I am back to "reality" -- as in I actually had classes this week, and my family left today, which after 3 weeks of being here, feels pretty odd! We had a great dinner last night back at Le Relais de Venise -- the steak frites restaurant that we visited before Christmas. It was just as delicious as before -- steak was incredible, the fries were amazing, and the sauce that covered it all was so yummy. I asked last time what spices were in the sauce -- and the waitress told me it was a secret...I can see why it's well guarded. For dessert, I split the two chocolate cakes with Becca -- one out of a loaf pan, and the other cut out of a round chocolate cake. Both were quite good, but I was partial to the loaf looking one...But overall, it was a wonderful last meal all together!
I think what's most interesting about the past few weeks, was the time that my parents and I spent in Budapest. It really is just an incredibly different city than anything found in Western Europe. There is definitely still the lasting feeling of the Soviet presence -- and many of the buildings are rather sad looking and dirty. What we didn't know, was that most of the big buildings in Budapest were built right around the turn of the 19th century. Who would have thought? I expected everything to be reallllly old. But even though it wasn't, it was still extremely impressive.
Highlights included the Parliament building -- which is probably the most recognized building in the city. We couldn't go in, but we took a nice walk around it, and I even found a 100 Euro note on the ground...Happy New Year to me! From there, we walked across the river (via a bridge) to the Buda side of the city (in case you didn't know, Budapest is actually made up of two cities -- Buda and Pest...I'm serious) where we climbed up to the Fishermen's Bastion, saw the extremely controversial Hilton hotel, and went into the Mattias Church, which was really beautiful.
The next day -- we ventured farther into the Pest side, which was where our hotel was, to the main park which is just in front of the Heroes' Square, and has a castle, the thermal baths, an amusement park, and a zoo. We wandered around for a bit -- didn't go for a dip in the baths, but did see them! Lots of steam, and lots of larger people wearing smaller bathing suits....We did, however, decide to go to the zoo! Which was great. We saw so much -- wombats, camels, tigers, lions, elephants, hippos, a rhino, giraffes, etc. And what was so amazing was that there's very little space between the animals and the public (many of the setups would never be allowed in the US). For example, what made the hippo come out of the water and show its teeth, was the fact that some little girl was reaching her arm out through the bars right into the hippos' little pool. Duh. Cool for us -- not so cool if he decided to bite her arm off.
Budapest also had surprisingly wonderful food. We had a lovely 4 course dinner at our hotel for New Year's Eve which was delicious -- I tried pig knuckle which was quite good! Perhaps the highlight was the chocolate cake at the end of the meal -- which was basically three types of chocolate mousse covered in a chocolate coating....YUM. We had goulash and fish stew and cabbage soup -- and I had a delicious piece of duck at Klassz, the restaurant that we went to on our last night -- which we had to fight our way through a protest to get to...
But overall, the vacation was wonderful! Many thanks to my family for coming over and making it all happen. Either fortunately or unfortunately, it's rather whetted my appetite for traveling and delicious food -- it's easy to fall into a rhythm of eating the same things and to be content with staying put.
Here are a few pictures that I rather liked -- again, courtesy of my father, who was the one taking all the pictures....Apologies for a bit of photo-overload....
Cool shot of the Eiffel Tower:
American Cemetery outside of Bayeux (in Normandy):
Mont Saint Michel from a distance:
Budapest -- View of the Parliament building from Buda:
Hungarian Starbucks (which was dirt cheap) - "Emili, El, & Lora":
DUH! Idiot.
The lobby of our hotel in Budapest -- incredible! :
Hope that everyone is off to a wonderful new year, and I will do my best to keep updating!
A bientot!
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