Budapest

Charles and I went to Budapest last weekend. He has cousins there, who graciously hosted us. We had a great time site seeing and visiting with the Kubinyi family. They picked us up at the airport, piled everyone into the minivan, and we were off to see the city.

We went to Buda hill and saw the sites.

And a wedding...

 Saw the city from Fisherman's Bastion...

Then we headed to Pest, or as Dori calls it, "real life." We walked around Pest and had dessert for dinner (even in Hungary, Hungarians seem to eat dessert before or in lieu of dinner!). Then we saw beautiful St. Stephen's Cathedral at night.

On day two we toured Parliament. This is Charles with Zsofia. I might have earned myself the nickname "Prime Minister" on this tour.

On to Hero's Square and some cousin bonding.

Feeding the ducks.

This is Eszter with a (virgin) Pina Colada. She is the youngest cousin and an absolute joy. She doesn't speak English, and we don't speak Hungarian, but she showed us that you need not have language in common to enjoy one another. Eszter was so excited to have us visit. She sat back at every meal and said my name, then gestured that I should choose my food first. She also drew a picture of my cat as a gift for me to take home.

This is Dori with her father, Jozef. They both took off all four days of our visit from work to host us. Jozef drove us all over the city and tirelessly entertained us. Dori spent much of our trip as translator and took us out on Margit Island.

Go kart racing...

This is me and Eszter after we won our respective go kart races. I beat Charles and she beat her siblings.

Chemistry homework in Hungarian! With the help of an English-Hungarian dictionary and some props, Charles was able to put his Ph.D. to good use.

Dori and Jozef took us bowling. This is Charles celebrating after a successful round. I beat him the first time, which motivated him to put on a very good performance in the second game.

Group shot.

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of the mounds and mounds of food that Kota and Ibolya made for us. They must have spent days cooking. We had stuffed cabbage, chicken schnitzel, fried cauliflower and dumplings, floating island, chocolate cake, gerbeaud cake, and much more. If we so much mentioned that we liked something, they wanted to make it for us. It was all delicious.

And all too quickly, our visit was over. We piled everyone into the minivan again (we even picked up a child we saw walking along the way) and headed back to the airport to say goodbye. But we'll be back.