Eastern Europe

Ok, before we get any further into the story of Em, let me explain why Robby and I decided to go to Eastern Europe instead of Greece. We had originally planned to do Greece for 7 days before I flew home from Tel aviv, but with the war (yes, I know it ended) and the trouble of finding a plane or ferry or anything back to Israel, we realized it would be better to just continue on to Eastern Europe and then find a way home from there. Plus we were both kinda sick of seeing Roman and Byzantine pillars. There are only so many marble and stone monument you can see before they end up blending into each other. We decided a change of scenery was in order and so Gothic castles became our next challenge. I also got to extend my trip another 6 days - was suppose to fly home from Tel Aviv on the 4th and now I fly to LA on the 10-11th via Krakow to Dublin.

Now back to the saga. We made it to Istanbul at 11am and went in search of the bus that would take us to Budapest. We were told that there was a direct bus, but after going from bus company to bus company we found that we were going to have to take a night bus to Sophia, Bulgaria and then catch a bus to Budapest. Apparently there was no direct bus, go figure. We had a 9 hour lay over in Istanbul so we ventured up to the Carrefour- the lovely supermarket/mall that made us extremely happy in Egypt actually existed in Turkey.

We enjoyed the next 8 hours looking at ugly clothes, eating something besides a kebob, keeping cool in the AC, and getting my hair colored and Robby's cut. When you have time to waste you end up doing stupid stuff... well, semi-stupid stuff. I've always wanted my hair to be another color and since the hair salon wouldn't make it blur I decided on Red, but no orange red, the red that is actually red. I wanted maroon, but they didn't have a lot of options and they didn't speak English. Robby and I communicated via a nice patron of the salon who spoke mediocre English and through wide hand gestures and pictures.
While I got my hair gooped up, Robby tried to tell the master Stylist how she wanted her hair. She wanted it shoulder length and with layers. We showed the guy a picture, but for some reason he decided to alter the image a bit and went a little nuts on the cutting. Robby's hair is cute, but short and boyish. We had to practically pull the stylist away when he went in for the kill on Robby's bangs. That's a No-No. So she can now pull her hair back into cute little pig-tail stubs and the rest up curls.

My hair on the other hand is long (I was going to cut it, but I got scared and bowed out)and red. When the dye set and the hair was washed my hair was a reddish-pink. Awfully bright pink more so than red, but after the first wash it went dimmer and since it's been about 12 days from when I got it dyed it's all but a natural red color. I think my hair hates anything un-natural and so it won't let dyes stay. So I have red hair, but it's red-headed step-child hair rather than punk red hair. Since I got it dyed I've run into at least 200 other people with red hair. It seems the color that everyone and their grandma dyes their hair in Europe. I feel so unoriginal. :( Hopefully America just has boring hair colors so I can stand out a bit when I get back.

So, hair cuts and shopping out of the way we headed back to the bus station and boarded our 10 hour bus to Bulgaria. The bus was a tight squeeze with the knees, but at least there wasn't an evil man kicking the seat behind me. About 12:30 am the bus stopped at the boarder and practically the whole bus got off. Robby and I weren't sure what to do, but once we realized everyone was headed to the duty-free store we relaxed and went back to sleep. At 1 am the bus stopped again, 10 feet further to the exit gate. Everyone got off again and we were sort of grunted at by a fellow passenger who told us to get off. We had to take all our bags because the inspectors were suppose to go through them, but they pretty much looked at us, rifled through 2 bags and told us to get back on the bus.

We wanted to go to sleep, but 15 minutes later we had to get off the bus again and this time it was a mad rush to get to the inspection window and have the very tired and bored officer inspect and stamp our passports. Robby, I and two other people got to be the lucky winners of the inspection officer keeping our passports. After the whole bus (about 50 people) went through inspection, us and the other couple were called to answer a few stupid questions about why we were headed to Bulgaria. We told him we wanted Budapest and he thought we said Bucharest, which started more stupid questions, but eventually he stamped our passports and handed them back.

