MJK Thrills N Spills: October 2011

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Dinner in a Pumpkin = Halloween

Jen came for dinner last night to hear about my trip to Europe, but I also made it my celebration of Halloween by making dinner in a pumpkin. We shared one of the Sacher Tortes that I brought home from Vienna for dessert. I'm really, really glad she helped me eat it since it was so rich. We also watched the movie, The Others. We had a great time. So that was my Halloween since I'll be sewing tomorrow night. Ha!

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Budapest: Cash, Baths, & Guns

Of the three cities, Budapest provoked diverse reactions from me. There were some parts that I loved and some parts that I thought were super sad. The three things/stories that stood out to me the most are:

I had to pay for everything with cash even though the company/store claimed to accept credit cards - even our hotel wanted us to pay with cash. To make matters worse, the ATMs would only distribute large denomination bills so a lot of these cafes and stores were pretty bugged with us that they had to break our large bills. I wanted to tell them, "So accept credit cards or tell your stupid banks to distribute smaller bills!"
The baths for which Budapest is famous are pretty dang cool. They were beautiful and extensive! And we only went to one bath complex. The dynamics of the people at the bath was interesting: there were a lot of older men and women and a lot of younger men, hardly any younger women except those there with their boyfriends/husbands. So we four girls were the strange sight at the baths, I'm sure.
My run-in with a police officer and a huge machine gun at the Budapest airport. We arrived at the airport three hours before our flight left since Melanie's flight left an hour before ours did. The three of us got our boarding passes but we couldn't check our luggage and go into the terminal until 2 hours before our flight (according to the Delta lady I asked), so we sat down on some chairs near the check-in line (or where it would eventually form). About 50 minutes into our wait and when I was completely enraptured by my book, some guy bent down by my face to get my attention and started speaking to me in what I think was Hungarian. I looked up and that's when I saw that he was dressed in all black, with a big vest on, several guns on his hips, and a huge machine gun in his hands with his finger practically on the trigger! I was shocked! I told him I didn't understand what he had said so his response in what was probably his limited English was, "Please go." My thoughts started racing! Did we break some Hungarian law by sitting here for so long? Where does he want me to go?! Since he didn't specify where I/we had to go, we got in line to check our luggage. Thankfully he didn't follow us more or make any requests after that. While in line we watched him and several other armed officers and men in suits with ear-pieces close off that part of the airport and secure it. So we think maybe a dignitary or somebody big was coming to the airport. Funny thing is that this was our first incident in Budapest when I was expecting one earlier with all the reports I heard/read about: the U.S. Embassy saying crime in Budapest was a concern, scams on tourists, Jenny's friend being arrested for jay-walking. Yeah, Budapest was kind of interesting that way.

Here are some of the other interesting things about Budapest:

We had a slightly harder time dealing with the language barrier in Budapest. My Hungarian phrasebook said that Hungarian is unlike any other language in the world and it has several ways to convey the meaning of one English word/phrase. The signage in Prague and Vienna was usually in English too or easy enough to read since German has a lot of common words with English. But the signs in Budapest, those were harder to follow since their words looked nothing like English.
Graffiti was prolific throughout the city. It was quite sad really. There were also several buildings in terrible states of disrepair that would otherwise be beautiful buildings. It seems like Budapest has had a harder time recovering from communism.
I bought a really neat, hand-made table cloth thingy from a very spunky older woman on Fisherman's Bastian. She was quite the bargainer - it was kind of fun to buy it from her and I hope she made it and even more so I hope the money she made off me helps her out.
We hiked up yet another European hill - this time Gellert Hill in Budapest. My legs were burning by the time we reached the top. About halfway up we came across a bit of an exhibitionist - I didn't look long enough to see what was really going on or what he was exhibiting for us but thankfully he turned away from us and walked down the hill in the direction we had just come from and were not going to go back that way. Once we got to the top, some old man was making some money off tourists by having them guess in which of three cups was the ball - you know, the trick where he moves the ball around between cups and has you guess. If you get it right you get the money, if you get it wrong he keeps the money. We think he had some friends in on it too in order to look like other tourists were trying to make some money off of him and he wasn't very good. He was kind of sloppy with moving the cups around so I could tell where the ball was, but he was entertaining enough to watch for a bit. Gellert Hill is also where we bought our secret boxes. They are pretty amazing since you have to know all the secrets of the box in order to even open it. It takes about 10 steps to open it. Very fun.
Central Market in Budapest was amazing! It's a permanent market in a magnificent building. The ground floor is entirely food while the second floor is all crafts and clothes. We spent several hours in the central market buying our souvenirs since it seemed like there were some excellent souvenirs there as opposed to Vienna and Prague.
Budapest used to be two different cities: Buda and Pest. The Buda side is very hilly while the Pest side is entirely flat. It was quite the phenomenon.
One of the girls, Randa, was very excited to see some of the Holocaust and Jewish sights in all three cities, but we had terrible luck! Apparently, October is a big Jewish holiday month as practically everything we tried to see was closed due to Jewish holiday.

