kate and tara's excellent adventure, part 1

yes that is a reference to a bad 90's movie...but tara came up with it, so I'm not totally to blame.

currently tara and I are in budapest, typing our little fingers off at a rate of 200 hungarian forints per fifteen minutes. not bad considering a euro is worth 242 forints. tara and I got to dublin on tuesday evening and went into the first hostel we saw (which just happened to be right next to the bus stop). as soon as we walked in this rather noisy, rather drunk group of americans came in after us. the passed us by and pretty ignored us, but one of their group straggled in behind them and stopped to talk. he put his arm around tara's shoulders and was yammering on about something until the two girls behind the desk finally convinced him to go down to the living room. they were very apologetic, and we got a quad room which had just the two of us in it for the normal quad price. we went out to a bar with the desk girls who were nice: one from canada and one from america. we left them after a bit and wandered into another bar in the temple bar part of town where there was some live, semi-traditional music being played, and we sat there and had a pint and talked for a while before going back to the hostel and going to bed. we woke up early the next morning and after a breakfast of toast and milk (somehow just that managed to make me ill for a short while), we walked over to trinity college, where the book of kells is housed. anyone who knows me knows that this is a big deal to me (especially since I had never had a chance to see it before). unfortunately, the 1st of december just happened to be a day that it was not on display for preservation reasons. so I didn't get to see it, only a facsimile (which is still worth more than my life). the library was interesting anyways, and after we had contented ourselves with this we walked back to the hostel to pick up our bags, then went to the airport. airports are always exciting, and the dublin airport is no exception. after doing the awesome self-check-in and wandering into the shop area, we noticed that the flight had been delayed for a bit over an hour. apparently there was a security check being done in milan. what are you gonna do. so we spent a couple hours loitering in the shops before we finally got on the plane. we had to go down onto the tarmac to board, which was very exciting because tara had never done this before. two and a half hours later, we were in budapest!
the question is, what do you do once you get there? we looked around the airport a bit, changed some euros in a brilliant (if pricey) cash machine, and after about twenty minutes we worked up the nerve to ask some taxi guys where the bus was. once they had established that no, we did not want to spend all of our freshly converted cash on a taxi ride to the city, they pointed us to the bus stop. the bus took us to the end of one of the metro lines, so we got on and went for a ride to the end of the line, then back another 7 or 8 stops. oops. it was dark and raining and the place we were looking for was tucked away in a dark corner, but we found it eventually and found two beds for two nights. we went out and explored a little, looked for some food, failed, and went back to the hostel and to sleep.
I woke up early this morning (for me, that is) and had my first experience with hungarian showers, which are actually easier to deal with than irish ones, minus the lack of overhead handle thing to hold the nozzle. we set out around 10.30 and spent the next 8 hours wandering around budapest. about 6 of those hours were spent walking, and our feet were less than happy with us when we got back afterwards. we went to castle hill (after going over the bridge near gellert's hill [which is named after st gellert who tried to conver the magyars and was thrown off of said hill] and walking the kilometer or so to the proper bridge). we rode a fenicular up the hill, where we saw the impressive buda castle. we decided that food was high on the priority list, so we found a cafe where we had grilled pork, fried onions and french fries, and I bored tara with all the lurid details of my 'poland and its neighbors in the middle ages' class notes which I had brought with. after that we checked out the fishermen's bastion, st. mathias cathedral/church and walked over to the palace which houses three or four museums and the national library. we wanted to go into the history museum, but after 5 minutes of standing around with no one at the ticket counter, we found the sign that said that they were closing early today. fair enough, we'll go the art museum. admission there was free, but half of the galleries were closed. I would continue, but besides much walking and getting lost not much happened. we came back to the hostel, I wrote a slew of postcards, and then we wandered out in search of food. instead we found an internet cafe where I am spending the money that was meant for food. not that we'll have troubles finding something within our limited budgets. but now I've been keeping tara waiting for a good twenty minutes, so I'm going to go.
tomorrow we're off to prague with a possible stop in bratislava on the way.