We climbed on board the bus again, only to get off at the boarder into Bulgaria (we were exiting Hungary) where we went through the "In" stamp process to Bulgaria. After 3 annoying hours we were headed to Sophia and finally allowed to get a little shut eye. Night buses save on hotel fairs, but you never get any sleep. We arrived at the Sophia bus station at 6 am and were told by the bus people in Istanbul to go to EuroBus for the connecting bus to Budapest. EuroBus didn't open until 8 am. We camped out in front of the office waiting and harassing the other bus companies for buses to Budapest. We started to get nervous when every other company said they didn't go to Budapest. We found one company that did go, but they were full and they didn't have another bus going until 2 days later. We did not want to spend two days in Sophia.

While we were waiting for EuroBus to open we bumped in a girl that went on the Goreme trip with us. She was trying to get to Budapest as well and so we banned together in finding a bus. At 8 am EuroBus opened and to our disappointment they told us they did not, and never had, any buses going to Budapest. Great! For some reason I decided to go back to the place that said they had a bus and see if there were any more buses leaving that day. Miracouisally they had spots available on the 9 am bus. Hum. Robby and Hollie (the other girl) ran around the station looking for an ATM machine to get Bulgarian currency because the bus station wouldn't take USD or credit cards. None of the ATMs accepted the Debit cards and so they went frantically searching for an open exchange place. About 15 minutes to 9am they returned, with me practically freaking out that we would lose the newly available seats. They paid, got tickets, and the bus driver rushed us aboard.

The bus left 10 minutes early, but we didn't care because we had seats. It was an old school bus of sorts with rickedy seats, no TV, no free coffee or water (like on the Turkey buses), and bad working AC - as we later came to find out. The bus stalled at the first stop light, but seemed to run ok after that. We had two more boarder crossings to deal with in our 12 hour bus ride that went fairly smooth and there were only 2 minor problems to deal with. The first was the fact that I couldn't pee in Serbia because I didn't have any Serbian money and I wasn't about to exchange a $50 USD into useless money for a 50 cent Serbia toilet. I pretty much went frantically searching for someone to give me a 50 cent Serbian piece and when no one did I thrust a Turkish dollar (way more that the 50 cent Serbian piece) in the toilet lady's hand and said, "I'm pissing!" and got in line. The problem with traveling in random countries for a short amount of time is that you will never have the right money and toilets always cost something Europe.
The second issue was the fact that no one on the bus spoken English and so at the first gas station stop RObby, Hollie and I spent too long in the store searching for food when the driver came to yell at us and motion that the bus was leaving. He was not a happy camper. At least he came to find us or we would have been stuck on the side of the road in Serbia. After that the lady behind us flashed 15 on her hands every time we stopped to let us know how much time we had at the stop.

9:30 pm we departed the sweaty bus (the AC had broke some 10 hours earlier) and found ourselves in a new city without money and no idea how to catch the metro we needed to the hostel we were staying at. We found an ATM to get money, but there was no Exchange place to make smaller bills for the metro ticket machine. Luckily Budapest is one of those trusting cities were they assume everyone will buy a ticket for the metro or buses, but they only ever have people check for tickets randomly. We boarded a metro without an problems and found our hostel in no time.

The Downtown Hostel was anything but friendly and clean. The bathrooms were small and smelly, the guy who worked there looked like he had never taken a shower in his life and never left the place (he was there everytime we we there), most of the other people staying there were cold-shouldered Hungarian girls that glared and smoked indoors, and for some reason the hostel loved to give the backpackers wine, but for some reason the hostel guy never learned that you do not serve red wine chilled... it's just wrong.

Hollie stayed the one night and then moved to Astoria Hostel because her friend was staying there. In the morning Robby and I wandered the town for a bit to take in the sights and get our barrings. Budapest is broken up into 2 sides. It was originally two different cities, Buda and Pest until a king came and combined them. Buda is the more rustic and rural of the two sides. Pest is shopping and monuments. We were staying on the outskirts of Pest. About a 10 minute walk to downtown Pest. We took photos of the giant church, went to the Jewish Synagogue, ate at a cute pub, and enjoyed the day. We met Hollie in the evening and went to see The Sentinel. We had all been stressed and tired and so we figured a movie would relieve some pressure. It turned out to be a great film and we had a nice evening.

