First, I wanted to go back and post the pictures I promised from the Chinese show a couple of weeks ago. I had to wait until Audrey returned from her many adventures in many different countries (I have a very worldly roommate) and got around to facebooking them. Here are a few, all capturing and editing credit to Miss Audrey.
Before the show with Meghan and Lauren...maybe not the biggest my head has ever looked, but close.
Leaping and jumping, a dance about Mt. Everest. (They called it "China's tallest mountain" -- did I mention that before?)
My favorite dance.
The entire cast.
So, Week 7. I'm pulling out my Hungarian planner (it's so cool! It has the name days listed: today is Farkas!) as a memory aid. It's especially hard to remember these days as I am spending less time with my camera out, partially to keep from looking like a tourist (it's always my goal not to be approached by the people selling the Hop On/Hop Off city tours), and partially because I just keep forgetting it! So, daily life has been less documented than usual.
So, last Tuesday, I went back to my volunteer job for the second official week. This time, the woman who wanted me to correct her grammar picked articles, one about gay adoption and one about how family composition is affecting children. We had interesting conversation, and only went on for an hour, which felt a lot more manageable than both the two hours we originally talked about and the hour and a half that we actually did the first week. We'll see how it continues in the future. When I finish this blog post, I need to find an article for next week. Goal: something about social issues, unscientific, political okay, psychological elements a plus (because then I know what I'm talking about...)
That evening, I believe I went over to Buda and drank a bottle of wine, then came back and stayed up way too late chatting with friends online. I need to stay away from that...when I get online late at night, there are so many people to catch up with! It's best if I do my computer work during the Budapest morning hours, because most everyone important to me in other time zones is asleep then!
Wednesday, which, as you may recall, is often my busiest day, brought a respite from class! My anthro class was canceled, as the teacher was still in Romania, and my history class was unexpectedly canceled. Before I heard the news about history, my literature class was...self-canceled. What can I say? No excuses, but I was up really late, and 8 AM came mighty early... It was great, though--I had a long day to do work and lounge and, best of all, go for a run. I normally don't have time to run on Wednesdays/midweek at all, and I think it put me in a good mood for Thursday/the end of the week. After my run, I went to the Tea House on my street with some friends. VERY cute place--I plan to go back. As per us, I didn't have my camera, but I will try to remember to bring it next time. There's just a lovely ambiance in this place, and I see myself going back and taking work multiple times.
On Thursday, I saw my favorite building in Budapest so far! Ironically, it was on a school field trip, one for my art and architecture history class. I adore the Museum of Applied Arts! It was designed and decorated by Ödön Lechner, who created a uniquely Hungarian style by combining Eastern art with Hungarian folk styles. The building was so beautiful! Big surprise, I didn't bring my camera. But, this is the coolest building, so I had to show some pics. Credit to Megan Griffith!
Ceramic decorations outside.
The inside used to be richly decorated, but was all whitewashed during Communism. I kind of like it this way, I think.
Our friend/tour guide George took us up on the roof of the building! So cool.
Thursday night, I went over to Buda with the intention of picking up Meghan and going folk dancing, but it was clear that it was going to be a night in when I got there. Lovely, of course. We finished Vicky Christina Barcelona and had some chatting and some snuggles. I slept over, because we left very early the next morning.
At 5 AM on Friday morning, I woke up and got ready--at 5:30, we (Meghan, Johna, Tanav, Megan, Máté and me) took a bus to Keleti Pályaudvar to catch our 6:30 train to Košice.
A bright and early picture of everyone.
After three and a half sleepy hours on the train, we switched to another train in Košice. Finally, an hour later, we arrived in Spišská Nová Ves. You'd think, maybe, our trip was complete? Nem! We waited for another bus that took us, after two near death incidents as we sped around the windy road, to Mlynky. In Mlynky, our bus driver stopped and took a bath in the stream with a bucket. He also showed us using a stick in the dust that we could either wait 20 minutes for another bus to take us to our final (for real) destination, or we could walk about 3 miles. We waited.
The last bus let us off in Dedinky, where our hostel was! Luckily, Máté saw the hostel sign (Aqualand!) out of the window, because it really was in the middle of nowhere. Even Dedinky, which is quite a small town (only 300 people), was only reachable by a bit of a hike around the lake. It was about 2 PM at this point.
By the way, I should mention that this is what it looked like in Slovakia that day.
About to ascend the hill to the hostel.
