Haven't updated in a while so I figured I'd let everyone know what's going on. Last weekend the guys went to Oktoberfest, so I was here pretty much by myself. Another friend of mine and I decided to check out Szechenyi(?) Baths while they were gone, and it was AWESOME. It costs about $15 to enter, and you can stay as long as you want but get refunded $2-3 if you stay for less than 2 hours. It took us like 20 minutes to figure out how the lockers worked, but once we did we were ready to go. When you [View Full Entry]

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Today we went and spent the afternoon at a huge zoo on the other side of the city. Pics are on Facebook. Busy with classes the next few days, so probably no updates. [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday the guys decided to go on a hike in the Buda Hills across the river. We took a couple trams over to the Buda side and up the river quite far. We had no idea where we were going, but we could see the hills and see where we wanted to get - the top. So we started walking in the direction of the hills until we got to the base. Now here, instead of continuing along the road, Andy thought it would be a good idea to take the trail through the woods, as it was more direct. Well [View Full Entry]

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So the school had a trip to Croatia organized for the international students for this weekend. Unfortunately, the group was leaving Wednesday night, and us ME's couldn't miss that much class. Because of that, we got a group of ME's together and were going to go ourselves, but the train schedules didn't work out. We were going to take a train to the capital, Zagreb, and then another train to Zadar on the coast. However, the first two trains out of Budapest interfered with a class we couldn't miss, and the third overlapped the train to Zadar by about 15 minutes. [View Full Entry]

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Russell found some info on a lake near Budapest, Lake Velence, so we took a day trip to check it out. The train tickets were only 240ft each way for students, which is about $3 total. The ride was only about 45 minutes. We got there and walked around and took pictures for most o the time. Russell and Mark tried wakeboarding at this place on the lake, so I got some good videos of them falling. Russell also got hissed at a by a menacing swan, which I got on camera as well... We walked toward the town a little [View Full Entry]

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I was feeling better today so we decided to go out and do some sightseeing. We went over to the Parliament building to take a tour, but they had sold out of tickets by the time got there. You can't go in the building unless you're on a tour, so we unfortunately didn't get to see that. Next we went over to St. Stephen's Basilica. The inside of the church was absolutely gorgeous, with ornate gold carvings, marble pillars, and statues, among other things. We paid to see the treasury, which was a small room with a bunch of historic treasures [View Full Entry]

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Not a whole lot going on this week. It was the first week of classes so I haven't really done much outside of that. I also caught a cold from Ali so I haven't been feeling especially well the past couple of days. We may check out a wine tasting this weekend, so I may have something more interesting to talk about after that... [View Full Entry]

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First day of classes today. The courses are really strange here - they meet for much longer times. We had our electrical engineering class today and it was 3 hours long! The professors give 15 minute breaks every hour though, so it's not that bad. Our schedule is pretty good, but we're working on convincing professors to move classes so we get a 3 (or even 4) day weekend. Our EE professor already said he would be fine with moving Monday's class, so that way we would have Mondays off. We also have his lab on Fridays, and we can move [View Full Entry]

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This morning Mark, Ali and I took a tram across the river to do some sightseeing. We went to Gellert Hill, a historic hill next to the legendary Gellert Hotel. The first stop on the hill was the Cave Church, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a very strange church build into a cave in the side of the hill. After going in here we got some decent cheese pretzels from a vendor near the church. we continued climbing up the stairs on the hill, stopping at various points for pictures and good views. At the top of Gellert [View Full Entry]

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Today we just had more orientation stuff in the morning, but we were done at 11:15 so we had the afternoon off. I swung by the central market on the way home to pick up some stuff for lunch and dinner. The place is huge and overwhelming, but I'm getting more comfortable there. It's a fairly touristy area, so most of the vendors either speak English or just point to things when they see that you don't speak Hungarian. We're just hanging out here this afternoon - our landlord came by and we signed our lease and did all that stuff. [View Full Entry]

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