The next day Robby and I walked 5 million miles to the City Park which is like Central Park in NY, but on a smaller scale. It's the main hub for people to chill out and walk their dogs or play soccer or go for a picnic. The Park also houses ever type of transportation museum you can think of. The train museum was cool because the building has train engines sticking out so it looks like the train is pulling the building. We didn't go into any of the museums, but they were nice to walk by. The park also has the the oldest bath house in Hungary.

Hungary is known for it's bath houses like Turkey is known for it's Turkish Baths and Thailand is known for it's massages. The bath house in the park is suppose to be rather large with about 15 different swimming pools all ranging in temperature. The water is mostly from natural hot and cold spring that are filtered in from the hills. There are whirlpools, jacuzzis, and a kids play area also in the bath house. Robby and I wanted to go in and take a look, but it was very expensive and since we didn't have our suits on we opted to do it another day.

The front of the park has a nice courtyard of Roman and Greece statues that look down upon the visitors. On either side of the courtyard is an art museum. We mostly just walked around the park and didn't really go into any of the museums. Next time. We did however find Death. We were wandering around and then we spotted him. He is a marble statue wearing a hooded cloak and holding a large book that is open. The head is practically concealed beneath the hood and so it looks like Death is thinking and writing the names of his victims in the book. The statue turned out to be of Anoymos - a famous Monk that wrote poetry. But to us and the people we met at Astoria Hostel, he is Death.

That evening we went to pick up Hollie at her hostel, but after waiting around for an hour we figured she'd forgotten our date and so we went off to find something else to do. We ended up at another movie theater and watched Thank You for Smoking. If you haven't seen this movie I advise you to go watch it. It is brilliant, well written and and beautifully acted. Well worth it.

The next day we said goodbye to the yucky Downtown Hostel and moved to Astoria Hostel. It was much cleaner, the people were friendlier and there was free breakfast. We left our bags in the lobby and headed out to eat lunch and then to Sandwiching. No Sandwiching is not a town fair competition of stuffing ones face with the most sandwiches, it is in fact caving - getting really dirty by squeezing your body through small caverns and holes inside the Earth.

Robby and I met about 20 other adventures at the #6 bus stop where we were all told to met with our little white sheets of paper. No one knew who was in charge, but pretty soon the white sheets gave away who was on the tour so that there weren't 20 of us just milling about go, "what do we do now," by themselves. Eventually the tour guy came and we boarded two buses that took us into the Buda hills. We got broken up into groups, Robby and I being put with 6 other girls.

We donned a lovely jumpsuit of and hard hat so that we looked like the 7 dwarfs off to work. The suits were great because we could freely crawl around in the mud and not care that our clothes were going to get all dirty. I hate to say it, but I'm a girl and I wouldn't want to be crawling on my stomach across wet mud while in my own clothes. The suits took away the dirty clothes fear and we were free to move about as we pleased. The 8 of us followed our guided across the street and into a tunnel that lead us down a 30 feet ladder into the belly of the Earth. For the next 2 1/2 hours we crawled, climbed, twisted and turned through about 700 meters of rocks.

Hungary is littered with underground caves. The one that we sandwiched through happened to be the World's 2nd largest network of caves spanning a distance of 20 KMs. It used to be only 5 KMs, but the combined it which a neighboring cave to in large it. The biggest connecting cave system is in Kentucky and is 25 KMs.

The best part about the caving adventure was the "Pooh Hole." The hole was very small, maybe 2 feet by 2 feet and aptly named the "Pooh Hole" because of Winnie the Pooh and the hole he tried to squeeze through after he had eaten all the honey and thus got stuck causing Christopher Robin and the others to push him through. Well, the guide first squeezed through the hole with little difficulty and then told all of us to give it a go. Now the only different between the tour guide and us is the fact that he is a man and therefore has no hips. 5 of the girls went, including Robby and only the small, skinny girl made it through. Everyone's hips got stuck and they had to back out. Even though almost everyone failed to go through, I felt I should give it a try and for some reason I pushed and pulled and managed to squeeze my hips through the hole. It was awesome.

