buda vs. pest - round 1

ok, now that i have my bearings, i will tell you about my trip this past weekend, but i will break it down day by day. that way each blog doesnt get too big and so i have something to blog about for the next couple of days (i gots ta please my audience, especially after recieving some rather vile hatemail). first comes the educational part. budapest is the capital of hungary. it has about 1.9 million residents which is roughly 19% of the hungarian population. it is actually 2 cities, buda and pest, separated by the danube river. hungarian is the language, which if you can believe it, is more difficult than czech, in my opinion, but many people know some english, so its aight. much of the city was destroyed in WWII, so there is alot of diversity among buildings. this was a treat for me after living in monotonous prague for 2 months. ok, moving on, 8 of us arrived by train thursday afternoon. 6 ksu folk, 2 scottish chums. funny story about the 7 hr ride there, aaron, adam, veronica and i had a 6 seat cabin to ourselves when a czech lady of about 50 came and sat with us. she said something in czech, but we didnt understand. im thinkin it was something like, "hey kiddies, im gonna sit here, aight?" somewhere along the line we began to entertain ourselves by saying filthy things. she didn't respond too much, unless we started laughing first. nearing the hungarian border, we all exclaimed how we wanted to try hungarian food. after a short pause, the lady says, "it is good, but spicy." surprise! she knew some english and we all tried so hard not to laugh out of embarrassment. nonetheless, we spoke to her for some time and she was very nice. we even saw her on our return train to prague and she was excited to hear how our weekend went. but back to our arrival, we went and toured the hungarian parliament, which was quite impressive and right on the river. after that we just had dinner and then went to a jazz club for a couple hours that night. the day pic is parliament (pest), the night pic is castle hill (buda).