*I’m writing this mainly as a stream of thought because I want it to be personal and casual and not something that I am stressing out over writing.* ALSO, I’m writing this about 2 or 3 weeks after I actually went so oops, you live and you learn.
THE FIRST BUS: To put this trip in perspective of time, I had been in Prague for a week before and some change before we left for this trip. When I say “we” also I mean the group of people I traveled with but I don’t really feel the need to define each group before I write about it, but sometimes I will say people. So for this trip, we had planned the bus and Airbnb before we left for Prague since we didn’t want to get caught paying a higher price (this has been happening to us A LOT after that trip)- my wallet is taking many hits. We scheduled our bus for about 30 minutes after our class ended which, on that day, we learned was not very smart. We had an exam in the morning and you could leave as soon as you finished, but the test was pretty hard and we had a few people take longer than expected so we RAN to the bus stop. Luckily we were all so excited about going that people didn’t really care that we almost missed the bus. It was about 7 hours and the bus was pretty crowded so its safe to say we got bored and were probably really annoying and loud.
THE AIRBNB AND LOCATION: The Airbnb situation was a little different for this trip because our group booked before actually leaving for the trip. My roommate and I ended up getting one and then the other part of the group also got one and the two were about a 15 to 20 minute walk apart. The actual locations of the Airbnb’s were pretty awesome! Taylor (roommate) and I did get a little suspicious of our when we walked to it and saw a hooker on the corner and there was a live, haunted house kind of thing underneath our building. Yikes. Other than that we really enjoyed the place! It felt very European since there was a patio in the middle of the building and other things like that. We had a loft style so it was pretty small but fit us well and we were barely ever there since we hung out with the other part of our group the whole time. The building was in Pest and it was a pretty good walk in toward the river and some cool buildings and clubs.
THINGS WE DID: I think that category name is kind of the only way to say it because we really do random things. My favorite place we went were the Baths of Budapest. We walked probably 4 miles to get there, but it was so worth it. The buildings surrounding the baths were beautiful, old, yellow buildings and the water felt amazing. Some people didn’t really like them that much because they felt like it was just similar to a pool, but I would love to be a fish and just swim around everywhere I go and chill in water all the time. After that we walked around for a while trying to find somewhere to eat and got the best ice cream ever. It wasn’t even the ice cream that was good, but it came in like a funnel cake type cone with Nutella all inside it and I got strawberry and chocolate sauce on top. After that great moment we broke into smaller groups which I really liked because it made it so much easier to actually do things and I really liked the people I went with during that time. We went and walked around a park/lake and an agricultural museum where we saw- no joke- 5 bride/groom photoshoots. Disconnected from that, we all went to two bars/clubs in Budapest that were popping. I didn’t love the first bar we went to that much but it was ranked in the top 100 bars and had a sick layout because it was all mainly outside with plants everywhere (my mom would’ve thought that was cool even though she would’ve been uneasy with the amount of drunk people, but it made me miss home a little bit) and it was two floors. The other cool club we went to was also ranked really well and that one was so fun. They played a lot of American music and I was dancing a lot with my frands and it made me feel happy with all the people we were with and excited for the study abroad in general. Also disconnected from that but kind of in time order, we went to the Parliament building! It was so beautiful and we walked all the way there and the air felt good even though it was really cold and I just enjoyed that experience.
Caroline on the Euroline 