After caving Robby and I followed a few of the girls back to their hostel on the Buda side in the promise of going to an all-you-can-eat buffet, but once we got to the place we found out that it was closing and not worth the price since it was so late. So we said goodbye to the girls and headed back to our hostel for the night.

The next day was Saturday and the main reason why we decided to stay in Budapest an extra 2 days. Budapest was having some sort of Festival and parade and it sounded like fun, even though no one could tell us why they were having the parade. We spent the morning looking around the Chinese Market which is essentially a huge Flea market before hopping on a train to the City Park and watching the parade. On the way to the parade route we stopped to watch the people in the make-shift skate park. It was refreshing to see tons of people of all ages and talents sharing the different ramps and runways. Little girls skates alongside an old man on a bike and teenagers jumping ramps on skate boards.

The beginning of the parade was cool because there were many different types of acts, most of them resembling some type of Carnival (Venice version) theme with people wearing elaborate costumes with feathers, stilts, masks, and odd ornaments. The Carnivaler's lead way for the capoeira fighters, about 50 or so people with balloon made porcupine spikes on their backs, belly dancers of all shapes and ages, and the Stomp street cleaners. Hungary apparently isn't too worried about parade safety and so Robby and I and anyone who wanted were allowed to walk along the parade path and through the parade participants if we chose to. It was great because I got some cool close up pictures of the people.

After all the interesting acts dances by the floats started. These floats were not good and all the same. They we pretty much semi after semi of half naked girls dancing to introduce the "After Party" of some club. Almost everyone of the floats had a following of 50-100 teeny boppers dancing beside it screaming and acting stupid. We saw girls ranging in age from 14 to about 25 strut their stuff (or lack of stuff) while idiotic boys took pictures and tried to picture up the girls. After an hour or so of this madness we opted to find an interest cafe and escape the bad Techno music the floats screamed. Too much nonsense.

On Sunday we rented bikes and peddled around St. Margaret's Island, another beautiful park/island with happy families out for a stroll with their puppies. We biked to the Buda side and got lost in the trees of the suburbs before finding our way back to the Danu. We didn't mind because it was beautiful and we were biking just to see stuff. We walked our bikes up the huge driveway of the Palace to see the view from the top. It turned out to be nice, but nothing spectacular, although you got to see the Danu below and all the bridges that lead from Buda to Pest.

We had to return our bikes after 6 hours, pick up our packs from the hostel and head to the train station because we were headed to Eger (pronounced Egg-ger) for the next 3 days. Eger is a small, very quaint town two hours by train from Budapest. Some of the people that we met at Astoria hostel recommended the place because it was peaceful, had a hot spring swimming pool, and was near a National Park. When we arrived in Eger at about 9:30pm we were told to walk about 700 meters to find the hostel that we were to stay at, but after a half hour of pacing back an dforth from one street to the next we decided that the idiot who gave us directions had no clue as to wear the train station was in regards to the hostel. We basically spent the next hour and 15 minutes walking around with our heavy packs getting crankier and crankier while we walked down a barely lit rural street looking for an address that seemed to not exist. We eventually found the hostel/dorm in middle of nowhere.

Like most small towns in Europe, Universities rent out their dorms as hostels for the summer to make a little extra cash and so when we showed up, not too happy, we were greeted by moronic college kids that didn't really speak English and could have cared less if we walked two feet to get to their door or the 2 miles we really walked. We were at least given our own dorm room, so we didn't have to bother with stupid other students while there. I really wanted a drink after the long hike to the hostel, but the only thing nearby was a gas station that didn't even have hot water for hot chocolate. Robby and I decided to change hostels in the morning.

