Friday was an eventful day.
As it always is with Courtney and I, we got the idea for a crazy adventure and made it happen by the next day. Thus Friday at 10 a.m, we were trudging through the pouring rain to get to work and have our first meeting with Dr. Louda. At 2 p.m, we were packing our bags, and at precisely 6:02 p.m, we had jumped a train to Hungary and were on our way to meet Anthony and Trey, some old friends from back home.
The train was an overnight ordeal (I've never slept on a train!) - and we had a private sleeping coach. It came complete with a butler, two beds, a bathroom with toilet, sink, two soap bars, two towels, and a private SHOWER (that had the most amazing hot water). It was quite fun... except that I kept waking up every two hours in a cold sweat from worry that we had missed Budapest and were now on our way to Romania. Otherwise, it was quite wonder to step out into the city and be cleanly showered, dressed, and ready to face the day.
And it's a good thing we were ready to face the day, because goodness... what a day it turned out to be. We ended up staying awake for a solid 26 hours.
The day started out in search of a pedicure. After two months of walking around in Rainbow sandals in the (possibly) most polluted cities in Europe, our feet were looking (and feeling) kind of rough. But when everywhere was booked and the cost was 50 Euro per person, we decided to go see an exhibit called Budapest Bodies instead. We had seen an advertisement in the Deak Ter metro and were instantly intrigued.
The Budapest Bodies exhibit. If you look closer (and ignore the peepee) you can see his bowels, different layers of skin and muscle, and some bones.
It was a study on the human body that showed the viewer exactly how our bodies are put together. Creepiness aside, a learned a lot about the sizes and proportions of different organs and muscles. For example, I never realized how truly tiny our leg bones are - I had always imagined that they took up about half of the space of the thickness of a leg, but it simply isn't true. The femur is quite thin, and I was very surprised. And the stomach is smaller than I had imagined too.
We also learned that smoking one pack of cigarettes takes an average of 3 months and 40 hours off of a person's life. Next to old, tar ridden lungs there was a clear box where people had thrown away their packages of cigarettes in an honest effort to not shorten their life further. It was insane to see the difference between healthy lungs and smoker's lungs.
The vascular network of a hand.
In one section they had even taken a red polymer and injected it into all of the veins, then washed away all of the body materials, leaving just the vascular system in red plastic. It was insane - you could even see the capillaries.
We also went into a tiny side street shop that had some metal rings from a local woman that were so cool that we each bought two. =)
Site seeing isn't our primary objective when we visit different cities, so getting us to a museum, Parliment, the Chain Bridge, and some random pretty church that we accidently found was a pretty big accomplishment.
Local Hungarian cuisine.
Parliament on the Danube. They modeled it after the one in London and worked 24 hours straight for 20 years to build it.
After all of that, we were tired, sick with an exploded knee and stomach cramps, and ready to sleep. But the entire purpose of my trip (other than to venture off and see the world, of course) was to hang out with Anthony. Thus, we combed our hair, reapplied some foundation, and headed out the door to meet Anthony, Trey, and these two other girls who were a coworker's daughter and cousin.
Chain bridge with a fun marketplace.
Budapest by night.
Our final spot for the evening (after a tram that shut off while we were on it) was an open air place along the Dunabe (the river that splits Budapest into it's two separate cities, Buda and Pest.) There were about 4000 people there, with three different dance floors (depending on how silly of a dancer you were!), and a really fun, young atmosphere.
Trey, Courtney, me, and Anthony.
Courtney, Trey, and I dragged Anthony out onto a dance floor where the highlight songs were "La Bamba" and the "Limbo" and danced until sunrise. We laughed so much all night long, giggling at Trey's Michael Jackson dance moves, wondering at the fools we were making of ourselves when our coolest dance move was the two step, and trying as hard as we could to get Anthony to loosen up and just... follow the music.
Courtney and Trey silly dancing.
I'm in love with their faces here.
It was a great night full of merrymaking that ended with a tram ride to Margeret Island and Courtney and I watching the sunrise over Pest. As we crawled into bed, sun fully up in the sky, we couldn't help but smile at our fortune for having found such great friends in a city so far away.
Sunrise over our island.
Me, Trey, and Courtney... we're now bonded for life.
Thus, Court and I left Budapest, exhausted, branded with new nicknames (I'm Buda because of my Buddha belly, and she's Pest... which is really quick self explanatory), and thrilled by our adventure.
My new favorite song:
Bad day, looking for a way,
home, looking for the great escape.
Gets in his car and drives away,
far from all the things that we are.
Puts on a smile and breathes it in
and breathes it out, he says,
bye bye bye to all of the noise.
Oh, he says, bye bye bye to all of the noise.
Hey child, things are looking down.
That’s okay, you don’t need to win anyways.
Don’t be afraid, just eat up all the gray
and it will fade all away.
Don’t let yourself fall down.
Bad day, looking for the great escape.
He says, bad day, looking for the great escape.
On a bad day, looking for the great escape,
the great escape.
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