Dina, Kyle and I are going to be staying in Europe until Thursday, January 12th to do a little touring. Most of our fellow officials had to leave Zlin really early to get to Vienna to catch flights home (some as early as 1:00 am and 3:30 am) but we were able to sleep in, which was nice. Since we experienced so much of Prague on Thursday we decided to skip going back and instead go directly to Budapest. We looked up trains from Zlin and found an 11:28 train with two connections that got us to Budapest at 4:25. We intended to leave the hotel at 11:00 to walk down to the train station but of course we got delayed with trying to pack everything so we didn't leave until about 11:15. The train station was about a 10 minute walk so we rushed, with all of our luggage, to get there to try to make this train. I don't think it would be possible to come any closer to missing this train. I was finishing paying for the tickets as Kyle and Dina were shuttling the bags out on to the platform. We were all sweating by the time we got on the train from rushing around so much. The first train ride was short, only about 20 minutes. We got to the next station and luckily the nice conductor who had held the train for us in Zlin helped us find the track where our next train would be leaving. I don't know that we would have found it without her help as the signs were not clear and everything was in Czech. We got on the next train for about 45 minutes, then we switched to the 3rd and final train for 3 hours. The train was empty so it was nice to be able to spread out with our stuff.
We arrived in Budapest at 4:30 and were able to change our Czech money to Hungarian money. That is the one thing that is a little annoying, all of the countries we are visiting use different currencies. After exchanging currency, we set off to find the hotel. We had emailed walking directions to ourselves and had a map up on the iphone but because there was no wifi we were unable to have the GPS on the iphone navigate us. We walked the wrong direction at first but eventually we figured it out and made it to our hotel. We are staying at a Marriott right in the center of Budapest. It is practically brand new, but I think the thing we are most excited about is the fact that they have American style beds and pillows. While the hotel in Zlin was nice, it was your typical European hotel, very small, twin beds and one terrible pillow. We are all going to sleep so well tonight! After we checked in we decided to try to find a place to eat. Before I had left, I had printed off Budapest in a day guides from both Frommers and Hostel World. The Hostel World guide is awesome, it gives restaurant suggestions around popular tourist areas. We decided to try Cafe Vian because it was on the way to the Hungarian Bath houses. It was a cute little place where they had an English menu but traditional Hungarian food. Dina and I both had a mushroom soup to start and Kyle tried the goulash. For dinner I had a chicken paprika dish. Everything was awesome and it was so cheap - our whole dinner, including drinks about $48 USD. After dinner we decided to use the metro to try to find the Szechenyi
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