I'm so Hungary!

Ann Marie emailed me and told me "I don't think anyone would be offended if you just happened to post a blog about Europe." So if you are offended, I'm sorry. Talk to her. But here it goes....the beginning of the fantastic week I had exploring Europe. Making the next few posts may just bring me to tears for two reasons. 1: From already missing these beautiful places! Ah, take me back! or 2: From how freaking long it takes blogger to upload photos (if anyone knows a faster way...please fill me in).

You must know a few things about our traveling situation. There were 16 ILP girls in a huge double decker tour bus with lots of Ukrainians. I'm just realizing I didn't take a picture of that bus and now I'm kicking myself. Thank you google for providing an image that is similar!

We were on the top level and I shared the back with Laria! My seat was broken and kept coming unattached. Let's be honest, it was so irritating. But being the weirdy I am that loves traveling, I loved the bus! I just love the traveling part of traveling. Hours on buses, planes, and cars don't bother me. I enjoy it very much, which I was grateful for because we spent many hours on this thing. It took about 30 hours to get to our first destination! And another 30 back. Plus all the hours in between countries. It adds up to be A LOT.

Our first stop was Budapest, Hungary where we spent a day. We began with the famous Szechenyi Bath Pools (I had never heard of them before). It reminded me how much I like swimming! It was raining, but it didn't matter because the pools were very warm. They were pretty cool, definitely worth visiting. Minus all the naked old ladies in the locker rooms and the men who think they can pull of speedos.

Next stop, tour around Budapest! Once again, raining. And we didn't have access to our suitcases so we got to wear our nasty all-day-bus-ride attire around town. But the rain didn't ruin anything because Budapest was beautiful! Take a look for yourself...

Our group of 16 had a separate English tour. This is our tour guide Charles.

He loved us!

Now for the story of the pretzel lady. I found this picture on someone's facebook. It will be our visual. Please look to the right. The girl with the cute umbrella, that is me. It is too small to see, but I am holding a pretzel in my hand, just feet away from where I bought it. This was midday on Sunday and Laria and I hadn't eaten anything since Saturday afternoonish. We were starving. Well there was just no time to get food. But on our tour we saw a little lady selling pretzels outside this castle. Yes! Answer to our prayers! Well we still didn't know the exchange rate (which is 200 florints to 1 American dollar) and she didn't speak any English. We bought two pretzels (they were pretty tasty I must admit) and she charged us 1800. I thought it seemed like too much, but our group was far ahead and we had to catch up. We later found out that we had just spent 9 dollars on 2 pretzels. All the other girls went back to the same stand later and got them for 400 florints each. 2 dollars. We tried to tell the lady who suddenly knew enough English to argue with us and tell us we were wrong. She ripped us off! And only us! No one else in our group. We were furious! But now we just laugh about it. For the rest of the trip whenever something went wrong we simply blamed it on the curse of the pretzel lady. Dear Pretzel Lady, you know what you did. If you ever read this, you best be finding me to give me that $5 you cheated me out of! Or just give me pretzels, that's fine too.

We ended the night with a water/light fountain show similar to Disney's "Fantasmic" or "World of Color." It was cool...but Disneyland is better. Just saying. No pictures for that. And that my friends was the too short day we spent in Budapest.