Europe Doesn't Sleep

Hey everyone, I'm a week and a half in to being in Budapest so it's probably time for another update. The most important thing to mention is that European bars don't close at 2, they close whenever they want to. So I can go out until 4 or later, and I have...

I have started work, although there is a pretty strong language barrier, so it has been difficult to get going on it so far. I go in to the office on Tuesdays and Fridays, and can work from home the other 3 days, so it's not a bad gig.

Enough about work, let's talk beer. Goodness me the beers are cheap here, it's awesome! 350 forints for a beer is hard to turn down. By the way, it's about 190 forints for $1 so it's often under $2 for a beer in a bar. Tomorrow I am going to some concert at a bar where it's buy one get one free or maybe even buy one get two free, I am confused. Either way, yeah they've sold me.

In case you don't know, I got to Budapest through an international organization called AIESEC. Luckily, there is actually a huge group of AIESECers in Budapest from all over the world who all speak English and are really great to hang out with. I went to an event Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday (today) and I probably met about 15 new people each of those days.

Tuesday: A welcome party for some of the new arrivals. Nobody apparently knew I had come to Hungary, so I didn't get a welcome party, but this kind of ended up being for me as well. My roommate told me she was going and then she ended up not going, so I found my way to this bar and saw a table speaking English. So I bought a beer, walked over, found out they were from AIESEC, and I had a great night finally meeting some people.

Thursday: We went to a party at a disco for AIESEC. Oh, and they call clubs discos out here, they don't play disco music or anything. There was supposed to be about 300 people there but there was only about 100. I still got to meet a bunch of people, so it worked out anyways.

Friday: Had the best beer of my life at some German pub. It has some sort of sweet flavor to it, but it's a natural flavor, not like fruity or anything.

Saturday: I went with my flatmate to a cultural cooking party thing where somebody brought some traditional meal from their own country but I didn't even realize that so all I brought was wine, but I feel like it was still accurate :) At some point everybody was looking up some song from their country on YouTube and doing a national sorta dance to it so there were latin people doing salsa and some Hungarian dance. They all of a sudden started yelling "Arizona!!!" and I'm thinking... we don't have a national dance. But everybody did something so I had to do something too. Song choice: "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" by Kenny Chesney. Dance: Two step. I couldn't think of anything any more Arizona than that at the time so that's what I did! That night we went to a disco on one of the islands on the river. Drinks were a little more expensive there (probably $3 for a beer, super expensive!). Basically we drank there until about 4am and then found our way home.

Sunday: Woke up early (11am) and went hiking with a group of about 20. It's pretty tough to fit an extra 20 people on a full tram and bus, but we found a way to do it. The tram and bus took us pretty far away and then we actually did a very short hike to a view point. This is probably the most epic view I've ever seen. We were on the Buda side, but kind of to the side of the city, so the river was aiming straight at us before it curves off, with Buda to our right and Pest to our left. The hills on Buda are just completely covered in green, with some castles and statues at the top of some hills. The Pest side has the whole city with some very old buildings that you can see from far away including the parliament and some churches. After that we hiked down, took a tram to the top of some hill just to see what was over there. There was a creepy old man statue, a war memorial, a church, and a swing-set. That's about it. In the day I met some more new people, including an American girl who just got here a week ago and had a bit of a rough start, but it's getting better for her. We are going to that concert tomorrow for 2-for-1 drink specials, awesome...

I'm in Budapest!

Hey everyone, I am in Budapest for my second night. I have a converter to charge my laptop so I am able to post an update. Here's the breakdown of my adventure so far...

Wednesday I left from Phx to Charlotte, NC and had only about a 40 minute layover before I departed to Rome. The first flight was about 4 hours and the second was 9 hours. I got about 20 minutes of sleep on the Rome flight and I barely got any sleep the night before so I arrived in Rome extremely tired. Well, when I got to Rome, I tried to get some Euros from my bank account. I tried using my debit card but it got declined. I tried again and it said the card was blocked! If you're wondering, yes, I told Chase Bank that I was going to be in Europe for the summer, but they apparently did not care. Because it was blocked, I needed to make an expensive international call to tell them to unblock it and that I'm in Europe, but I had no money to make a call and there was no wifi in the airport. So I was sorta screwed.

