Old Pictures and New Activities

I'm off to Vienna in a couple of hours, which should be pretty exciting (and maybe excitingly pretty?) and I'll post pictures and such upon my return. But for now, I'm throwing up some old pictures and telling what I've been doing the past week and a half.

This picture is for Grandma. It's St. Elizabeth Church. Very pretty, just tucked back in to a little corner of town. I'll go inside and get a picture sometime, but here's the outside.



Here is the Millennium Monument and Heroes Square. I don't know if I have posted a picture of it before, so I thought I would. It is at the end of Andrassy Ut, which is like the Budapest version of the Champs Elysee, and marks the beginning of City Park.



This is Vajdahunyad Castle. It's in City Park, right behind Heroes Square. A pretty fun building. And it's quite close to my apartment.


Here it is from the other side. This was when I first got here and it was cold enough for ice.


This last weekend I had many visitors. I think there were 10 Mac kids in town from Thursday to Sunday. Kabir and Jack stayed with me (and Carlye joined us for a night), and the rest stayed at hotels or hostels around town. 6 of them were studying abroad on a Macalester program in Maastricht, the Netherlands, one was studying at the University of Edinburgh, and one was studying somewhere in Rome. The weekend they were here happened to be spring cleaning weekend, or so it seemed. The streets were filled with trash of all varieties. Beds, dressers, cupboards, sinks, appliances, computers, televisions, clothing and more were collected in huge piles on every street. So they saw Budapest at an interesting time. But it was a blast to have them, and kinda crazy to be leading them all on a tour of the city.
Then yesterday two more friends showed up (Paul, a Mac student, and Patricia, his gal from Sarah Lawrence, both studying in London) and I showed them around. So it's been an interesting time, getting to hear what everyone thinks about Budapest.

Now I'm off to Vienna. The next two weekends I'm either going to stick around here, or visit Bratislava or some small town in Hungary. The weekend after those I'm going to London for a little over 4 days. The next weekend I'll be in Zagreb/Croatia somewhere. After two more weekends here I'm off on my big adventure to the West.