Day 11 (July 29, 2012)

Today was a super awesome day! Being our first day off, we skipped church and spent the entire day touring Budapest with Meagan and John. They picked us up at 9:30 and we drove to the train station. We took the train to Budapest, and then got a bus pass for five people so that we could ride all of the buses, trams and subways all day. At the train station we had to go on this super long, scary escalator thing...I didn’t know it was coming up - I was just following my group - when they all stepped onto it and I came to a sudden stop right before stepping on. It was going so fast and I was so scared of falling! So I stood there watching my friends go down, down, down, and letting other people go on ahead of me. Finally I just took a deep breath and stepped on. Super scary! HAHA I know I’m a wimp! We had to go on them a bunch of times, and they were sooooo long. I couldn’t look up on the ones that were going up because they made me dizzy.

It was so neat walking around Budapest and seeing all of the buildings. I have never been to Europe, and I couldn’t believe I was seeing all of the architecture that I have only ever seen in movies! The buildings are so neat - they have so much detail and such neat colours. I took a lot of pictures of doors, because they were so neat! There were also lots of statues. One of them was of Zoltan Kodaly, so I (of course) took a million pictures with him.

There were also two guys with birds you could get your picture taken with - I’m not sure what the small bird was, but the other one was a hawk. I really wanted to do it, but it was 1600f and so I decided not to. We toured around the castle, which was really neat. You could even see the chunks out of the walls from the gunfire and canon balls.

The best part was when we came across a guy selling wooden flutes! He played all of them for us (I took videos, of course!), and ended up buying two! One is a traditional flute made out of wood, and one is a dual tone flute. If I could have, I would have bought one of everything!!

For lunch we stopped at a little restaurant and I had pasta & broccoli cheese soup. They don’t give out tap water at these restaurants (because that would be free), so I had to buy bottled water, which cost the same amount as buying pop.

We visited a church as well, and saw that there was going to be a Baroque recorder concert going on this evening. I SO wanted to go to that! I guess I will just have to come back to Hungary. :)

We also went to Hero Square, which was totally cool! I took lots of pictures! 

After that we rested in a little coffee shop (I had an awesome brownie!), and Ty did video interviews of us for OM Arts.

Then we took the subways and trains back home. There was a really good rain/wind/thunder and lightning storm this evening. We went to Meagan and John’s (and Rebecca’s) house where we hung out for the evening and watched some of the Olympics. Rebecca made me an awesome quesedia while the others had sausages. We came back to OM around 9pm to find all of our English camp friends back. I was so exhausted and fell right to sleep! It had been so hot today, and I think I didn’t stop sweating until we actually sat down at Rebecca’s.

It’s funny how you don’t realize that you are different from the rest of the world until you actually leave your home. I never realized how much I say “eh”...it has been pointed out to me many times...haha :) My apparent “Canadian accent” was also a source of laughter all day! And everyone was super confused when I said, “I was going to wear my runners but decided they would be too hot”. Apparently only Canadians call “sneakers” runners! :)

We also said goodbye to Ty before going to bed, as he was leaving at 4:00 in the morning to fly home. He hasn’t seen his family in 6 weeks!! We are going to miss him though! I have had so much fun hanging out/living with him and Alegria all week!