Hungary

The next stop on my Christmas trip was to go to Hungary.  I took the train from Brno and after a bit of wandering I Hostel.  I even ran into two Canadian guys in the street before finding the hostel.  As it was nearing both my birthday and Christmas I had only booked a couple of nights (Hoping to find a fun crowd to spend the two with).  After checking in and meeting the awesome folks there, I quickly decided that I would stay until after Christmas.  We all worked on creating more than a few empty bottles, and the Australians cooked a great risotto for Christmas dinner!

The hostel crowd:

 

Budapest is actually two cities "Buda" and "Pest" which are on opposite sides of the river.  Here is a view of the "Pest" side from up on the hill: (also someone's Christmas welcome!)

The hostel was called HomePlus and had a really neat common area with a multi-level platform common area:  (Picture stolen from google)

We all hung out lots, cooked a batch of mulled wine with about 20 bottles of wine, and then we went to the Turkish baths for Christmas day:

(I stole this picture from national geographic since I didn't want to be that creepy dude in the bath with a camera!)

We also did a walking tour and saw lots of cool sites.  I will definitely be going to Budapest again as it is an amazing city!

A couple more pictures from the walking tour:

The Czech Republic -- Christmas Trip Stop 1

Well as many people know I have a firm belief that if you're going to get what you want for Christmas, you should buy it for yourself.  So with that in mind I decided I would get myself an interrail ticket.  I had 24 days off and a 21 day interrail ticket.  Since there was a night train from Copenhagen to Prague,  I decided that Prague would be the best place to start my trip.

Prague is an amazing city, it has great beer, amazing food, and a beautiful castle.  I stayed in what was one of neatest hostels I've ever stayed in.  With lots of great activities including baking some traditional cookies in the evening, and I love eating free cookies!  I took the usual free walking tour, and then from there went for lunch at a traditional restaurant with some new friends.   After eating the fresh homemade cookies I met another Canadian and we went to go explore Prague at night and wandered up to the castle and back. 

As some of my close friends weren't in town I decided I would keep the Prague visit short and went on to Brno to visit friends there :)

Brno was very foggy, although I did find a great Christmas tradition there! I would like to encourage other places to start the same tradition.  In the Czech Republic you will often find large pools of water set up around Christmas.  In these pools will be tones of large carp because Czech people like to have "fresh" carp soup for Christmas.  The trick is that if you want really fresh soup you should keep the fish in your bathtub and feed it each day!  (I'm serious: http://www.myczechrepublic.com/czech_culture/czech_holidays/christmas.html )

After a great night out I was off to the next country: Hungary!

Some Pictures:

 Cathedral in Prague

 The Opera House

 The Bridge and Castle in Prague

 Another picture of the Cathedral

 A picture from wandering around at night.

 The bridge and castle at night (The amazing castle lights were provided by the Rolling Stones! http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/504571/stones-light-up-prague-castle.jhtml)

 

Another Cathedral

Me an Katka in Brno

England

Well this post is way overdue.  Thanks to Cecilia for calling me out for not writing it.  Last year I had gone to the UK to visit an old buddy of mine I'd met in Australia.  I started had started in Manchester, took the train to Birmingham and then we went to Hinckley which is where my buddy actually lives.  Its tricky to write about Hinckley as we went out and my memory is a little fuzzy.  Although I did run into someone else I had met in Australia!

Due to the fuzzy memories I'll have to plan another trip to the UK soon!

My one and only picture from the UK: