Budapest Beginnings.

Normally, I would begin this post with the Hungarian word for hello or welcome or something, but I have searched and searched through my phrasebook, and I swear to God, there is no Hungarian word for Hello. What the hell? But honestly, Hungarian is a strange language because there's no other language in the world like it, except Finnish, only slightly.

So yes, I'm in Hungary, and what a voyage it was getting here. I stayed on in Krakow for a couple of nights before coming here, because otherwise I would have been awake about 26 hours. The train trip from Poznan to Krakow was exhausting, and it took all day. I mean it, I was up at 7am, got on the train about 10am. So that should mean I get off in Krakow about 5pm right, since it's a seven hour train trip. Wrong, because I did something really really dumb. I got off at Katowice, an hour early. I don't want to say it's not my fault, because it totally was, but everyone else was getting off and there was no direct signage of where we were. So I got off, and by the time I realised where I was, the train had gone.

Needless to say I was pretty annoyed at myself, but I got over it because the train from Katowice to Krakow was only about 7 zloty (pronounced: zwoh-tee), and that's about 3 dollars. It's stupidly cheap.

And it's funny how fate works, because I made a new friend on that later train. His name's Marek, he's 22, he works in construction and he's moving to Poznan in three weeks. Now it's interesting how I could learn all of that about him because he barely spoke a word of English. We drew pictures, we showed each other photographs, and heavily relied on the fact that we could understand each others languages better than we could speak it. Then when we got off the train, he pointed me in the direction of the city centre, and we parted. I miss him already.

I was talking about this on skype with my best friend. She believes we were destined to meet and should get married. She went to an all girls school, so she doesn't really understand the concept of friendship without romance. Sorry Miro, if you're reading this but it's the truth. I went to an all girls school too, and to this day I still don't have many male friends, I've never had a boyfriend, unless you count the two I had (at the same time) when I was at kindergarten. Their names were Royce and Duncan, and they kept getting into fights over me. But despite my male-less teenagehood, I'm not really that bad at socialising with guys.

I blame the media actually, because in every TV show and every movie they can't seem to put together a platonic friendship between a boy and a girl, unless they're related, or one of them is gay, and so all those kids who go to single-sex schools think that life is really like that.

So anyway, back to the journey. I stayed in Krakow for two nights. I don't need to tell you again how magical the city is... but it's magical. Then, I got on a bus to Budapest. It was seven hours, we had two pit stops, and while we drove through such magnificent Slovakian countryside, homesickness, my mortal enemy, attacked me and wouldn't go away. I really hate that stupid thing.

But eventually, I got to Budapest, and now I've been here two days. I haven't done anything touristy yet. Don't judge me, I've got a whole week and I'm waiting for my Australian friend to get here from Prague. I don't want to do anything without her, not because I'm pathetic and can't do anything myself, but... actually that probably is the reason.

However, I've had a good time still, just doing random exploring, and I've met the coolest people. There were two Australian backpackers at the hostel when I got there and we talked. They left yesterday. I met and hung out with this really cool American girl (she's not one of the loud obnoxious ones, I have a theory that most of those types of Americans don't leave America much), and one of the hostel workers is probably one of the most funny and fascinating men I've ever met. He was an extra on 'Titanic'. I'm serious. I didn't believe him at first but he actually looks familiar and he knew all this stuff about the movie while it was in production. He actually hung out with Leo DiCaprio. He has this idea for a movie called "Jesus' Revenge". The title's pretty self-explanatory, but the basic punchline of the story is, Jesus is back, and he's pissed, so he goes off and kills all the terrorists and destroys America. I really think that since I'm probably going into the film business later in life, I'm going to have to make that film.

So that night was fun, we hung out. We watched 'Seven Pounds' with Will Smith. If you haven't seen that movie, I seriously recommend you do. It's really sad and quite intense, but beautiful. We also watched 'Grand Torino'. I think that no matter how old Clint Eastwood gets, he'll still be kickass.

So as I come to the end of my post, I would love to finish this with the Hungarian word for Goodbye, but that doesn't seem to be in my phrasebook either. I'm going to have to write a strongly worded letter to the Lonely Planet guys.
So, later homies.
That's as Hungarian as it gets.