About Half Way Through

Czech Republic--check. Poland--check. On to Hungary. I just got into Hungary yesterday, into a small town called Eger. It was a nice place, but a little boring. The point of going was to spend tiime hanging out in the cafes around the town square and drinking the local wine. However, the weather was really lousy, so it was pretty dead. After a couple tries I got into Budapest this afternoon. I say a couple tries because I actually got on the wrong train at one of my connections on the way here, so I had to backtrack a little bit to actually make it to Budapest. The town I had my connection in was a small little cow-town, so it's train station didn't have boards specifying the destination of each train in the window. However, I say a train pull in with a sign in it's window saying "IC - Budapest - Kaleti Pu.", which is exactly what I needed. Looked like the train was actually going in the opposite direction and they just didn't update the sign. However, I don't know this for sure as the only people I had to ask about it spoke only Hungarian. Don't know if any of you have ever heard Hundarian, but it might as well be Chinese it's so incomprehensible to an American Ear.

Budapest has been really nice so far, but apparently the lousy weather has followed me down here. It didn't rain that much, but it was extremely cold for this time of year. It's been like this for about 6 days now. I was getting rained on in Cesky Krumlov, more often then not it was rainy and cold in Poland (even by thier standards), it rained the whole day yesterday in Eger, and now it's absolutly frigid in Budapest. The weather's been bad enough that I've actually caught a cough and a sore throat. Pretty annoying considering this is the prime location for my eating and wine drinking on the trip.

Notwithstanding the weather, Poland was great. Krakow in particular had some really nice areas of town to stroll around in, and had some very interesting things to do. I spent alot of time in the historical old center (it's about the only part of Poland that wasn't completely flattened in WWII), checked out alot of the communist-era architecture in the city outskirts, visited Auschwitz, and toured a salt mine a bit outside the city. Sounds a little smaltzy, but the salt mine tour was actually really fascinating--the miners had actually carved a massive underground chapel out of pure salt. It's got the whole spiel, an alter, art (for instance, they carved a very respectable copy of "The Last Supper" out of salt), massive chandaliers made out of salt crystals, and of course, the requisite full-size statue of John Paul II added a few years ago. And it's big. The chapel is about the size of you're typical high school gymnasium. The place is actually a service industry item now. There are other large rooms also carved completely out of salt (the floor is salt too) where you can host events. And they of course have all the kitchen facilities, bathrooms, and bar setups to support that kind of thing. Our tour guide, who is from the area, actually had her graduation party in the mine, 100 meters underground. And yes, people even get married in the chapel. I'll post photos when I get an opportunity.

Posting to the blog here has been a bit more difficult than I expected. Most of the places I've gone are big tourist spots, but they still don't seem to cater to the travel crowd quite as much as other places I've been. In most of the towns prior to Budapest, the internet cafes has closed at 6:00 or 7:00. The last thing I want to be doing is wasting my opportunities to go do stuff during the day sitting in front of a computer. The other issue is the fact that this blog site is automatically internationalized. Then hit it, it recognizes that I'm working on a maching with a Hungarian (or Czech or Polish) locale, and renders the site appropriately. Since all these languages are pretty much inscrutable to me, I've got to work from memory as to what the different actions are on the page (like "login", "create new post", etc.). At the top of my page now I've got:

Bejegyzések - Beállítások - Sablon - Blog megtekintése
Létrehozás - Bejegyzések szerkesztése - Megjegyzések moderálása

OK. So I made out the word "Blog". Aside from that, if you've got any idea what the hell they're talking about, you're one up on me.

Anyways, I gotta run. Dinner time.