The Beginning of the Budapest Entries
I am not sure how exciting any of my vacation will be to you without accompanying photos. I am going to try to get digital photos soon. My photos will have to wait--as it is expensive to develop. But just trust me--that place is beautiful.
It literally took days to get there. I probably could have flown to America and back for the amount of time it took. The boarder crossing was relatively easy compared to horror stories I'd heard. Just took a little train from a Ukrainian boarder town (Tchop) to a Hungarian boarder town (Zahony) and got tickets there to Budapest. No fuss. No time wasted.
Once in Zahony, we ventured to find a bank to exchange money. It was interesting trying to communiate with the Hungarians because the language is drastically different from both English and Russian and even toher Indo-European languages. It is suposedly most similar to Finnish, which is a ridiculous sounding language. So asking for directions in Russian and English got us nowhere most of the time there in Zahony, but thankfully bank is a word most languages recognize, as well as our landmark, the post office.
Hungarians use the Florint and it is 200 HUF to the dollar. This means you are dealing with bills with three or more zeros most of the time and it certainly threw off my abilities to calculate or figure out how much anything costs, at least for a few days. Just a headache.
Once on a train headed to Budapest our excitement could not be contained. Despite our tired state we were really looking forward to getting there.
Part of the countryside looked decidedly like Ukraine-fields of sunflowers, old Soviet buildings. We were confused as to whether we really left or not, but after 5 hours, we ended up at our destination!
It literally took days to get there. I probably could have flown to America and back for the amount of time it took. The boarder crossing was relatively easy compared to horror stories I'd heard. Just took a little train from a Ukrainian boarder town (Tchop) to a Hungarian boarder town (Zahony) and got tickets there to Budapest. No fuss. No time wasted.
Once in Zahony, we ventured to find a bank to exchange money. It was interesting trying to communiate with the Hungarians because the language is drastically different from both English and Russian and even toher Indo-European languages. It is suposedly most similar to Finnish, which is a ridiculous sounding language. So asking for directions in Russian and English got us nowhere most of the time there in Zahony, but thankfully bank is a word most languages recognize, as well as our landmark, the post office.
Hungarians use the Florint and it is 200 HUF to the dollar. This means you are dealing with bills with three or more zeros most of the time and it certainly threw off my abilities to calculate or figure out how much anything costs, at least for a few days. Just a headache.
Once on a train headed to Budapest our excitement could not be contained. Despite our tired state we were really looking forward to getting there.
Part of the countryside looked decidedly like Ukraine-fields of sunflowers, old Soviet buildings. We were confused as to whether we really left or not, but after 5 hours, we ended up at our destination!
posted by Molly | 1:18 AM
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