Budapest in Photos

October 11 – October 14

After visiting Prague and Cesky Krumlov, we still hadn’t had enough of Eastern Europe. We had found great history, food, and hostels in each location, so decided to extend our time in the east with a visit to Budapest.

We hopped on the night train from Prague, happy to find a couchette all to ourselves, for less than we paid to share a couchette with 2 other people on our first night train to Switzerland. There were a few noticeable differences on this train however. First, we didn’t have to reserve the train so we just paid cash on board. Second, the conductor checked our rail passes and kept them for the rest of the night (we were a little worried we wouldn’t get them back). Third, there were four locks on the compartment door and the conductor told us that we needed to use them. But the fourth difference was the biggest of all. The train was routed through Slovakia, a country for which our Eurail pass is not valid. We reached the border around 6 am and a few minutes later we heard a knock at our door. A little nervous to undo all the locks the conductor had told us we needed to use, we asked who was there, but nobody answered and the knocking continued. Still half asleep, we opened the door to see the conductor and the Slovak customs official standing in front of us.

The conversation went something like this:

“So your pass not valid through Slovakia so you need to buy ticket. It will be 33 euro for the ticket,” and then, smiling eagerly, “or I give you discount, 15 euro if you don’t want receipt.” As we fumbled clumsily for our money belts, he changed his mind after a few seconds. “Actually 20, give me 20.”

So we bribed our way into Budapest.

When we got into the city, it was dreary and cold and rainy and dismal. We made our way over to the hostel, a really cool place run by a 33 year old Hungarian woman who looks 10 years younger than she is, and her boyfriend from Indiana who came to Budapest planning to stay only 3 days and is still there 6 months later. The hostel was overbooked, so they asked if we could share the pullout couch instead of having separate beds, and we’d only have to pay half price. We happily agreed.

As mentioned, it was a pretty disgusting day, so we asked them for some activity recommendations and they suggested the Szechenyi Baths. Budapest is full of thermal baths, and these ones are apparently the best. Fed by natural springs, the Szechenyi Baths is a very large complex of indoor and outdoor pools, all different temperatures and sizes, for sitting or swimming, still water and jets, everything. There was even a circular section where swirling water creates a whirlpool that carries you around and around. It was wonderful. We spent the entire afternoon into the evening there, playing in the pools and people watching.

Max and I had some differing ideas about what we wanted to do our first night, so we decided to separate and meet up later. I was really interested to see what the Danube embankment was like, so I walked down to the bridge near our hostel to check it out. All the lights were lit up along the riverside and the castle was illuminated looking over the river. The view was great, but it was close to 10 pm by the time I got to the bridge, and the lateness and the darkness and the unknown environment were freaking me out a little walking around alone without Max, so I headed back to meet up for drinks with him and some people we'd met in the hostel.

The next morning was also disgusting, worse than the first day, bitter cold and pouring rain. We didn’t leave the hostel until lunchtime so I was cranky, and we were hungry, and wet and cold the moment we stepped outside. We still wanted to do some sightseeing, and I was really curious to see the river in the day time and with Max, in a setting in which I wouldn’t be so focused on being scared and alone. We didn’t get far because we were so hungry and cold, but we came across an enormous market with lots of traditional Hungarian food and wares. We had some yummy goulash and pastries and checked out the traditional Hungarian wares for sale.

After lunch, we decided to brave the bad weather and make our way over to the Parliament building (our Frommer’s guide said that the tour was amazing and the author had done it 6 times, so we thought it would be worth it). We decided to take public transportation to evade the freezing rain. Budapest, like Prague, lacks strict ticket enforcement, and we had yet to pay for a ticket in either location because it just wasn’t necessary. In our haste to escape the rain, we hopped on a tram with only about 4 other passengers, and a ticket controller. The train was already moving as he started to approach us, and we were cornered!

