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.

Sunny Greece!

I haven't updated in a while, but since that last post Todd and I have been to London, Amsterdam, and now we're in Greece. London and Amsterdam were fun, but it was kind of expensive so we didn't visit many museums or anything. I'm really glad to be in Greece. The weather is really nice-- it's the first real sun we've had in three weeks-- and its a bit cheaper so we've actually been able to do things. We visited the Acropolis today and got the see the Parthenon, and then we hiked a bit and got some pretty amazing views of the city. We're probably only going to stay in Athens for a little bit, though. We're looking into doing some traveling to port cities by getting on a freighter and just going wherever they go. I really want to visit Thessaloniki and Crete before we leave for Turkey. Take care!