We spent the day in Budapest today with the first wave of the beer tour gang. Ken Kane flew in from Portland and his friend Dave, who we just met, came in from Arizona. Ken's niece Chelsea also joined us for the day. She is about 2 months into an around the world trip heading the opposite direction of us. We have shared a few travel tips for the next part of her journey in Egypt and SE Asia.

Before I fill in details of our day getting here and today's fun, I felt that I needed to note an anniversary for Val and I. Today made 1 year since our last day of work at our jobs. Time sure flies. We both agreed it doesn't feel that long, but I'm sure as soon as we get back to work, it will become obvious that we're pretty rusty.

So, lets start with the trip here. A very loooonnnngggg day. We woke up at 2:30 a.m. in Barcelona and caught a local bus from our hotel to the center of town where we hopped off and waited a few minutes for another bus to take us to the airport. We arrived in time to check in, go through security, and basically walk onto our plane. Good timing!

We slept for most of the two hours it took to get to Amsterdam. After collecting our baggage and finding a place to store it for the day, we caught the train into town. The next 4-5 hours were a whirl wind of activity. We found a few old haunts to have breakfast, a few drinks, a WiFi cafe, and a place for me to get a sweatshirt. It's going to be cold from here on out. We eventually stopped at our favorite little bar and had a Genevre before catching our train back to the airport. We arrived back, collected our bags, and caught our flight to Budapest.

A few hours later we got off the plane in our third country of the day. A bit tired, and confused. A new language that neither of us speaks a word of, and a new currency to go along with it. We hopped onto the bus to the train station and caught the train to our hotel. Everything was going smooth until I pulled out a map and tried to find the street our hotel was on and couldn't. We were sure we were heading to the right stop since we had written the directions directly off the hotels website. We got off and started asking around for the street location. After several people looked on maps and asked around, we were finally ushered into a hotel where they looked at the directions, the name of the hotel and the address and informed us we were in the wrong part of town. We had followed the directions correctly, but the directions were incomplete.

Well. a 2500 Forint ($11) taxi ride later we were at our hotel on the other side of the river and quite a ways away from where we thought the hotel was. We walked up to our room and arrived to find our roommates out at the Symphony, but Ken had brought us a bottle of Patron so we had a small ceremony and then broke the seal and had our first taste since New Zealand. Ahhhh!

Ken and Dave arrived a few hours later and we enjoyed a bottle of Spanish wine, Dutch Cheese, Hungarian bread and Mexican Tequila for dinner.

So that gets us to today! Today we started off by heading over to the central market to meet Ken's niece and do some shopping. We wandered around and picked up some tid bits, including Hungarian Paprika! After shopping for lunch foods, and stopping for a beer, we headed off to Margaret Island which is in the middle of the Danube River. This is a huge island that has parks, athletic fields, and an assortment of other places of interest. We found a nice spot to sit and have lunch next to a fountain that was amazing. There were loud speakers playing various classical concerto music which was timed with the fountain. As the music got louder and bolder, the fountain sprayed higher and more of the jets cane on. It was very surreal to sit in the park with our picnic, in a new foreign country, listening to classical music and watching the fountain.

After this we headed back to our hotel for a quick rest and to get ready for dinner. after a few hours, we set off to find a traditional Hungarian meal. We found a small restaurant and ordered beers and food. The Hungarian Goulash dish was fantastic as was all the food. Paprika here is very tasty and we plan to carry some with us for the remainder of the trip:)

That's it for now.

Eric & Val