak.

This was our christmas dinner. Christmas is kind of a big deal in Rome, so all restaurants closed.

I'll update again soon with pictures from Paris!

Change of Plans

Greece was a lot of fun, but had a lot of ups and downs. We started off in Athens and had a lot of fun looking at the ruins at the Acropolis and the Agora and climbing the hills to get some good views of the city. We wanted to go to some of the Greek Islands, so we went to Crete, but it was completely dead, and we ended up wasting two days getting to Crete and trying to leave again. We also visited a really picturesque little tourist city called Napflion which had a really big castle on a mountain that we climbed up to. The funnest part, by far, was a little day trip we took to an island called Aegina. The island is really small and its famous for its pistachio nuts. Anyway, we rented scooters and spent the whole day scootering around the island.

When we were in London, the airport people toko all of my toiletries, so I didn't have any shampoo or soap for over a week. To improvise, we used dishwashing soap as shampoo which actually worked pretty well. We have toiletries now, so I can take real showers. Only now I miss smelling like citrus.

We left for Bulgaria yesterday on a night train, and we got into Sofia, the capital, today. The first thing we did was go eat at a nice grill, and got a lot of food for only 5 euros each. Bulgaria is the cheapest country I've been to so far which is a welcome relief. We ended up choosing Bulgaria because Turkey turned out to be too expensive, and this way we can hit up Romania on our way back to Budapest. So, even though I won't be able to visit Egypt like I really wanted, we'll save some money and be in an environment that's much more familiar for us.