So I’ve just come back from Budapest, Hungary, and it is a great city full of castles, churches, and the incredible Danube River. Surprisingly, Budapest is very similar to Prague in how it is set up. The river splits Budapest into Buda on the west bank and Pest on the east bank. In Buda, there is the castle and the former palace, as well as a great hill to climb that has an incredible view for miles. Pest is the more active side, where most of the locals seemed to live, and also had the opera house, the synagogue, churches, and Hero’s Square.

It seemed as if all Prague students headed to Hungary that weekend, as our train there had about 60 study abroad students on it. The trip is about 6 hours, but when you are crammed into a small cabin with 8 people, and nothing but time ahead of us, it wasn’t all that bad. We ended up commandeering an entire car, so had about 40 of our friends riding together. We finally got into Budapest just past midnight which didn’t make it easy to find the hostel. No one was around at the train station, but we eventually found an English speaking travel agent who helped sneak us onto the bus and just directed us toward the river, where our hostel was.

A good piece of advice is to bring a map of the city you are going to with you. It seems simple, but in the past we’ve been just grabbing them from tourist booths in the city when we arrive. Unfortunately, a midnight arrival isn’t good for that kind of planning.

This was the first time I have ever stayed in a hostel and it was an awesome experience. We found it off hostelworld.com and it turned out to be a really small, extremely clean place with about 25 beds and 3 bathrooms. As we walked through the door, we were welcomed with Hungarian shots and told to put our bags down and join the woman working at the hostel for some drinks. We were exhausted, but headed out anyway and found ourselves in awe of the city and its similarities to Prague.

Prague is routinely referred to as the city that was not damaged in World War II, so it has retained its beauty and history. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Budapest, but it just added to the history of the city. Many of the buildings were covered in inches of dirt and pollution, clearly ruined from the wars and many, even on main city drags, looked abandoned (at least on the upper levels) for at least a decade.

Saturday morning, we hit the tourist route and went to Hero’s Square which is a large, open space, serving as a memorial. So I should add here, before I get into everything I did and saw that I have made peace with the fact that I will not remember the names and historical meanings of almost 90% of the sites I will see across Europe. It isn’t that I’m not making the effort or don’t care, but we see and do so much, and I don’t write any of it down while I’m at the spots because we are moving so quickly and my goal is not to feel like a tourist all the time. But, I’m completely okay with this, but do apologize to all of you. From traveling in the past, I know that five years later I will remember what the place looked like and the people with whom I traveled, but not the name of this church or that square, or the significance of this statue or that park. So I’m sorry, but….

We then headed to some of the museums off of Hero’s Square. The main museum had an awesome Goya, Velazquez, and other Spanish painters exhibit. More impressive than the paintings was the museum itself. 50 foot ceilings, great tiling and mosaic floors and walls, huge Victorian staircases. We then headed to the Terror Museum, which although sounds like some kind of fun-house type museum, was an extremely modern and somber museum dedicated to the victims of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in central Europe. Housed in a building that was the former home to part of the Soviet elite that helped oppress and kill millions and helped spread Nazism into Hungary, the building is converted into 30 or so very unique rooms that take you from the early 1930s until the 60s or so.

In many ways, Budapest reminded me a lot of Paris. The huge open parks and long, straight, tree-lined streets that lead to the city center and main attractions were very similar. We had a great snowball fight in one of the parks and toured a castle (which we happened to just stumble upon, as it was not on the map and was not much of a tourist attraction, but an awesome castle from the 1500s).

I still hadn’t seen the main castle and palace across the river when it got dark out, but a friend and I walked across the Chain Bridge and headed into the castle district at night. We thought everything would be closed off, but we actually got great access to the grounds. Looking back, I’m glad we were able to climb up there at night because the views of Budapest in the dark where beautiful and almost no one was around, so it was as if we had the entire district and palace to ourselves.

Going out that night in Budapest was not as easy as Prague, as the nightlife is a little more relaxed and sparse (but much is compared to Prague). We met up with a lot of the other CIEE students visiting Prague at a club called Seven. It was great to meet some Hungarians and dance to an odd collection of America, British, and central European techno and 1970s American classics like “Grease Lightning” (for some reason, without fail, I have heard that nearly every night while I have been out in Europe).

The following day, we headed to the famous Hungarian synagogue, the largest in Europe and the second largest synagogue in the world. The building was beautiful, built in the mid-1880s. However, the most moving and impressive feature was the Holocaust memorial in the back of the synagogue. A small wall was constructed with the names of various Jews of the Hungarian ghetto who lost their lives and visitors placed a stone next to the names. There was also a huge metal tree, The Tree of Life, that on each leaf had the family names of Jews who once lived in Budapest.

A good trip to Budapest, we were told, always ends with a day at the baths. Budapest is near natural hot springs, so the city has various bath houses that might make for the most hilarious, uncomfortable, and unforgettable experience for any American tourist. Located in the middle of a city park is a huge building that looks like a castle. You enter and tell the cashier what service you would like (choosing from a list that includes: baths, mud massage, stone massage….seems glamorous, right? Just wait.). Then you pass through the gates into huge dressing rooms that look more like a mental institution than anything else. A quaky man opens your dressing room for you and in broken English says he will lock it up for you, so trust him (sounds safe). Before I describe the baths, a question is necessary….when you are at a hotel pool and you head over to the hot tub, if there are 8 or 9 older gentleman in Speedos sprawled out in a crowded 4 person hot tub, you usually decide to come back later, right? If not, the next description won’t be so odd….

So when we entered the baths, we found 12 different pool size hot tubs, each able to hold 15 people comfortably, but instead, each was crammed with upwards of 40, even 65 or 75 people, off all ages, sexes, bathing suits. The baths start at about 90 degrees Fahrenheit and progress to 120 degrees, and you are supposed to slowly move from bath to bath until you feel most comfortable. Except, feeling comfortable begins with being all right with a stranger rubbing against you in a hot pool already overcrowded and people continuing to enter. After an hour or so, we got over the laughing and really enjoyed it. All this was indoors, but there was also an outdoor pool, about the size of 6 Olympic swimming pools. It was about 3 degrees out, but the water was well over 100, so it was great. People were playing chess in the pool, relaxing, just enjoying the day.

We headed home on a midnight train that was unfortunately delayed for a while due to a bomb threat, but that is an entire new story in itself. Eventually, we got home around 7 a.m., got a few hours to sleep and headed to class at 10 a.m.

Have to run and explore central Europe. Have fun and enjoy.