Saturday, April 9, 2016

Easter getaway to Hungary

Ayyyyy it's time to bring back the blog after another pause. This time I actually stopped writing on purpose, rather than out of pure laziness, because for several months I really wasn't doing anything. Since November I had been searching for a job, which for me followed the very predictable pattern of hopeful applications followed by weeks of waiting and final rejection. Although I'm very happy/fortunate to be out of that slump now that I finally found a good job, which I started last Friday, and so far so good, except for the fact that I had to move to Bielefeld, while Erika stays in Bonn. I'm still getting to know the city, and will have to post again once I get some more pictures of it.

But before I moved, Erika took some vacation days and her mom asked us if we wanted to join them in visiting Erika's family in Hungary.  Since we didn't have any other plans, we tagged along to a 12 hour car drive through southern German, Austria, to a small village near Budapest. Here's a bunch of pictures I took, I don't know the names of a lot of the sites, I'll have to do some research and annotate it later.

All in all, it was a great trip, Budapest was beautiful but a bit melancholy which led to an interesting vibe. It reminded me a lot of Paris, but with an eastern, rustic, underdeveloped twist to it. The way the Danube splits the city, dozens of historic bridges, the 3-5 story tall, square buildings with flat roofs and high ceilings and windows, and of course beautiful old churches with intricate murals.


Cool house in Budapest next to all embassies 

Victory tower

Disney-like castle in the middle of a gigantic park, wish I took more pictures of it from the courtyard

One entrance to the East(?) train station

With some dope langos inside as well

Front entrance to the train station. They are in the process of renovating it, it could use some work.

The Citadel on the cliffs of the Danube




One side of Budapest. This river actually starts from a tiny little stream in the Black Forest and ends up all the way in the Black Sea


Cheesin'

That big building in the bottom left is where the following pictures all took place


Beautiful church. Loved the roof

And the sun finally came out to say goodbye before setting

That big white building on the other bank is the Parliament building. 2nd biggest in Europe, behind the one Bucharest


Sweet castle


Church from the other side

Let's see if Erika complains about this picture

This whole area with all these awesome views and buildings is call the Fisherman's Battlement I think



Yeah baby, MGD at the Tesco

Day 3 we went to Eger, known for its wine and the site of where the Hungarians halted the Turkish advance into Europe in the 1550s (only for about 40 years). 

Sitting on the embattlements of the fortress

It was a nice, cute city. I liked it

And just a 10 minute drive away from the fortress, you get to the wine district


Each one of those little porches is an entrance to an individual wine cellar built into the hill


I say cellar, but most were more like a cave...This one went about 200 feet deep

Just the outer parts of the Alps near Salzburg. Southern Bavaria and this part of Austria were awesome, definitely want to go back for some real hiking

The coolest thing about the wine was that you can buy it straight from the barrel. They fill you up with 1L 2.2L (pictured here) or 5L or even bigger plastic jugs. Each one of those 2.2L jugs cost about 3 Euros

Our return haul - Salami and wine of course, plus cheese, Hungarian Jaegermeister variety, and some nasty puffed corn things that Erika used to eat as a kid.