Gresham Palace, now the Four Seasons Hotel. It took 5 years to renovate the palace for the hotel.

Chain Bridge

Castle Hill Palace and fountain

Fisherman's Bastian

View of Parliament from Fisherman's Bastian

Randa and me on Fisherman's Bastian

Fisherman's Bastian

Another cool pulpit in a church on Castle Hill

St. Matyas church on Castle Hill

I liked how they painted the walls in this church. It made it feel earthy.

Stained glass window in the church

Lord's street on Castle Hill

In the funicular that took us up to and down from Castle Hill

One of the abandoned buildings in disrepair

Another view of the same building

Waterfall on Gellert Hill

The beautiful Gellert Hotel

We toured rock church which is built in a cave in the side of Gellert Hill

Rock church from a distance

Paprika in Central Market

Central Market

Eating lunch in Central Market

Exterior of Central Market

The courtyard of our apartment building

The closed synagogue

The Holocaust Memorial behind the synagogue

Parliament on the day we toured it

Outside the baths we went to

Vienna: Tortes, Cakes, & Pastries

I am guilty of gluttony. Terribly so. It happened in Vienna when I realized they had a ton of yummy food! Tortes, cakes and pastries; pumpkin soup; emperor's pancakes; bratwurst; and delicious baked goods! The food and the eating were definitely my favorite things in Vienna, Austria.

Some of my other favorite things are:

The metro. I seriously love metros, subways, tubes, whatever you call them! They are so convenient for getting around town.
Discovering that the Austrian Empire was a seriously powerful empire for a very long time. Did you know that Marie Antoinette was Austrian? She was one of 16 children of the Empress Maria Theresa, who reigned for 40 years. Many of her children lived to adulthood and all but one were married off to other countries as Maria Theresa's crazy way of building her empire and making peace. The Austrian Empire included Hungary and the Czech Republic and I'm sure a lot of other parts of Europe. The Habsburgs Empire, that lasted over 600 years, didn't end until they were exiled in 1918. So fascinating!
The Marie Antoinette Ballet we attended. I think I could really get used to ballet. I really enjoyed it - more so than the symphony in Prague. Ballet tells a story!
The funky tree trunk statues in the Schonbrunn Palace grounds and on the Hofburg Palace.
Discovering the difference between a maze and a labyrinth - the hard way. They had both in the Schonbrunn Palace gardens. The maze was fantastic and it took us a while to figure it out. Then I went into the labyrinth and as soon as I realized the difference I was regretting getting into it! You don't make any decisions in a labyrinth - it makes you go only one way and that one way takes a long time to go.
The Nashmarkt and their falafel sandwiches! Vienna's downtown farmer's market was amazing with all the fresh vegetables, packages of spices, olives, and dried foods. The falafel sandwich was super yummy. I can't really say what falafel is, but it is good.
The Bataan-Death-March day of some serious walking, walking, walking, and walking .... and more walking. That's the day we did Schonbrunn Palace, Naschmarkt, State Treasures in the Hofburg Palace, Belvedere, and Prater Park. It seems like there was more we did that day, but that's all I can remember.
The crazy, wicked swing ride at Prater Park. I've always loved the swing ride at the Western Idaho Fair, but this swing, in Prater Park - which happens to be a 100-year-old fair that stays open for most of the year - was crazy, wicked. The ride takes the riders way, super high into the air. Be sure to see the photo.
Melk Abby's dressed up skeletons. That's crazy! They dug up these saints from some other cathedral/cemetery and brought them to Melk Abby and dressed them up.
A cruise down the Danube River in the Wachau Valley. This was a blessed day of rest in the country-side and small towns after our Bataan-Death-March day.
Discovering my cafe - Cafe Jesika - so they maybe misspelled my name, but it's still named after me!