Second Weekend

Our second weekend there, a few of the students had plans to travel to Barcelona while the rest didn’t. The remaining group decided to go to Luxemburg to hike and hang out in the outdoors but I was asked if I wanted to go to Budapest instead. It was significantly cheaper and was definitely worth it. Budapest is an interesting city.  We took a train to Eindhoven, a city in the Netherlands and then we flew to Budapest. Just outside of the airport terminal, I had a huge reality check. I was almost cheated could have been man-napped. A man wearing an “Airport Official” badge walked towards us as we were looking for a taxi. He asked if we needed help and I talked to him. I thought he gave us a fair price but one of the other students I was with who had already been to Budapest found it to be too high and we walked away. He then went down in price and got angrier as we found the actual Taxi station that was being run by the airport. I felt really vulnerable at that time and realized that we weren’t in one of the safest cities. This was Hungary a once soviet country that had lost in most of the wars it had been in for over 500 years. It was starting to look a bit glum. What made it all better was staying at a “party hostel”. I had no idea those existed but imagine a bunch of people who all go to different cities just to have a good time and engage in a lot of debauchery. One night I hung out with a bunch of drunken Scotts whom I could barely understand and the experience was radical. The fun activities went pretty much all through the night and involved certain aspects of the city. For example, one night we got to visit all of the ruin pubs. The ruin pubs are located in the 7th district which was once home to a large Jewish community before WWII. They are the remnants of abandoned buildings after the deportation of Jewish residents. It is not the nicest area but the atmosphere is amazing. Aside from night activities I joined a walking tour one day and learnt about the cities history. It is somewhat of a sad history and a lot of the architecture although it appears old and run down is not much older than 60 years