Saturday, March 29, 2008

Carolling through Europe

Christmas seems to be big here in Central Europe. At least for the musicians on the street. Is has been a common occurance to here "What Child is This" on recording, and whistling renditions of "Jingle Bells". It has happened in Prague, Budapest, and now we will just have to wait to see what happens in Vienna.

Yesterday we got away from the dilapatated part of Pest filled with run down buildings and lots of grafitti, and adventured through Buda. We saw another palace, a few more churches, a bridge...ya know-the usual. It was beautiful, and not overrun with tourists like Prague was. Kara referred to Prague as being in a doll city, I called it a snow globe. There, even the snow flakes were too perfect and pretty. Here, everything is beautiful but there are also real people surrounding you, taking their children to parks, having picnics besides the Danube (because it is considerably warmer here), and the like.

We found out that Hungarian food is way beyond filling (or just that we havent had a verz filling meal this trip- either way we were stuffed). I tried the fish soup, which to my surprise had a huge lump of a whole fish in the middle of the bowl. I am sure I looked like an utter beauty beauty as I had to continuously spit out the bones I was accidently ingesting.

Our host took us to the Budapest Fringe Festival, which is a three day festival of music, dance, and theatre that is completely free (which means wonderful and beautiful). We also went to the Godor Bar where her sister had a gig last night. It was a pretty big deal for the band, being that it was a big venue for Budapest. Two Hungarian pszchologist female rappers performed after them.

It seems that we wont be leaving Budapest until early Monday morning now. Tickets for Sunday night had sold out by the time we got around to booking them. Oh well. It means less time in Vienna, but I am fairly certain we will be able to power our waz through the city in a day and a half.

Sorry that there are no apostrophes in these postings...the keyboards over here do not seem to find them necessary (hence the lack of contractions...boo).

Love you all and miss you.

1 comment:

The Pirate said...

Are you sure they aren't playing "Greensleeves?"

Sorry the ice cream tip turned out to be kind of a bust. I guess June is a better time for ice cream than March. Huh. Go figure.

Good job on the more frequent posts. Keep having fun and keep telling us about it!

And congrats on the service grant. It's almost like you're a grad student already--hand always out, asking for money, and living on grants instead of a real salary.