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...