As soon as we got in, a man said hello and thrust a phone in Megan's face. "Peter." The hostel owner was on the phone, telling us that he was the only one who spoke English and that he would be back that evening around 5 PM.
The two main hostel guys who didn't speak English. The one on the left is Peter, who cleaned and cooked. The right is crazy painter.
Meanwhile, we settled in a bit, then figured out that we needed money and food...we had been getting around on Tanav's limited supply of Euros, but they weren't going to last long and we were all pretty hungry. We walked around the lake and into Dedinky, where we were able to determine that the food store didn't take cards and there were no ATMs in Dedinky.
Dinks vogueing.
A preview of what's to come...we spent a long time waiting on these benches in downtown Dedinky. (Also, Dedinky loved benches...walking along the road leading into town, there was just a huge bench garden on the side, and not a person to sit on them.)
Upon inspection of the map with tons of little icons (ok, so there's coffee in this town...and soccer...and mushrooms!), we determined that we could take a bus leaving soon to Dobšiná, which had an ATM. So we did!
Dobšiná was full of pretty colors and hoodlum kids playing in a parking lot. We successfully procured money and food (including mucho cheap wine.)
We headed back to the hostel and fed ourselves and drank wine. We were introduced to the English speaking Peter (I never got any pictures of him) as well as the Aqualand custom (it seemed) of blasting music videos onto the projection screen in the hostel. We met the couple from Montana staying there that night and traded some tips: they had been hiking for a few days and were headed to Budapest. Eventually, Tanav took out his guitar and there was much singing and playing and comradery. He was also fed quite a bit of pear brandy by crazy artist.
On Saturday morning, we set off on the first hike.
The highlight of the hike was definitely the ladders. The ladder hike was pretty much the main reason Megan wanted to come to Slovakia, and it did not disappoint. These great rickety ladders basically led us right up in the waterfall. So beautiful, so exhilarating.
We felt pretty badass at the top...enough for a self-timed photo!
The way down featured a really cool chair-lift. Johna got all ski nerdy about single chair lifts and how rare they are in the US.
Down from the mountain.
Meghan had an epic fall in the mud.
We stopped to check in at the grocery store, where I snapped this picture of old men gambling.
That night was less epic, but still quite fun, of course. Nothing's boring at Aqualand...
On Sunday, I made the executive decision to stay in and get some of my work done. All the others were/are on break, which made it hard to stay academically minded at all. Plus, I would have felt silly because my backpack was so heavy with homework. Too bad, though, because it was a gorgeous day.
But I was confined to this.
We woke up nice and early on Monday because we wanted to do a BIG HIKE. Tanav stayed in to write songs, and we sent Máté back to Budapest that morning, so it was a lady's hike.
I dig spider webs hard.
It started out a really foggy day. This picture is of one of the same views from the first day. Go back and look!
This is from when we accidently wandered up a logging trail and were called down my some lumberjacks. Megan went to confer with them, and one of them kept offering her a drink from his vodka bottle...obviously a great logging beverage. The one who spoke a little English told us "bad map, bad map." Awesome!
The sun came out for our lunch. However, the picturesque spot we picked happened to be a gazebo in the middle of the river, and it was really windy and COLD! Absolutely gorgeous, though.
Overall, the hike took us about seven and half hours. We did stop for lunch, but were going at a pretty steady clip for most of the time, so we estimated the total distance was between 12 and 15 miles. Not bad for a day's work! And we even got in about an hour before the (absurdly early) time the sun went down, no thanks to the end of Daylight Savings Time.
That evening, non-English speaking Peter made us dinner. The first thing they asked when we requested dinner was whether there were any vegetarians. Very non-Eastern European of them, but good, because we did have one, Johna. However, Meghan answered jokingly "Yes, but it's not important" and apparently he missed the sarcasm...Johna got served a little stuffed turkey piece just like everyone else. Shoot.
On Monday morning, Tanav, Johna and I set off for Dedinky to catch a bus back in the reverse order from earlier. This was the start of a day of frustrating travel. The first bus didn't come, so we waited for the second one...which also didn't come.
Luckily, it was a beautiful day for waiting, if a little chilly.
Tanav talked to the store lady, who had come over to hang at Aqualand a few of the nights...new people were always coming in, and she said that bus wouldn't come 'til 5 (too late!), but that we could catch a bus at 1 in Mlynky. So...we set off and walked the 5 KM with all of our luggage. By the time we'd arrived, we had almost two hours left to wait, so we sort of camped out their for a while. One old woman seemed to like us/pity us, and kept on talking to us in Slovakian even though we clearly didn't understand.