Without tickets, we were supposed to pay the fine. It seemed that the only English words he knew were, “You must pay 6,000 forints,” and he kept pointing at a sign on the tram to support his argument. We countered with “We don’t have 6,000 forints.” The conversation went on like that for about 5 rotations of these phrases until we came to the next stop and he declared with exasperation, “Get out.” We talked to the hostel owner later on and she told us that she never pays for public transit in Budapest and has never had a problem because the ticket controllers have no real power. She said things go like this:

“Give me your ticket.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Pay me the fine.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“Give me your ID so I can write you a ticket.”

“I don’t have it with me.

“Let’s go to the train station and you can use your credit card.”

“I don’t have one.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“So call them.”

And they never do, and according to her, no one gets in trouble. She tried the same routine with a ticket controller in Rome and spent 8 hours in jail.

But back to the day. After being kicked off the tram, we decided to walk the rest of the way to Parliament, only to find it closed. By this time, we were a little fed up and unwilling to explore in the rain any longer.

We haven’t exercised the entire time we’d been traveling, so we decided that this would be a good time to seek out some squash! Unphased by our experience with the ticket controller, we took the tram across town to the Hotel Grif. Max bargained down the receptionist for a 30% discount on the court time and a 50% discount on the racquets, and we had a great time (indoors, thankfully). After squash, we made it back to our hotel room early and were in for the night.

Having accomplished very little our second day in Budapest, we were determined to cover a little more ground on our third day. Though still bitter cold, it was no longer raining so we made our way over to Parliament first thing to pick up tickets for our afternoon tour and then headed to the House of Terror. The House of Terror is a museum dedicated to the victims of fascism and communism in Hungary. It houses various relics of the Nazi and Communist regimes in Hungary from World War II until 1991, including a full size tank, and details the history of the era on full page leaflets in every room (the reading was a little overwhelming – Max commented that he probably read more in that museum than he had for some classes). The most chilling part of the museum was the basement, where dissidents had actually been imprisoned during both regimes. Even the elevator down to the basement was horrifying – we were forced to watch an account of the executions as told by the guy who cleaned the gallows as the elevator descended slowly through a big black dark room where all of this had really occurred. It was wet and dark, and you could see where prisoners had slept on wet boards (no blankets) or been forced to stand for 12 hours at a time. It was a lot to take in, and I was pretty excited to get out of there by the time we left.

I thought Parliament was cool, but Max hated it. The building was astoundingly grand and beautiful (it was built by the Hapsburgs) and we got to see the crown jewels. The dome was even significantly 96 meters high to commemorate the founding of the country in 896. But the tour was really short, and not overly informative, and especially having just come from the House of Terror, Max was unimpressed. The tour also never addressed what happened to the building during the Nazi and Soviet occupations, which was pretty fresh in our minds and seemed to be a pretty important part of Budapest’s recent history.

The next thing we did was one of the weirdest and coolest activities we’ve done so far. Buda Castle sits on a hill overlooking the city and inside the hill beneath the castle is a labyrinth. The rooms were apparently formed by thermal springs, which were then made into cellars during medieval times. The rooms were connected to form an underground network of tunnels during World War II, and were also used by the Nazis and Communist officials for their secret operations (and for fun, Max says). Now they are open to the public. They were bizarre. It was really dark in there. There were also weird statues, and some of them had spears, and it was really unclear why they were there which made everything weirder. But the scariest thing of all was the music. Some rooms had light tapping, some had tinkling bells, and some rooms had deep, menacing drumming. The scariest room was almost completely dark, was full of statues with spears, and there was loud primordial drumming. I was afraid the statues would come to life and sacrifice us in some pagan cave ritual.

But it still got scarier. At 6 pm, they turned off all the lights and gave us lanterns, one per group. At first, I thought having our own light source actually made it ok because I could see where I was going. At that point, we had our own lantern, and they hadn’t actually turned off all the lights. But then they did. I walked around with Max like that for about 10 minutes (we had already been down there at least an hour!) and decided I couldn’t take it anymore and had to get out. Max wanted to stay, and he wanted me to take the lantern so that he could explore in total darkness. He actually stayed for an impressive 10 minutes, but even he was a little scared after that (and he bumped into something because he couldn’t see anything at all).