When we awoke the following day it was of course raining, but we didn't care because we were getting the hell out of the hostel. The people we not friendly and we were about a 1/2 hour walk from anywhere near town. We hopped on a bus and ended up near the center of town not knowing where to stay. I made Robby hike all around as we followed the Pension signs, but everything seem too expensive. Eventually we found the Tourist office and they pointed us in the direction of a dorm/hostel near the center of town. Luckily the dorm had space and we were allowed to set our packs down. I don't mind not knowing where I am going, but with heavy backpacks it can be a pain.

We decided that we needed to relax and so we packed our bathing suits and headed out in search of the hot springs we were told about. They turned out to be fairly close to the hostel. It was a large complex with 6 swimming pools filtering in natural sulfur water. All the pool varied in temperature and we opted to stay in the pool that was about 38 degrees C. The pool had pipes that poured extra hot water on your back with was nice. We also went in the neighboring pool that was slightly colder, but had a water jet bed and a whirlpool. It was very relaxing and cleansing.

We spent the rest of the day window shopping through the downtown square that was picturesque from some TV show of a small town. The cute cobblestone street with appealing shops to the side and happy people walking about. I nicknamed the town "Sunnydale," because at about 7 pm the shops closed and the majority of the people went home. The only things still open were the pubs that served only alcohol and coffee and a few restaurants. We ended up at McDonalds because it was open to at least 11pm. On the way back to the dorm we passed the park and it looked so creepy I felt we needed crucifixes and stakes to walk through it (hence the name Sunnydale).

The next day we visited the castle on top of the hill. It was interesting, but we didn't get to see the cool prison cells and the hero's walk because the tour took you there and we had hopped off the tour in the beginning since it was in Hungarian and we didn't understand anything. We looked around the museum that gave a timeline for when the castle was built and how it evolved over the centuries. There was a nice view of the town and farming villages in the distance. We got to see a small exhibit on the olden torture devices, but all the info was in Hungarian and so we just looked at the pictures. Overall the castle was nice and gave us something to do because we spent the rest of the day rewalking the downtown square and wondering what people did here.

The last day of Eger we spent in Bukk National Park, hiking through the hills of Szilvasvarad. We decided that we wanted to stretch our legs and get some fresh air so we started our journey up a small hill to visit the prehistoric cave of some cave dwellers before blindly following a group of hikers up and up and up a large mountain trail. Halfway up the trail we decided to ask someone where exactly the trail we were on lead. The Hungarian first asked us what the hell we were doing there, since we were American and it probably looked a little weird having two Americans come up to her and ask where they were headed, but she eventually told us we were about a KM away from a nice lookout point on the tip of the mountain. Since we had spent the last hour or so huffing and puffing up the stupid hill (why we decided to go up I don't know) we decided to continue to the top.

Yeah, the 1 KM turned out to be more like 3 KMs and the lovely lookout spot turned out to be a grassy knoll hidden in the mist of tall trees. No lookout to anything. We did however get to see a nice large cross planted in the grass and a bird house sign that said we'd reached 959 meters. Yea us. All our hard work climbing and we didn't get to take one nice picture of the valley below. We decided to head down a different direction from the slippery and steep one we climbed up and some how managed to get a tad bit lost.

We knew that we needed to go in a certain direction, but the clearly labeled paths seemed to become unclear and sometimes vanish all together the further we went down the mountain. It was suppose to be a 4.5 KMs journey back to town, but it took us about 6 Miles to reach the bottom. Our journey up the hill started out on the Green Triangle path which lead to the Red Triangle, The Yellow Dash, The Blue Slash, the Yellow Cross, The Yellow dash again, and the Green Dash got us out. Along the way we off roaded a bit, lost all paths completely and backtracked a bit. It was fun, but freezing and threatening to rain on us at any moment. We hit the town with growling stomachs and entered the first restaurant that sounded edible.

The day turned out to be a blast and made us too tired to find something to do during the night. We headed back to the dorm and went to sleep. We had to get up early to catch a train to Budapest to get another one to Prague, but that is another story. So long for now.