bye bye, budapest. alone in athens.

my legs hurt
Originally uploaded by Ffoggy

I arrived in Athens 36 hours ago, after saying a sad goodbye to my parents and sister in Budapest. We had a great trip, and consumed more beer and french fries than I thought humanly possible in a mere 14 days. Go, Team Utgoff, go!

Nick didn't get here until this morning, so I had a day to wander around in Athens by myself. That was actually kind of fun, until I got stalked in the National Gardens, which temporarily soured me on solo exploring. I noticed a weird-looking middle aged man staring at me from a park bench, and left because he was creepy. I realized he'd been following me for twenty minutes when he wandered up behind me as I sat down again. When I got up to leave a second time, he got up and started following me AGAIN. Gross. Fortunately, he only seemed capable of very slow stalking, so I lost him pretty quickly by power walking out of the park.

Anyway, Nick is here now, so I feel less sketched out. He's alseep at the moment, though, after having struggled valiantly against jet lag until 8 PM. That means I have a chance to blog about Budapest, which I completely missed, what with all the fun.

The highlights were:

• Statue Park, where they moved all the socialist statues after the communist regime fell. It's a total tourist trap, but a good one. We took lots of pictures of Utgoffs doing impressions of soviet statues. (See the above for an example).
  
  
• Goulash. I'm totally adding this to my list of foods I need to learn how to make at home. I expected it to be stewy, but Hungarian goulash is actually more of a spicy soup, with lots of beef and vegetables. All the other Hungarian cuisine I sampled was kinda greasy and unremarkable, but goulash rocks.
  
  
• Going to the Gellert Thermal Baths. Budapest is famous for its thermal spas, and the Gellert is supposed to be the most beautiful. It's a huge old turn of the century style building that looks a bit like a cathedral or an opera hall, where you can swim among pillars, tile mosiacs, and glass ceilings. Apparently the Utgoffs aren't quite good enough for the Gellert, because the staff was totally rude to us. It's hard to enjoy a drink by the pool when you have to confront the angry Hungarian lady guarding the lockers in order to get at your pocket money.
  
  
• Party Island. Maggie and I had heard that some of the spas have night parties where you can dance in your bathing suit in the pools, and we asked a waitress about it. She directed us to "Party Island," which turned out to be a really far away place where high school kids go to do drugs and listen to techno music. I think we must have had a communication problem with the waitres, because there was definitely no swimming. Nevertheless, Maggie and I had fun drinking and hanging out in our bathing suits (under dresses, thankfully). We spent some time chatting with two British physicists, the only other people over 20 at the bar, but we ditched them after they turned out to be the kind of people who don't own TVs.
  
  
• Walking around Budapest, just looking. Wow, is Budapest pretty. The view from Castle Hill at sunset was amazing. I got to see fireworks over the Danube, too. Good stuff.