Buda Palace and other sightseeing photo opps

here are some pictures from our trip to Buda, on the other side of the river yesterday. I finally felt like I was a tourist in a foreign country. It was beautiful, and so old.


inside the church at the palace


my mentor Dory, Carolina, me, and Claire in front of the Buda palace.


this is part of the castle


the nicest mcdonald's i've ever been in.


the outside of our house, we live on the top floor

Why B is the Best Letter Ever

beer for breakfast
budapest bumblefuck (aka orientation)
bomb ass burritos
the Blue Baron (Big B.) our new hooka
beautiful Szimpla bar
irish beezies
subway bitches
black french funk brother wearing 2 belts
bedtime hooka sesh
aaaaand our discovery of Bushdoctor, one block away from our house


Well that was my day yesterday... Szimpla was the coolest place I have ever been to. It's this giant bar that is basically a courtyard in a cool old building with all these different rooms, plants, art everywhere, a huge movie projector outside, colorful lights, at least four bars.... basically it would be pretentious as shit if it was in America, but it wasn't, it was really awesome. Ran into drunk Irish beezies on the way home who were so relieved to find people who spoke "proper english", and talked shit on Romanians and Budapest being poor and having too many homeless people (hopefully they never go to San Francisco, I think I've only seen about two homeless people this whole time). We also discovered a shop called Bushdoctor right around the corner from our house, which is incredible news seeing as we were resigned to the idea of never smoking weed this whole trip. You can go to jail for smoking a joint. That place definitely knows what's up.

Today we had our second Hungarian lesson, and I'm actually pretty excited to learn this absurd and unique language. It is completely unrelated to any other language in the world, and the 44 letter alphabet is a little overwhelming. Because so many of the letters make different sounds than you would ever guess (S makes "sh" but Sz makes "s", Gy makes "d", J makes "y", etc) it takes us longer than a kindergartener to sound out words, but every letter always makes the same sound no matter what word it's in. But our professor is really hilarious. Carolina and I stumbled into some sort of weird dungeons and dragons-y cave bar place filled with weirdos playing Magic, drinking beer, and listening to metal, and tested out our skills on the crazy hippie bartender who certainly appreciated the effort but understood little of what we said. Also, this freaky "bar" connected through dungeony passageways to Bushdoctor. So we've gotta get to be regulars.

We bought a beautiful huge hooka with four hoses and named it the Blue Baron, so every night we come back and just sit around and smoke it. Very relaxing.

Also, our mentors at the USF program took us to a nice bar/restaurant on Margit Island in the Duna River, and paid for our expensive drinks and fancy appetizers, which led to the nicest bottle of wine I've ever tasted. It was complimentary since the server couldn't get our drink orders right for the life of him (I was served a mojito, and upon telling him I had ordered the Soco mojito, which has NONE of the same ingredients, and pointed at it on the menu, he came back with a shot of Southern Comfort and told me to pour it into the mojito.... uh, whatever).

Anyways, I'm going to go read Kafka on the Shore--which is an amazing book--and tomorrow my mentor Dory is taking us "sightseeing" around the city, including Buda castle.

What the???

Well, here I am in my nice-ass apartment in Budapest. It's right downtown and it's all you could possibly expect from an apartment in an architecture-centric country. It's probably the nicest place I will ever live in my life. We have quite the charming European courtyard, which looks haunted at night. I can understand why there's an architecture program here; every building is absolutely stunning and intricate, and really old. Still, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm in another country, and not just another district of San Francisco. Our alley is apparently the hot spot for drunken home-stumblers, plus we plan on getting roller blades since an acceptable amount of people here practice the sport with no shame. The flight here was mostly sleepy, courtesy of a dank nug we appropriately found on the kitchen floor on my last morning in the Dank Tank. Coupled with the fact that someone tagged our George Forman grill at our party the night before, and that Cathleen made a mega-pancake filled with bananas and chocolate for breakfast, I had the best last morning possible.

I think I'm still too delusional and jet lagged for this all to hit me, but I'm still stoked to be here. Tomorrow we start classes and all that, and there's still so much to do and I just hope it doesn't cost too much money. Carolina and I are looking into jobs at a hummus bar, where we would most likely have to get paid under the table.

Once I get some camera batteries I'll post some pictures.