The city at night.

We couldn’t leave Eastern Europe without partaking of the legendary nightlife, so we asked our hostel owner for a club recommendation and convinced an Australian couple from the hostel to come out with us. A few beers later, we were dancing the night away to electronic reggae on the graffiti covered rooftop of an old warehouse building. It lived up to the hype.

The Australian girl told us that it was supposed to snow in Budapest the next day, and that solidified our decision to leave Eastern Europe to seek the warmer weather of Italy by way of Austria. Next stop, Vienna!

The Czech Republic in Photos

Prague: October 4 - 8

Cesky Krumlov: October 8 - 11

Prague is a great city. Wonderful architecture, exciting history, and delicious food, all of which are affordable.

We got into Prague after midnight. When a taxi driver told us it would be the equivalent of $50 for a 2 km taxi ride, we decided to brave the public transit (metro and bus) to find our hostel. When we finally reached the hostel, all the lights were out and reception was closed. After tapping on the window for a few minutes, we were sure all was lost. Then the the lights flickered on and a guest came to the door and we were saved. We called the receptionist (using his phone), who was at the hostel within minutes. We had booked two beds in an 8 bed room and got the entire room to ourselves. It was a great introduction to the city.

The mighty St. Vitus Cathedral in the Prague Castle complex. Max commented "I would obey the Catholic church if that was looming over me every day," and I think that was their plan in building such a scary looking building. It is by far the most impressive building in the castle complex, and builders and architects have been working on the castle's exterior for 600 years, adding more flying buttresses and gargoyles and so on. It was completed in 1920, and those 6 centuries of construction were really worth it.

Charles Bridge. King Charles IV constructed it in 1357. Parts of the bridge are actually made of eggshells, as in eggs from chickens. The bridge is lined with beautiful black statues. Rick Steves says that Prague's statues are actually "time blackened" which I think is pretty neat. We haven't seen that anywhere else in Europe.

We spent our first day lazily strolling around the city, and our second day we took a tour of the city with a company called New Europe. They have free tours in many major cities in Europe, and you tip the guide at the end of the tour whatever you thought it was worth. We had a fantastic guide who must have been some sort of theater major in college. He was really entertaining and told us lots of stories about the history of the Czech Republic and the sights of Prague. One of his stories was of the Russian invasion in 1968 after the Prague Spring. President Dubcek was trying to reform the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the Russians were not happy about it. In order to delay their arrival in Prague, Dubcek told every town and city to paint over it's town sign (like "Entering Prague") and change it's name to Dubcek. The Russians had no navigation system and were really confused by the name change, so it took 3 DAYS for them to find Prague! Other stories included a grenade kleptomaniac who helped drive the Nazis out of the city, and a sea lion who escaped the Prague zoo during the 2002 flood and swam all the way to Dresden. The tour was 4 hours long, but entertaining for its entirety.

During the break, the tour guide advertised a pub crawl and made it sound like this was a really great one that he was going on of his own volition. He got everyone on the tour really excited about it. When we arrived at the meeting point later that night, it turned out that he was really the owner of the pub crawl and was also leading it, not just going out for fun like he had told us on the tour. He had been using his free tour to advertise the pub crawl, which is really where all the money is anyway. We felt a little betrayed, but it was still pretty fun.

After a long day of walking around, Max was pretty excited to get some McDonald's.

The view in sunnier weather.

Statue of King Charles IV leading up to Charles Bridge.

Street performers on Charles Bridge.

Beautiful streets leading up to the castle (full of tourists).

The view from the castle.

Max and the view from the castle.

Close-up of St. Vitus Cathedral with its scary gargoyles and Gothic spikes.

Interior of St. Vitus.

Exquisite stained glass inside of St. Vitus Cathedral in the Prague Castle complex. I overheard a Spanish tour guide telling her group that this is the only piece of stained glass in the Art Nouveau style in Central Europe (really meaning the Czech Republic). Relieved to hear a language we understood after weeks of French, Dutch, German, and most recently Czech, we were thrilled to latch on to the tour to get some information about the cathedral.

