Day 38 in Europe - Budapest, Hungary

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Day 38 in Europe - Feeling Hungary in Hungary, Budapest - January 20th, 2013:

Hey Hey Hey! Guess who's in Budapest! After around a 4 hour Charter Bus ride we head into Budapest from Brno. The first part of the town is super run-down, and the very first thing I see when getting off the bus is a gigantic pile of Puke waiting on the ground to greet me. Likewise, the first picture I take in Budapest is that Epic pile of Puke! Lol. We then take the Metro to our Hostel Area, and that area is a lot nicer. We get into the Retox Hostel at about 2:30, and are immideately greeting by one of the workers with his face completely painted to look like Braveheart, and another dressed up with Fairy Wings. We didn't want to bring up a conversation of why they were dressed like that, so I just acted like it was a normal thing to do, lol. All the workers and people here are super nice and chill, and it looks like it will be a pretty epic time here.

The Hostel has graffiti artwork everywhere and gives it a fun feel to it. I like Turtles. We are staying in a 14 person room and we are in a pretty great central location to all the cool points of interest. We are staying on the Pest side, the side with the Parlament and most of the night life. After we check in, Nick and I are Hungary in Hungary after not eating anything yet, so we went to a great Hungarian resturant/pub that was recommended to us. There I of coarse ordered a side of Goulash, which was much different then the Goulash in the Czech Republic, as here it is a soup and in the Czech, it was a much thicker souce on a fancier dish that had awesome fried potatoe things. My actual main coarse was Duck! It was the first time I ever had it and it was really good.

We then ventured around the city as it was starting to get dark. Nick has already been here once since he only lives a 4 hour bus ride from here, so showed me around a lot of the big and famous buildings on the Pest side, walking through the big government buildings, the Ronald Regan Statue, took some cool photos at St. Stephans Basilica and others as we made our way to the gigantic Dunabe River that seperates Buda from Pest. It was one of the widest rivers I've ever seen, and it was absolutely Amazing to see all the buildings along the river! Seeing the Parlament building, the Castle, the Royal Palace, Parlament and all of the other Epic Buildings by the river was quite Amazing.

Then we made our way to the Margit Sziget in Hungarian, or the big-ass island to the North. There was this fantasticly huge park full of snow surrounded by the Dunabe River. We walked through it and there were a lot of joggers somehow running on the ice. It went on forever so we decided to cut to the other side, but it was so wide we gave up trying to find the other side and headed back to the beggining area down the middle, where we saw this really creepy and isolated hut for some reason still open in the middle of nowhere with nobody around. It was a really cool park to walk through at night with all the snow everywhere. At this hut we ordered hot apple cider and coffee to warm up since it had to have been under 20 Degrees Farenheight. The Cider was Amazing, actually making it there when we ordered it and then we headed back to the Hostel, as we were going to attend our Hostels Pub Crawl, which is a great way to meet people from the Hostel.

On the way back, we made sure to stop at the McDonnalds to get a few cheap hamburgers. McDonnalds is lliterally everywhere, they are taking over the World! By eating there this night marks the Ninth European Country on this Trip where I had McDonnalds! Lol. It was pretty cool to see each McDonnalds in Different Languages with slightly different items on the menus that were specific to that country, for example, Germany had a Broughtwarst Hamburger, something definitely not on the California Menu! Lol. I ordered my usual dollar Cheese Burgers and we were on our way back.

Our Hostel is known for it's parties they throw, and it was a pretty fun night and met a lot of really cool people. At our Pubs bar was our meeting place, and we had a huge group of around 30 People for the Crawl, pretty much our entire Hostel going! After a drink there, we were told that there was a law that you had to be quite after 8pm or you could possibly get finned or arrested, so we made our walk to our first of four pubs as quite as possible, but not too quite.

We get to the first Pub, and I was absolutely Blown away. This place is one of the reason's that I will never be able to go into a California Bar ever again. I absolutely LOVE places that have a bunch of nooks-and-crannies with random rooms and hallways and floors and rooms inside of rooms to hangout at, and boy this one had it! In California, at the Bars there are pretty much just one room, and one bar and that's it, boring. Here in Europe, you Have places like this! I believe it was called Szimpla. It was Epic, this place had three stories, and no exaggeration, at least 20 or more random rooms inside of rooms on each and every floor to drink in, all along every floor just all these hidden rooms,with giant Courtyards on the first floor for both indoor and outdoor drinking. It was nothing short of amazing, with at least 10 bars throught the entire place. This place was huge! And the setting was really cool with cool music playing and it was a lot of fun! The only other place in Europe I've been to comparable bars was in Dublin, which I'm excited to go back to in a couple of days to ultimately catch my roundtrip flight back home.

We spent an hour at everybar with a bunch of cool people. Budapest is definitely a gigantic Party area, something I did not know going into here! The other bars were much the same, with multiple floors and many places to drink in. The third was more of a California style bar with just one big room. I had my camera hanging on my neck as I usually do, but this time hanging backwards hanging on my backside. So these girls who were behind me, without me know, start taking pictures of themseves on my camera! Lol. After I realised that, I laughed and we talked for awhile. The Beer was generally only about 2 US Dollars so it was Awesomely cheap to drink once again. For the last bar we kind of got lost form the group and walked into another bar that we thought they were in but weren't, but that was okay since the pub was probably my second favorite and they accepted or 2 for 1 couponse that we purchased earlier.

On the way back we stumbled upon the most Epic find you could Possibly have at 2am after the Bars. It was the greatest hole in the wall Pizza Place selling the most fresh Gigantic Pizza through a hole in there wall! Well, window! Lol. Oh my gosh it was the best! There was a huge long line, and constatnly a person coming with 5 or 6 huge freshly made pizzas ever few minutes to supply the demand. These pizzas were not only about 1/3rd of an entire pizza, but had amazing toppings and was only 200 HUF, the equivalent to like .75 US Cents!!!! Oh my gosh it was good, we had a couple and then heading back to the Hostel, were we were approached by a Prostitute and wanted Sex for something like 20,000 HUF or something, but we walked away.

This was a huge surprise heading back to the Hostel. After hearing how crazy it was we come to find only 4 people at the bar, mostely workers, just hanging out at drinking. Nick and I then went around the corner to a cheap 7-11 Style place to buy some cheap beers, then went back and joined them. One of the people was the BraveHeart guy, and now he was Super Trashed and ever thing that came out of his mouth was, FREEEDOM!!! We have LIBERTY!!! And stuff like that, lol. It was cool hanging out for awhile and that is when we decided to go to bed. This was the even bigger shocker, the website says that it's hard to sleep at night, but since I guess it is the offseason there was pretty much no one here! In our 14 Person Room, it was just Nick and me! Absolutely no one else in our room! After almost a month an a half of traveling this has never happend before! We had the entire 14 person room to ourselves, so we drank a little more, were loud, then passed out.

Tommor Nick has to leave in the Morning, so I will be officially on my own again for the rest of the trip until I see my family at the San Diego Air Port in a handful of days. I can't wait for the Awesomeness that Awaites me tomorrow.

Egeszsegedre,

-Chris

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Photos

Random rooms within rooms to hangput at at the pubs
Way more interesting then the boring 1 room Bars in california

Millions of. Rooms!
Had to have been over 40 rooms, 3 Floors, multiple courtyards and 8 Bars inside one pub. Try to find a place like that in California!