Beautiful words, like "keleti"

"Keleti", I just learned, means "east" in Hungarian. Which makes sense: Budapest-Keleti station was certainly east of the Danube, east of three grand bridges and endless streets of casually overwhelmingly beautifully historical-looking buildings.

According to an "overzealous" pedometer as Alaina put it, we've been walking about 40,000 steps a day, so certainly at least half of that. My feet hurt so much right now but it was certainly worth the careful look at the city that a walking pace afforded us for two and a half days. I arrived knowing almost nothing about the city or Hungary in general, besides the fact that the word for "hello" is pronounced as "see ya" is in English (szia, if you're curious), thanks to an afternoon last summer spent with a Hungarian friend of a friend's family friend (have I said the word friend enough?). But there was something a little magical and perhaps almost melodramatically beautiful about the city of Budapest that grew on me quickly.

A few shades for your mind palette:

Pound it, man.

Just one of the statues atop Gellert Hill, where you can overlook both Buda and Pest (they were once different cities) and the Danube as a reward for making it to the top.

Casually: a castle. This seems to happen a lot more often in Europe than in the states.

Didn't Johann Strauss write a waltz about you?

The original ruin pub: Szimpla Kert. 200% things you would find at the coolest garage sales arranged in a tasteful manner. There are many of these around the city, built into abandoned buildings and courtyards, offering all sorts of nooks and hidden gardens to hang out in.

Another that we went to - and my favorite - was Fogasház, a ruin pub and community cultural center built into what was once a dentist's office (hence the sign and its translation to something like "dental house"). Probably one of the coolest places I've ever laid eyes and ears on. Amusingly, they placed electro dance remixes of three songs I used to listen to in 9th grade in a row. The walls and ceiling of one of the rooms was completely covered in astro turf.

So, escape games are something that Alaina and I are definitely trying to bringing back to Providence. We deleted the Matrix and saved humankind, and with 1 minute and 41 seconds to spare! Though we wasted at least ten minutes because of our lock-opening incompetence despite solving the clues...our game was at MindQuest, though there are countless other places around the city where you can be thrown into a room with a group of people and try to solve a mystery or escape before the time limit is up. Our situation involved driving a tiny car through a maze on the ceiling with four different remote controls.

And though we have no photographic evidence of this, I find it necessary to mention that we went to a fish spa and got fish pedicures. Basically, there's a tank of little fish that like to eat dead skin, and you stick your feet in and try not to die of ticklishness as they exfoliate you.

While I'm mentioning unrelated things, chimney cake is really cool and I would like to attempt to bake it at some point. Not only does it unravel for easy eating, but you can look through it, too! I'd also like to make goulash at some point. And Turkish food is undoubtedly the Mexican food of Europe - a bit foreign, comes in huge portions, cheap, and super delicious.

Went to a concert in St. Stephen's Basilica, which is overwhelmingly ornate. Cool fact: its floor plan is in the shape of a Greek cross. Hearing Saint-Saens' "The Swan" was a definite highlight.

There are certain places that make a greater impression on you for whatever partially unknown reasons, and Budapest was one of them for me. It happened somewhere between people-watching at the ferris wheel on a Saturday night, and talking about death at a ruin pub. Somewhere between watching rain blur the glow of streetlights through a grand hotel window, and finding silly excuses to strike up conversations with other hostelers. 

The last thing I did in Budapest was sketch the corner of Keleti train station that you see in the bottom lefthand corner of the photo below. There was something dreamlike about it - sitting in the window seat of a train, daydreaming while in a scene that I'd have daydreamed about in the past when thinking about what a European adventure, like the one that I've somehow gotten into, would be. A good place to think, but not too hard, about where the train was going, and to say farewell to the city.