The tomb of "Good King Wenceslas" (like from the song). Wenceslas was actually a Bohemian duke, and the first to spread Christianity in what is now the Czech Republic. He was widely adored by the Bohemian people, but was murdered by his brother who wanted his power. Again, we were listening to the tour in Spanish, so I may not have interpreted the information completely accurately, but I think the Czech crown is in the walls of this section of the cathedral.

Max trying to blend into the cathedral wall.

The cathedral's exterior.

The castle complex is a mysterious juxtaposition of styles. These buildings are right next to the cathedral. The castle looks like administrative government buildings, not like a castle at all.

The non-castle side of Charles Bridge.

Old Town Square is the most delicious square we have discovered yet. It is full of food stands selling everything from potato pancakes, to sausages, to chicken skewers, to Czech fried dough. It is also really centrally located so we just kept coming back for more.

We liked Prague so much - interesting history, delicious food, incredible architecture, and the thing that separates it most from Western Europe (besides a recent communist regime), affordable prices - that we decided to spend a little a few more days in the Czech Republic. An Australian we met during our stay in Paris had told us about a little town in the south of Czech Republic near the Austrian border called Cesky Krumlov. He said that he loved it so much that what was originally an afternoon excursion turned into a 3 day stay, so we decided to check it out.

We arrived in the afternoon having taken the train from Prague and got totally confused and ended up meandering around for a an hour trying to find the hostel. A river runs right through the town which makes navigating the city a little more complicated, but the amount of time it took us to get there (after 3 weeks of traveling now??) was embarrassing. We even got separated as we were trying to get there - Max wandered off while I was looking at the map. Guess who found the hostel first.

Exhausted after the long walk. This hostel was really neat. It was an old bakery that some backpackers from New Zealand had converted into a hostel. The place had really cool character, lots of hand drawings and woodcuts. That is a mural of Jesus above our bed (we weren't sure who the other guy was).

The outside of the hostel.

The dragon door!

I think the bathroom is a good example of the character and quirkiness of the hostel. Maybe the space used to be a bakery oven? Who knows?

The Cesky Krumlov castle at night.

The next morning, we set out to explore the city. The first place we went was the castle. The castle is actually guarded by bears who live in a moat.

The scary bear. I would definitely be more hesitant to cross a moat filled with bears than water. Max kept telling me thast my bear pictures were bad, so he took this picture himself.

The castle tower. The entire exterior of the Cesky Krumlov castle was painted to make it look like it was made out of stone or brick, but the surface was actually flat. They even painted the shadows of the stone onto the building so the shadows were the same regardless of the time of day.

We walked up to the top of the tower. The dungeon was a stop on the way and they had a real skull and bones to give people an idea of what went on in there.

View of the city from the top of the tower.

Me and the castle.

Our next day, we wanted to get out of town a bit and explore the countryside, so we visited a horseback riding stable a few kilometers away. I was very excited to ride. Two things told me that this should be a good experience. 1) I had taken a trail ride in the US just a few weeks earlier, and it was great – I had an awesome horse who was really easy to steer and really ready to run (in a good way), and the guide let us trot and canter all over the place. 2) My only other riding experience abroad was when I studied abroad in Chile and I went riding there twice. The first time was with my family, and we went to a farm and rode with a real Chilean cowboy who let us do whatever we wanted. The second time, I was with friends and we rented horses with no guide and rode to a beach and cantered up and down the beach. With these experiences, and the beautiful Czech countryside ahead of us, I was convinced that riding here had to be just as good if not better than those.

The woman asked us what level we were and I replied that I was an intermediate and had had some riding experience, which is true. On trail rides in the US, saying you’re a beginner means you get a slow horse, and won’t get to run at all. Intermediates get good horses and you get to run.

They brought out Max’s horse and he got on, and then they brought out another horse that looked like it was for me. As they were checking its hooves, they noticed a loose shoe. They quickly exchanged words in Czech, returned the horse to the barn, and came back with a different one, motioning for me to get on.

