Budapest

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This has got to be one of the most beautiful cities Ive been to so far. Its kinda funny though its sorta like basel, but bigger. It was really funny arriving in Budapest, I felt like I'd come back into civilisation a little bit. Had this amazing sleeper train that even had a duvet rather than the bog-standard-20year-old blanket aaaaaaaah. And when I arrived in the train station... nothing! One guy asked me 'Taxi?' I said no thankyou, and...
that was it! I couldnt beleive it. Then I got on the metro, which was very easy to navigate, and got to the hostel with no trouble whatsoever. Admittedly noone said 'welcome to hungary' like they did in turkey, but it wasnt far off!

Budapest is beautiful, and theres really a lot going on. We went to this cool bar in one of the metro-underground-entrance-walkway thingies (its crazy what you can fit in one of those!) Theres an awesome food market (like most places actually but they never get old), we also went to this really cool flea market, where they sell EVERYthing, you can get violins, gramophones, there were several stalls 4x2x2m chocka block of massive big iron cogs (i think thats what they were) and wheels and tools like you wouldnt beleive. Im not entirely sure who buys that kind of thing, but i could easily have made an excellent toolbox. they literally had everything, including old army uniforms and helmets (yes actually like knights helmets... we saw those and were joking next wed see a sword - well we didnt see a knight's sword but we did see some samurai swords!) we hung out with one lady in her shop for about an hour goggling over the jewellery she was selling. we bargained her down from ridiculously cheap prices to ridiculously unbeleivably cheap prices, and i think she probably still felt she got lots of money out of us stupid tourists and we felt like we got an awesome deal too so smiles all round.

I managed to meet some of the locals as well, it was nice after turkey to actually be able to approach someone and have a real conversation rather than being bombarded in the other direction, just trying to get rid the guys who are doing their very best to talk to you no matter what about. I met this one guy, we were talking about travelling, hes planning a trip and he said nz is a rich country, which really surprised me, i dont think of nz as rich, but i guess you dont normally compare nz to eastern europe countries. i should have thought about it before in that kind of context and not been surprised, seeing as i keep going on about how cheap everything is around here. anyway, hungarys not poor, living is pretty cheap, but like i think of nz, its sorta hard to go on holiday because their currency is worth so little.


photos to come...

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Photos

Me and a hooker
haha i mean hookah

Absinthe
Theres a lot of this stuff around here

Government Building
This place is like being in a fairy tale, gorgeous!