Czech hockey!: Budapest

My normal schedule includes 1 hour practices:
Monday: 18:00 (boys)
Tuesday: 20:30 (girls)
Wednesday: 16:45 (boys)
Thursday: 06:00 (girls)
Friday: 20:30 (girls)

My daily activities included morning coffee and bread with cheese, bathe, study the czech language with Pimsler's audio tracks, flash cards, and read Lenka's Czech language book... go to the grocery store... cook the food from the grocery store... go to Prague, plan for trips to other places like Marseille, and Budapest!

The Prague- Budapest train
Our Thursday morning (February 18, 2010) practice was canceled because there weren't going to be enough players. So, I took the train left Prague at 7:39 in the morning. I needed to leave the flat around 5:50 to get to the bus station that goes from Kladno (leaving around 06:00) to Dejvicka, the round square, in Prague (getting there around 06:20). Then I took the Prague metro lines from Dejvicka to Hlavni Nadrazi (the train station). There I bought a ticket from Prague to Budapest. Unlike flight tickets, the train tickets do not change in price. I wish I had a reliable, safe, consistent, cheap and public form of transport from one large city to another available to me always.

The train was nearly empty for most of the trip, and it was hazy overcast and rainy making it difficult to see the countryside and pictures hard to take. Much of the countryside was similar to Kladno, with rolling hills and trees.

The train:

There were sets of four chairs on each side that faced each other with a table in-between, which was really convenient for eating, setting my iphone down, etc.

On the train I met two Brazilians, Thais and Guilherme. I met them after they invited me to have lunch with them in the restaurant car after I gave them an orange because I noticed one of them was a little sick. They had either studied or were studying "letters," or literature. Thais was incorporating economics and tourism and other languages with letters. Somewhere near Brno (the second largest city in Czech Republic) the train's motor car went "Kaput" (the words of a local Czech), so we waited for an hour for another motor car.

Brno was very industrial with big old abandoned looking buildings, possibly factories, with broken thick old glass windows. I thought there was more graffiti in Brno than Kladno, Prague or Marseille. I can't give an unbiased opinion without getting away from the train tracks. This part of eastern Europe felt empty, concrete and mute, though the dull weather and empty train car probably helped create this feeling.

The Budapest train station (which looks similar to the Marseille transportation hub):

The hostel
I stayed in another hostel in Budapest, the Aboriginal Hostel. It was hard to find, and every single Hungarian I asked for directions from gave me bad directions, for the entire trip. I didn't take any of my own pictures of the place. I stayed in a room that holds 8, and I think there were 8 people sleeping in there when I woke up. They had lockers, which I really liked. They also had wireless, which is a minimum for me.

Budapest
Budapest is near the Danube, and has its own history, which I only know from wikipedia. The Hungarian language, like George said, was completely unrecognizable. The Hungarian equivalent of "cheers" was, in my phonetic spelling, "Egeshegedra." At least the Czech "Nasdravi" shares roots with Russian. Unfortunately, the train back to Prague got into Prague when our practice started, so I flew back. The airport is about a 20 minute drive, by taxi, from edge of downtown Budapest, or about an hour, if you know what you're doing, by public transportation.

Like other eurpean cities, Budapest has a metro (below). Budapest had a fasion street full of commercial tourist minded shops, some old buildings like an opera house, I wouldn't have minded another day or two for some better weather and to get to know the city better.

There was a beekeeper's store! I stopped in, but unfortunately didn't know what my dad uses or needed. I did ask my dad, but he couldn't say what he would want without actually seeing the things.