A City Named Buda Next to a City Named Pest

I apologize because I am incredibly late on this blog post, but I wanted to take a moment and talk about Budapest. Myself, my roommate Joe, and Sage (one of our friends here) went to Budapest a few weekends ago and had an absolutely awesome time. We were able to spend some time checking out some of the historical parts of the city as well as check out the nightlife and younger atmosphere. A little background history on Budapest; it is actually two separate cities, Buda and Pest, separated by a river, but because they are so close they are known to be one in the same: Budapest.

The city itself is super beautiful. Ironically out of all of the cities I have been to since I have been here in Europe, I would say that Budapest may be the closest to what I remember America looking like. This may be comical because I just said it was a super beautiful place and then related it to America (which I think is not that beautiful), but that is not so. The space of streets, and modern, but still older looking buildings reminded me a lot of downtown Cincinnati.

The Parliament Building

The Royal Palace

Opera House

Castle in the park

Heroes Square

It was one of the more relaxed trips that I have been on since I have been here and traveling; We walked around casually, and were not always "go, go, go". This type of trip allowed me to enjoy Budapest more than I thought I would. 

One thing that I was blessed for was that Hungarians (for the most part) speak English. Since I have been abroad and traveled around, I have always tried to be respectful of any country that I travel to. I find that showing them respect and learning how to say "Excuse me, do you speak English?" in their language works much better than just asking "Do you speak English?". The truth is, yes, if they speak English they will understand the second question, but the other side of it is that you will always look like THAT IGNORANT AMERICAN, but rather a traveler who is looking for some information in a respectful way!! However, after the few days we spent in Budapest I can safely say that I did not learn a single word. I could not even say "thank you" properly even after people would repeat it for me!!!! Having said all of that.... Hungarian is by far the hardest language I have seen since I have been here. 

The words are pronounced NOTHING like they are spelled!!

Also a little bit of insight to these prices; because Hungary is still on its own currency, after we switched from Euros to Hungarian Forint we had so much money we honestly weren't 100% sure what to do with it all! For example; on this menu a beer is 650.- Today the exchange rate is 1 Hungarian Forint = 0.004505 U.S. dollars. That means that the beer for 650.- actually costs just under $3 USD! So to be honest we drank a decent bit of beer and relaxed in bars and just talked about everything! It was really cool for me to listen to my roommate Joe, as well as Sage, open up about things that I never knew and all of us just be real with each other.

This weekend marks the start of our Spring Break here in Italy. Although this is my senior year of college and I have never been on "that" spring break trip, I have no problem doing exactly what I will be doing; staying here in Torino and working on my internship and independent study. I might take some time to get out of the city and go visit my professor and his family in Saluzzo. O and that also means that I will have some more time to Blog and keep you all informed on what is going on here in Italy.