Weekend in Budapest

So much has happened since Friday afternoon, It's hard to remember it all!
After I finished my last post, I went up to Castle Hill in Buda (Budapest is divided into two parts by the Danube river. The side we live and go to school on is Pest. Across the river is the very hilly part, Buda). I went with Barbara John (our professor/ site coordinator) and Rachel, her daughter and the only other student in my classes. Everybody else was in class. The hill was beautiful. There were a lot of great views of Pest, and at one point I pulled out my sketchbook and did a really quick sketch of Parliament. BJ was actually really impressed, and says she might get me to do more sketches of sites so she can put them in the catalogue for next year! It started to rain, so we took refuge at this wine tasting place- we walked through old caverns and read all about the history of wine in Hungary. After that we saw the Hungarian Dance Company perform a ballet version of Carmen that was amazing. In Hungary, there is apparently a weird tradition about clapping at the end of a show... everyone claps in unison. The is no standing, and there weren't cheers either. Instead, the clapping just got faster for the bigger stars. Unlike the American slow-clap, though, it never built to regular applause, it stayed in unison the entire time. It was pretty interesting. That night we looked out from another apartment's balcony and relaxed.

Saturday morning we went to the zoo. The enclosures were depressingly small, unfortunately, so that part was sad. The animals didn't look very healthy, and many of them were pacing around or swaying strangely. We got to feed giraffes though, so that was really cool! We also took pictures right next to a gorilla that happened to be sitting right up against the glass posing for photos. Later we went shopping at a huge mall, and then Saturday night three of us went out to a club two blocks away called alter-ego. We had a ton of fun!

Unfortunately, we got very very little sleep last night, because we got up early to go to Skansen. It's an open air museum thing, sort of like Conneor Prairie in Indianapolis, but bigger. And Hungarian. It had a lot of booths and events for the holiday weekend. It was ok, but the time it took us to get there- on subway, train, and a bus with at least an hour wait- was more than the time we spent actually there. We were all also exhausted from going out last night.

On our way back we bought tickets to the Opera, since it's just around the corner from our apartments. We're going to see Xerxes Wednesday night, and the tickets were only 900 Forint, or about $4 US.
Well, I'm still exhausted, and I should be napping. Tomorrow we visit the Danube Bend.