The only way I was able to get out of this situation was to purchase a EU mobile phone and plan in the airport, and they charged my first call to the bank with the debit card I was calling the bank to unblock. I told them to stay on the phone after unblocking to make sure it worked because the Italian girl told me too. Good thing she did because after they "unblocked" it, the card was still declined. Then they said, uhhhh, wait.... ok try now, and then it worked. So I had to purchase the phone for 60 euros and the plan for 120 euros, which gets 200 minutes. After that 15 minute call, I was down to about 100 minutes, so it costed about 60 euros, or about $100 for the call. Ok, so at least I have a debit card that works.

Next I went to check for my bag because I did not see it earlier - I couldn't find it. I went to the people to ask if they took the bags off because it had been a while. They brought me in to the backroom and asked if any of the bags were mine, but none of them were. We eventually discovered that Phx placed the bag on the wrong flight to Charlotte, so they did not have time to put it on the flight to Rome! Now it's been over 4 hours so I didn't think I would even have the opportunity to make it to the city and back, so I decided to stay in the airport. I got some Euros and tried using them in the vending machine for some food, it obviously didn't work. But hey, I was in Italy, I might as well eat at one of the restaurants. I couldn't find a nice restaurant, so I ended up going to a couple cafeteria-like places in the airport for pizza and gnocchi. Obviously it can't be as good as in the city, but wow their cheese tastes so good. I mean, wow, the cheese... When the person asked if I wanted Parmesan cheese and I said yes, she put about a pound of it on my gnocchi.

I slept a little bit in the airport because I couldn't physically stay awake, I was too tired to even play angry birds. I didn't want to sleep because I didn't want anybody to steal my backpack, but I couldn't stay awake. I discovered later that if you stand next to the ticket counters you could connect to wifi, so I was able to do that to talk to my dad. He told me to try to find the USAirways departure ticket counter because since they lost my bag, they would reimburse me with money. I had searched the entire airport for USAirways but I couldn't find them so I looked online, standing next to another ticket counter, and discovered it's in terminal 5. Well, there was only terminal 1, 2, and 3... I had to look up where terminal 5 was, and you have to take a shuttle away from the rest of the airport to get there. Once I got there, there was nobody working USAirways because there were no USAir flights that night.

Alright, luck was not on my side at this point, but I found my way to my flight to Budapest, took it, found my buddy and we took a cab to my flat. Then we went to a bar for a couple beers. I was kind of excited to see what a Hungarian bar would be like. Well, let me tell you... In this Hungarian bar, they have Miller, Jager and Redbull, Coca-Cola, but also some Hungarian spirits. They played Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Usher, and so on. Also, they had the NBA playoffs on TV. It was like going to Half Moon basically haha.

Today I bought some clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, deoderant, food (without preservatives!), so I am in my room with stuff and it's awesome to not be in the Rome airport with nothing.

Here's some pictures, but I don't have any of the city of Budapest yet.

Leaving for Europe Wednesday

Alright, here's the deal. I'm leaving for Budapest, Hungary this Wednesday (May 11th, 2011). I will be there for 12 weeks unless I stay longer. I fly from Phx to Charolette, NC and then from there I go to Rome and arrive Thursday morning. I have a 14 hour lay over in Rome and I'm going to take that opportunity to eat 3-4 of the most delicious meals of my life and try to see some cool things (especially the coliseum!).

Then at 11pm I leave for Budapest. I am doing in internship with Intersoft Consulting as a Sharepoint developer. Here's their website, although it's not totally in English http://www.intersoftconsulting.hu/en.

I'm going to try to take bunches of photos and videos so I can share my experiences as best as I can. Keep checking for updates!