When we did get on the bus, it was with all the children who go to school in Mlynky, it seemed. It was pretty ridiculous--they were not really sure what to make of us. Johna befriended one...sort of.
This is red pants girl. She was our favorite. So cute.
So, we reached Spišská Nová Ves, and actually did not have to wait that long for a train. In Košice, however, we found out that there are only two trains to Budapest each day, so we had to wait for the 6 PM--another nearly 2 hour wait. I bought some food there, and promptly got asked for money from the same beggar twice in a row. I really don't like being begged from in foreign languages, where I don't even know the words to say No, Sorry.
We finally returned to Budapest at 10:30ish. I turned on my phone (it had been off all weekend) to two worried text messages from my father. Apparently, my silly sister doesn't listen to me at all and forgot that I was going to be gone for the long weekend...when she couldn't get in contact with me, she told the 'rents, who then got worried and contacted CIEE, who then got worried. It turned into a much bigger deal than I would have liked. I missed two days of classes for the trip, which would generally not be a big deal (everyone does it), but apparently missed class plus worried parents means calls to the CIEE office in Maine and an "official incident report," whatever that is. On Wednesday, I had to talk down Elizabeth, the program coordinator, a bit, which I always hate. It was kind of a bummer...but I felt a little famous. In every class I walked into on Wednesday, I got a chorus of "Avery, you're alive!" Yep. And well.
Overall, Slovakia trip was a huge success. Spent a little more money than I was expecting (the hostel price was in EUROS, not DOLLARS. Big bummer!), so I probably won't be traveling again soon. Time to economically enjoy being in Budapest, and my visitors!! (Emily is coming in less than 2 weeks and my mama is coming in just over 3 weeks!) For a representation of the trip that is a bit more 3-D, please see Johna's vlog. I make many appearances, and it's a beautiful compilation.
Post arrival on Tuesday night, I ended up staying nearly all night (I napped from 6-7 AM) working on the two presentations I had on Wednesday. My first work all-nighter ever...weird. The presentations both went well, though, as did my presentation on Thursday. Only having class for two days made the week go by really fast!
Before I knew it, it was Friday, and we went on the
to
Exciting! We had two double period Anthro classes to make up, so our teacher Agnes took us to the Skanzen, or Open Air Museum, just outside of Szentendre. Szentendre itself is 40 minutes by train north of Budapest and is a simply charming little town. I'll come back to that.
The open air museum was cool. It was set up as a mini-map of Hungary, with different traditional settlements set up in the appropriate areas. I enjoyed the exhibits/houses, but I definitely experienced tour exhaustion. Highlights:
We bought cookies from this woman. Unfortunately, just as I finished mine, she took a fresh batch out of the oven, and I know they would have been so good warm! Bummer.
Great fence.
I loved the way the bundles were tied together on this roof.
Wet swirls on the floor...so pretty!
I'm clearly out artsying Sam here--we had a running informal competition going on all day.
We took this train around.
When we were done at the Skanzen, Sam and I decided to shake off the drowsiness and hang around in Szentendre for a while. So! cute.
Super Communist car.
Beautifully sketchy narrow alleyway to reach the main square of town from the overlook.
We walked along the Duna for a while.
Then stopped and sat and drank a hot chocolate (me) and a mulled wine (Sam.) The hot choc was good, but I regret not getting a hot wine. Hers was especially YUM.
A kitty who was just loving playing peek-a-boo with us, but kept hiding every time I reached out my hand or lifted my camera. He would always reappear, though, just peeking over the top. I'm pretty sure he was climbing in the tree.
After Szentendre, Sam and I stopped at a THRIFT STORE that is LESS THAN TWO BLOCKS AWAY from us so that she could Halloween costume shop. I'm so excited to go back there all the time. So great. I hadn't realized how much I miss thrifting.
Today, Saturday, I did not much besides work, run, and await news from the VICTORIOUS MIDDLEBURY WOMEN'S RUGBY TEAM. Today, they beat URI 18-15, I think the final score was. Going on to play in the regional finals in two weeks. I'm immensely proud of my girls and wish I were there to play and celebrate with them.
This evening, I did do fun activities, but I think I am going to save them for the quick Monday post...otherwise it will only be study study study in that post. (If I buckle down and do it tomorrow, that is.) It's late and I'm tired and this post is EPIC.
Big slobbery kisses,
a
