A much-delayed update of fall break

Once again, I have left the blog on a sour note far too long. The following is a "brief" account of my travels during our fall break, copied from an email:

During our week off in November, I traveled with a friend to Budapest, Krakow, and Vienna. We flew to Budapest and stayed in a great hostel run by a couple who had converted their large apartment. We met a lot of fun people, including a pair of British college students who showed up in tuxedos. Their story was that in Bristol, where they go to school, there is a charity event called Jail Break (), where participants spend the night in jail and are released at the same time to travel as far as they can in 24 hours without spending any money. The winner gets money for the charity based on how far they get. Anyway, these two guys had made it to Poland in their 24 hour period, and then found themselves without a flight home, so they hopped a train to Budapest (turns out their trip to Budapest was counted and they came in 1st). Only thing was, all they had to wear were their tuxedos, so they got a lot of funny looks. We all went out to dinner at this Hungarian restaurant, which was fantastic. There were five people at dinner, so we ordered five dishes and passed them around the table so everyone had a chance to try everything. There was no dish that I didn't like. While we were in Budapest, and wandering about the city, it started raining, then sleeting, then snowing, until finally we gave up and retreated back to the hostel, where we met everyone else who had the same idea.

After a few days in Budapest, my travel buddy Kamilla and I took an overnight train to Krakow. We weren't in a sleeper car, because it was cheaper, but that meant that we slept stretched out on the seats. We got to Krakow around 5 am, where it was snowing. Instead of going to a hostel, we had arranged to couchsurf (), where someone lets us stay for free at their place. Our host in Krakow was a nice American girl, who had done her master's at Jagiellonian University and decided to stay and join the large population of American expats in Krakow. She met us at the station and took us to her apartment, which wasn't great, but it was nice to have someone come meet us and give us tips on what to see, not to mention have a free place to stay (though we bought our hosts dinner in thanks). Poland is the most actively religious country I've ever been to, there is a church, or more, on every corner, and people stop in to say a prayer while on their regular errands. So, one of the main things we did was go visit church after church of historical or architectural importance. There is also a castle, which Callie, our host, took us to while giving us a brief rundown of Krakow's history and royal family (her masters was in Polish history). Another upside was again the food. Polish food for me is a kind of comfort food (there is apparently a larger Polish population in Chicago than even Warsaw), though Kamilla is Russian and was disappointed in the differences between Polish and Russian food. Having Kamilla around was great, though, because she could speak Russian and be understood, and she could understand some of the Polish. In Hungary we didn't have any problems with language barriers; we joked that all Hungarians spoke English because no one else speaks or can understand Hungarian. We only spent two full days in Krakow, which was more than enough, because it really is a small city.

We took another overnight train, this time in a sleeper car, to Vienna. Apparently I don't ever get motion sickness UNLESS I'm suspended midair in a dark cabin, so despite the improvement of comfort of a bunk compared to the seats on the train to Krakow, it was a bit of an uncomfortable ride. We reached Vienna around 6 am, and made our way to the apartment of another Couchsurfing host, this time a guy named Mathias. His Spanish roommate also had her brother and his girlfriend staying, so it was a pretty full house. Also, the UofC has a study abroad program in Vienna, and I had a friend there, so between Mathias and my friend Shira, we had plenty of tips on where to go and what to visit. Though by the time it was the weekend and Mathias had time to give us a real tour, he joked that we had done everything and could probably give him a better tour than he could give us. So, we went by his university and the houses of parliament. There is also a nice Viennan tradition of drinking punch - hot mulled wine - outside in the snow (yes, there was more snow). We visited more churches, though with considerably less enthusiasm after Krakow. Apparently every church is Baroque, which is neither my nor Kamilla's favorite style, so that got tiring pretty quickly. We took a day trip to the monastery in Melk, the highlight of which was our adorably dorky tour guide and the amazing library there. When it came time to leave Vienna, we realized that what we thought was a flight flying out of Vienna to Paris at 8pm was in fact a bus leaving Vienna at 8pm to go to the airport in Bratislavia, and that our flight was actually at 5:30 in the morning. Apparently, we had to take the bus shuttle that night because it was the last to leave Vienna and get us to the airport in time for our flight. So, we had to spent the night sleeping on these really cold metal benches in the airport in Bratislava. I suppose I visited Slovakia, too, then. Sadly, we weren't the only ones in this predicament, because despite the fact that virtually everything shuts down in the Bratislavan airport, there was an Armenian football team sleeping on the benches too. Such is the life of flying cheap airlines, I suppose. Anyway, we didn't get back into Paris until Monday morning, and we were too exhausted to go to class (which was at 10 am), so we went home and slept. Not that we were the only ones to do so.