Jocelyn's Blog

Hi,
So we had an exciting stay in Budapest to say the least. I guess I left off at the air race... We arrived early, but still had to fight our way through over a million spectators along the river. We were really lucky and managed to find a shady spot sitting down with a perfect view. Once we found it, we were too scared to move incase we lost it, so we spent hours sitting there dangling our feet over the edge of the railing. It was pretty funny, our feet were so swollen by the end of the day that it was really hard to get our sandals back on again!

The race itself was fun to watch, but the highlight, in my mind anzways was the airshow where three planes did all sorts of spins and loop de loops really close together.. It blows my mind that they can do anything like that. A german guy sat down next to us and was really friendly and explained to us all sorts of little details that we never would have known. He told us about the owner of the team and how he was the only person to privately own a Cobra helicopter, etc.... useless information for sure, but fun to know. The helicopter was shown off and flown around for a while. I thought it looked like a big scary wasp - pure evil! The hungarian guy we were rooting for unfortuately messed up right at the beginning and was disqualified. Im not sure who won in the end, but it was pretty exciting anways.

That night, we went to eat dinner at a fancy restaurant (compliments of Erics Hungarian grandmother who wanted us to eat well and experience good traditional hungarian cuisine...THANKS!!!!) It was pretty fancy, with musicians playing classical music and so we decided to order wine with dinner instead of beer. It was a good choice too, because were no longer in beer country... wine is the way to go in Hungary. In fact, were soon planning on visiting a small town called Eger where there are tons of wine cellars to go to where theyll fill up any bottle you have for cheap. Well have to be carefull there!!

And just in case anyone is wondering, Im not putting in apostrophees (haha is there a way to even spell that?) because I dont think they exist in Hungarian and I cant find one anywhere on the keyboard.

So after dinner, we headed back to the Danube to watch the fireworks.... Yes, we were lucky enough to have stumbled across a national holiday... After about five spectacular minutes of watching them, all hell broke loose! The wind picked up, tree branches started whipping around, people started panicking and running, rain started and within 2ö seconds I was wetter than Ive ever been in my life and if that wasnt enough, it started hailing!!! The fireworks continued, and we could sort of hear them, though the rain was so hard they werent really lighting up anymore. Soon we were being rushed along with the stampede of people to get to cover - it was insane! We later realized that before the fireworks started, the flashes wed been seeing werent part of some crayz lightshow, but was actually sheet lightning. Anyways, we got home safely, and I have to say that although we didnt see many fireworks, it was still a pretty exciting night. I just felt sorry for all the children and older people who got stuck in it. Im Eric wrote more details about the storm in his blog if anyones interested. ericsblog.travellerspoint.com

We spent the last coupld days at Lake Balaton, where we camped and made a trip to a thermal lake where we floated in innertubes for a few hours surrounded by tons and tons of people. It was strange to be in a lake that felt more like a pool than anything else, that is until we saw a dead fish floating around.... I cant say the lake seemed the cleanest with all those people and the temperature must have incubated bacteria... ew ew ew... and its supposed to be a heath spa! Ha ha but Im just being silly, Eric informed me that about 8ö million litres of water pumped into that lake everyday (lava water), so it must be fine.

Now were in a little city called Keckskamet and weve arrived for a little festival. There are tons of little booths selling Hungarian snacks - such as Langosh, deepfried dough with cheese and sourcream spread over it... my god its delicious, but soo disgusting too - and theres wine tasting too as well as musicians and entertainment. Its pretty cool to see. Weve decided to forgo the wine tasting until we get to Eger, as we plan on getting up early tomorrow to take a day trip to a smaller town close to here that has cowboy shows. Apparently the Hungarian cowboys do crazy things, for example, one guy will get five horses galloping together, holding all the reins while standing on the backs of the last two. Im so excited, its going to be thrilling. Im sure Eric will take lots of pictures too!

Anyways, take care everyone..
xoxoxox
Joce

Hey everyone,
Sorry it's been so long since I've written... but I'll start from Prague because I'll forget mostly everything before then... but if you're curious, you can read about it in Erics blog.

We spent a few days in Prague, and it was definitly the most stunning city I'd been to yet. Everything about it is big and impressive, including the kabillions of tourists infesting every last inch of it! I managed to get around this slightly by waking up ridiculously early and heading straight to the castle to take advantage of a few hours of peace there. I even got all artistic and took a sketch pad and pencils and attempted to draw a landscape of the city from the top of a wall... until I realized that every tour group that passed would hover over my shoulder to see what I was doing. Needless to say, it was embarassing and I'm shy so I quickly gave up. I think the best part of Prague was that we discovered how absolutely amazing Czech food is. My mouth waters just remembering it! And if you just took a few streets away from the tourist streets you could find really great and cheap local pubs with really great and cheap beer. Mmmmmmmm .5 litres of Pilser Urquell for less than .2 litres of coke.

Straight after Prague we headed to Pilsn to tour the most famous brewery in the world. Eric's idea, not mine, but it was still fun, and I have to admit that I'm hooked on it. We got to taste it fresh from the cellars and everything. Those pictures should probably be up fairly soon, they're in the next batch anyways!

We then headed to Cesky Krumluv, a tiny little touristy town south of Prague, where we spent a couple days relaxing, eating good food and drinking good beer and floating circles around the town in inner tubes - down waterslides and little rapids... FUN!

Next stop was Bratislava, Slovakia. We stayed in a very hippieish hostel with a big statue of Lenin on the wall, and posters of Bob Marley everywhere. We saw Devin castle, on the Danube, which was really stunning, and then wandered around the old town. It was a smaller and less touristy city than the last we've been to, which was nice, but otherwise, it doesn't compare to...... Budapest!!!! Which is where we are now.

Budapest is phenominal so far. I really really like it. There's an air race going on this weekend, so we get to watch planes racing really low to the ground along the Danube river, going under bridges and through big balloon pilon things. So far they've just been practicing, but tomorrow is the big race, so we're going to try to find a good shady spot nice and early on to watch it from. The other highlight so far are the baths. We spent the best part of the afternoon today soaking in thermal outdoor baths surrounded by a beautiful building. You can go inside and explore through tons of different rooms full of saunas and steamrooms and hot and cold baths. It's really beautiful and relaxing, I think I'll sleep well tonight.

So that's all for now, if you want to read more, again, Eric's blog is probably much more detailed.. so go see it!

Love and miss everyone lots!!!!!