Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary

Ahhh yes...

So we took a 20 hour train ride from Thesseloniki, Greece all the way through Bulgaria and arrived in Buceresti, Romania. We were greasy and tired so we crashed at the first hotel we could find and grabbed some food from the train station.

Buceresti was different than the other places we've been. It is by far the least touristed city we've been to. People there happily sit in the streets along with their own garbage. It was common to see piles of garbage and places where the sidewalk no longer exists. People sit on boxes, chairs, old couches, etc right in the street. We checked out the Village Museum which is like Heritage Park in Calgary, or Fort Edmonton only for Romania. We also saw some wild fountains, and the Romanian Parilment building (the second largest building in the world).

From Buceresti, we headed to Brasov, Romania. Here, we payed an old, ugly lady for two beds in her house. We like it quite a bit - she was nice after all. This was our home base for checking out some Transylvanian countryside and also Dracula's castle (actually, NOT dracula's castle, but the castle that was made famous by the story of Dracula). The real Dracula, named Vlad the Impaler, had a castle a little further out which is now ruined.

Onward to Budapest, Hungary!!! We loved this place! Here is what we saw:
- the Chain Bridge
- The Royal Residence
- Parliment building
- Buda Laberynth
- Buda Castle
- Buda Walls
- many, many churches - can't remember their names right now
- Fisherman's Batalian
- I saw the homes of Franz Liszt and Zoltan Kodaly while Greg saw the House of Terror (WWII)
- the main market
- we spent an afternoon at a Turkish Bath (sooooo cool)
- Heros' Square
- and many other things...

We like Budapest so much that we stayed an extra, unplanned day to fit everything in!!