We started out into the fields beside the stables behind a girl who couldn’t have been more than 13 years old. My horse was slow and I had to kick him a bunch of times to get him to move, and we still weren’t keeping up. We walked through the field, and then through a forest until we came to a clearing. A loud lawnmower was roaring away and it spooked my horse, causing him to wheel around towards Max’s horse. Nothing really happened, but he got a little nervous.

We walked through the forest a bit more and then went out into the field again. When we came out, there was a plane flying low in the sky, roaring over the fields, and it spooked my horse even more.

After that, he kept cantering sporadically. It was hard to stop him, and he veered close to Max’s horse several times.

The cantering was annoying, but what really aggravated me was how much this horse wanted to eat. He was the hungriest horse I have ever ridden! He tried to nibble at every leaf and blade of grass he passed, and pulling on his head did nothing. Not only that, he would canter, and then jerk his head down, almost sending me over his neck every time. Our guide couldn’t do much more than say “Kick him, missus” (the only English she knew), and hand me a stick. My hands were rope burned by the time the ride ended. It was definitely the most exciting horseback riding I’ve done in a while.

We left town later that night (we took a taxi this time so we didn't get lost) for Budapest, backtracking through Prague.

Germany in Photos

September 28 - October 4

Stuttgart: September 28 - 30

Heidelberg: Septmber 30 - October 1

Rothenburg and the Romantic Road (including Neuschwanstein): October 1 - 3

Munich (for a few hours): October 4

We started out our German segment in Stuttgart, where we had our first couch surfing experience. It was awesome. Our host, David, was so gracious, easy to talk to, interested in exchanging stories of culture, telling us how things are done in Germany, and curious to hear what we had to say from a US perspective. We got into Stuttgart at 11 pm and didn’t make it to his house until close to midnight, and he still welcomed us in, offered us drinks and an Argentinian pizza. Not only that, his flatmate was spending the night at his girlfriend’s, so he gave us an entire room all to ourselves. He was terrific.

After a wonderfully relaxing and restful night of sleep, we made our way out into town. David had recommended that we visit Stuttgart’s park, an incredibly beautiful large, sprawling piece of land, filled with many different kinds of trees, lush green grass, ponds full of carp and ducks, and happy people biking, picnicking, and strolling around the grounds. The day was warm and pleasant, and we spent way more time there than anticipated, relaxing by the pond.

The main reason we came to Stuttgart was for the Wassen, a lesser known version of Munich’s Oktoberfest. The Wassen is like a big fairground, complete with rollercoasters (one had 2 upside down loops), ferris wheels, games, and junk food. However, the Wassen is distinguished from regular fairs by something very special – BEERHALLS! Women in dirndls and leiderhosen clad men handed out liter sized mugs of beer while their fellow Stuttgarters sang, cheered, and danced on tables. We sat with some guys from Stuttgart who declared enthusiastically (and regularly), “We are from Stuttgart!” They also called us “Oklahoma boy” and “Oklahoma girl.”

In the beer hall.

The Wassen was memorable not only for the beer halls, but also for the food. In addition to beer, we had “fried everything” as Max calls it. Kartoffellpuffen (potato pancakes), apfelstrudel, sausage, heart shaped frosted gingerbread cookies, shokoladefrute (fruit bathed in chocolate), crepes, and on and on. It was amazing. We got there at 3 in the afternoon and didn’t leave until 11 pm.

Max in front of a haunted house about to be eaten by King Kong.

The next morning we rented a car and drove to Heidelberg, a little city about 2 hours north of Stuttgart with a river and a castle. Heidelberg is beautiful, one of the prettiest places we’ve been, and having just come from Switzerland, that says a lot.

Max on the autobahn.

Apparently, lots of people also think that Heidelberg is really beautiful and very worth visiting because when we got into town, there were no hotels or hostels available. Following the advice of our guidebook, we decided to try a campground a few kilometers down the road. The campground seemed nice, but when we told the campground owner we didn’t have a tent, he told us it was “too cold to sleep in car” and directed us to another campground across the river that apparently had bungalows. When we got there, we found the place eerily deserted. We saw the bungalows, but it was clear nobody was staying there and they were all locked up. There was no one there but a few RVs. We decided to keep looking, and that spending the night in the car there would be our last resort.

