It seems that once again I've gone two weeks without posting an update, so this one might be a little on the long side. Last weekend I met my friends Grace and Meg (close friends from Lawrence studying in Vienna this semester who have come up in my travel blog previously) in Prague, which was fantastic! I've also done a fair number of interesting things around Budapest in the time since my last post, so I'll try to describe them as well. A photo post will follow as per usual, although there might be a bit of a delay this time around because I need to consolidate the photos from my friends. Without further ado, here's what I've been up to lately!
I didn't travel at all the weekend before last, which meant I had a lot of time to focus on my studies and stay on top of my workload for the upcoming week. Despite spending most of my time working, I did get to have some fun too--on Saturday night, I went out with a couple of other BSM students to see a show being put on by a small theater company called the Asterion project. The show was a 2-person piece in English, and although it started out as a romantic comedy it was pretty weird and I think it ended up being about euthanasia? I was confused for a lot of it, but it was very interesting and I had a good time. On Sunday night, Rowan (one of the BSM students I sing with) came over to my apartment to do a casual folk song exchange--we each taught each other a couple of songs that we enjoy and had a lot of fun singing together. I miss the huge number of musical opportunities that I have at Lawrence, so any chance to make or listen to music with other people is especially great here. :)
Nothing particularly interesting happened during the week itself. I was less stressed than usual thanks to the extra studying time I had over the weekend, but I pretty much just went to class and stayed around my apartment otherwise. On Friday though, I went to Prague! My bus left Budapest around 11:30 Friday morning, which meant I arrived in Prague at 6:30 or so. The ride was very fun--I listened to a lot of nice music, admired the countryside all day, and read about half of The Da Vinci Code! Meg and Grace made it to Prague about 10 minutes before me, so they met me at my bus stop and we walked straight to our hotel, which was a couple kilometers away. The walk gave us a nice chance to catch up with each other, and we saw some pretty parks and things on the way (although it was dark so the views weren’t great). We got really good Thai food from a restaurant next to our hotel and had a nice night in talking to each other. Meg spent a few days in Prague on a school-related trip years ago, so she had recommendations and places she thought we should see on Saturday. Grace and I thought her plan sounded good, so we pretty much followed her lead for the day. We wandered around “the labyrinth” of Old Town, which is the medieval section of Prague. It’s fun because the streets are all winding and narrow with lots of cool old buildings everywhere. We went to see the astronomical clock, which is one of the main sights that everyone visits, and we watched it chime the hour on both Saturday and Sunday. We also wandered through some of the local shops, including some very nice glassblowers and woodcarvers. Christmas markets are just starting to spring up, so we looked at those as we passed them as well. We also looked at some different cathedrals and things from the outside before going to Charles Bridge, which is a beautiful pedestrian bridge connecting the castle to the labyrinthine part of the city. It's almost 700 years old!
On the bridge we bought some really cool ocarina-type flutes! One of my goals this semester was to purchase some sort of musical instrument in Europe, so that was very exciting for me. Once we crossed the river we hiked up to the castle and toured around the buildings there, which was a lot of fun. We didn’t get to go inside the fanciest buildings (the lines were hours long and it didn’t seem worth the amount of daylight we would lose waiting), but everything was spectacular from the outside. We had lunch in a The Rainbow's End, a great cafe/art gallery that I stumbled upon, and later we got chimney cakes with ice cream (one of Grace’s goals is to get ice cream in every country she visits this semester). There are also a bunch of marionette stores in Prague, and we had a lot of fun exploring one where the owner would tell us about the Czech folktales that inspired the different puppets. We walked through the gardens by the castle, which were nice and quiet but not super colorful since it’s November, and got some great overlook views of the whole city. We also found a stopped metronome monument representing the end of Soviet control in the Czech republic that Meg remembered from the last time she was here, although she said that it’s changed a lot in that time. We ended our day by walking back across the bridge and through Old Town as the gas lights turned on and getting dinner at a nice traditional place where I was able to get soup in a bread bowl! Even better, Meg got to hold a barn owl named Richard on the bridge! After dinner we went back to our apartment and had a quiet night together, which was a perfect finish to the day.
Sunday morning we woke up, checked out of our room, and went back to Old Town to do some souvenir/gift shopping for ourselves and our families. We also went to a couple of thrift shops, since that’s something that we’ve been enjoying doing together in different countries. I found some fun orange garments to complement my usual purple aesthetic. It also happens to be the 30th anniversary of Czech independence from the Soviet Union this weekend, so there were a lot of open festival/concert-type things happening in the streets and we had fun walking by some of them. We ended our day by going through the Jewish quarter and seeing some of the synagogues and cemeteries in that area, which was really cool. We wanted to go into the museums, but they wouldn’t let us in with our bags so we had to make do with seeing the outside only. It was still nice though. We said our goodbyes and departed Prague around 4:00 PM, which meant that my bus arrived back in Budapest by midnight. It was a busy and fantastic weekend!
I didn't get much homework done while traveling, so this week was rather more stressful than the previous one. I did manage to get everything in good order though, and I also had a chance to go to a concert in the national concert hall Tuesday night! The group was the "Baltic Sea Philharmonic," and they perform all of their music from memory, so they have a lot of freedom to move and connect with the audience on stage. They performed Grieg's Pier Gynt suite and a minor piano concerto in the first half, and then finished with the Firebird suite in the second. They sang a cool folk song and performed a bit from Swan Lake as encores too! The conductor was a very Leonard Bernstein-esque character, jumping around and practically dancing on stage the whole time, which was especially fun to watch. I had a standing seat in the nosebleeds, but the music was still great and it's awesome that students are able to get cheap tickets here--the concert was sold out, but as a student I was able to get a $2 ticket an hour before it started. It was an amazing experience and I hope I can go to at least one more performance before the semester is over. In addition to the concert, I've started learning a couple of Hungarian folk songs with other BSM students, which is a lot of fun. It's been a musical week!
And that's about it! I'm not traveling this weekend, but I hope to visit some of the Christmas markets in Budapest and maybe attend a concert or two. I also want to get ahead on my homework, since I get Thanksgiving off and am planning to travel to Bratislava and Vienna during that break. I return home almost exactly four weeks from now, so while there's still plenty of time for me to do cool things in Europe the end is clearly in sight. Cheers!
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