Guess where we ended up. After hours of searching, we had no other options. It kept getting colder and colder, and we really did not have enough clothing to provide padding and keep us warm. By this time in our journey, Max had already lost every long sleeved article of clothing he had brought (first fleece left in Newport, second fleece left on train to Lucerne, long sleeve shirt who knows where) which made things worse. He did still manage to sleep in until 10 though, so it couldn’t have been that bad.

Max, still exhausted, at the castle.

In the morning we went to the castle. Built over the course of hundreds of years and several different reigns, the castle is a beautiful and bizarre hodgepodge of architectural styles in varying stages of disrepair. Some parts of the castle are well preserved and look as though they were built near the 18^th century, while other parts could have been from the 1300s. There was even a tower that had toppled over and was crumbling at the base of the castle, the entire interior exposed where it had broken away.

The castle.

It cleared up later in the afternoon. So beautiful!

The gated community, I mean walled city, of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The city was established at the crossroads of the two major trade routes, east-west Paris to Prague, and north-south Sweden to Rome, and thus became a prosperous medieval city. Now, Rothenburg's only industry is tourism. Perfectly preserved and well maintained, the city is a destination for visitors from all over the world. Though we saw barely any locals, streets were full of elderly tourists on the Romantic Road tour bus. It's like Disney World for old people, but we loved it too.

Old town square.

We visited the torture museum in Rothenburg - what medieval town is complete without one? A lot of torturing went on in those days, and they had quite a few devices for carrying out their torture. There were instruments of harsh punishment, including stretchers, as in to stretch a person's limbs from their body, pulleys with weights, used to hang people up and basically use their own weight plus heavy balls tied to their feet to dislocate shoulders and other such things, and spiky chairs to sit on. There were also less severe punishments used more to embarass the victim than create pain, such as these weird masks with big glasses and long ears and tongues for women who gossiped (they saw and heard everything and then talked about it all). If I wasn't already scared to imagine life during medieval times because of seiges and famines and all those terrible things, the torture museum really drove the point home.

Here is the famous iron maiden. The museum had two of them.

Max in the stocks.

The beautiful view of the city skyline.

One of the town gates. This entry way was built in the 1300s and they still have the door from the 1500s. It is incredibly well preserved.

The city wall.

Neuschwanstein castle, the inspiration for Disney World's Cinderella castle. Built by Bavaria's "Mad King" Ludwig in the late 1800s, the castle combines all sorts of styles from other castles the king had visited. It is also a testament to the king's favorite composer, Richard Wagner, and is full of paintings depicting scenes from his operas. There is even a grotto inside - you go from a bedroom, into a cave, into another normal looking castle room. It is apparently also from one of Wagner's operas. The castle is totally bizarre but spectacular at the same time.

The view from one of the windows of the castle.

View of the castle as we were driving away.

We couldn't leave Germany without visiting Munich's Oktoberfest. We decided to stop there before we took the train to Prague. In Stuttgart, people said Munich's Oktoberfest was like theirs but bigger. By "bigger," they meant way more people in the same amount of space. Really "bigger" meant "insanely crowded" or "too crowded to walk or move at all." It was the last day of the festival, so there were even more people because of that. It was still a ton of fun, and we drank lots of beer and gorged ourselves with snacks and rode rides like we had done in Stuttgart, but we were only there for about 2 hours instead of 8.

The train we took was at 4 pm, and it was the last one of the day. You didn't need a reservation, meaning anyone could get on, meaning that it, like Oktoberfest, was insanely crowded. The first car we walked through was so full that a lot of people were standing in the aisle without a seat. Several subsequent cars were the same way. We were finally lucky to find a few empty seats, but it was unlike anything we'd seen before or since.

After 6 hours and a philosophical conversation with an American student studying abroad in the Czech Republic, we arrived in Prague.